Week 3-Immersion-into-Course

Immersion-into-the-CourseThat's how the week felt. The excitement of creating one's own pages on WWW during the first two weeks had begun to settle. I expected Week 3 to be similar though. But like each of the first two weeks, the third one sprang up surprises. There was heavy workload. I started  the session with the Reading assignment. Busa was loaded with information on what experts were doing with pronunciation and technology. It was enough to give me a complex. I had been so proud of having set up the Multimedia Lang Lab in our Institute with some modern software. And now to think of it, the Lab had not been aware of all these Applications available. And I didn't even know they existed. I followed this reading by going through Julia Gong's article. The two complemented each other. I felt so sure of myself, so proud of the awareness I had come to possess in the field. Only during the last week I had expressed interest in 'Prosodic Features' and now I had so much knowledge about taking up its teaching through weblinks. I could actually join some Research team in this area. I must bring these Applications to my Institute.

Creating delicious.com web page to bookmark my special links was very easy and equally easy was diverting all my recently acquired weblinks to my page. In fact it was a fun task. But posting my delicious URL on the class wiki earmarked for it was a bit of a nightmare. As usual, it kept playing tricks and then much to my embarrassment, I could succeed only in my third attempt leaving imprints of my failed attempts behind... never mind, as long as I learnt to do it. Robert I am sure will delete the redundant traces from the page. I plan to take up the task of getting on my page all the links I keep discovering from the Readings, from Robert, from the class members, from assignments. I plan to give a demonstration of all this in the next staff meeting. I hope to inspire the faculty to use these resources in their classes. Teacher trainees from remote araes will benefit so much from this.

Reading sample Project Reports, I read four of them, was a pleasure. Each one structured so well. Each so informative. It was a delight. I use these adjectives because after the Busa article, they made easy reading and were very relaxing. I got to know about the research happening in different parts of the world in the field. The problems everywhere are the same. Deprived sections of society, large classes, poor proficiency levels despite years of teaching/learning, inadequate teaching resources, teachers with fixed mind-sets. And almost like the proverbial silver lining, the ELT teachers, always experimenting with new ideas to succeed. Modern, well-informed, motivated.

The task on exploring websites was truly demanding, equally demanding was the task of bringing: the articles, the websites on resources, the websites on lesson plans together. But it was a great learning experience. I have found solutions to my local problems in Randall's Lab. I can use it with my trainees.

And now about the forums of communication: Nicenet, Blog and also Delicious; I intend to take them to all of my classes. It's a pity I don't teach students directly much as such. I intend taking it to my staff and the teacher trainees who in turn will take it to the students. I am often invited to institutions to talk about the latest in the field. This will help. I must tell them these tools can prove to be revolutionary if used effectively.

Great. I am more or less done with Week 3. Better informed thanks to the class members on Nicenet as well. Tomorrow, I intend going through everyone's blog.

Sharda

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