Monday, October 28, 2013

WEEK 3: Reflection

I would like to describe the knowledge I have learned and the experience I have gained as health,very delicious and full with vitamins!
It's my first time to hear about delicious in this course and from the first week when we started with nicenet, I began to think about blogger and delicious. Before week three, I created my delicious page but since I lost the URL and Password I had to create another one to complete the task and then share it on nicenet with my nice colleagues. In the past to save all the useful links I come across them, I used to copy and paste the URL in a word format on my device and it happened that once I lost it all due to some technical issues. Now I know where to put and keep everything together for a later easy access.
The three articles given this week were really helpful and I learned more about CALL theory, lesson planning and many resources to teach different skills at different levels and I have already started using some of them. All this knowledge I gain from the course every week makes me wonder how  would have my classes been If I had this knowledge before?

The list of former projects inlighted me more about my project and I intend to use them as a guidance during the development of the final report.

If I learnt that much in only 3 weeks, then how about 10 weeks! I think then my colleagues can  call me "web-skills freak"

Monday, October 21, 2013

WEEK 2: Reflection !


The second week of our course is really interesting and it really add much more to my excitement and enthusiasm for the coming weeks. The experience I gained this week is totally new to me, it is my first time to know that Google is not the official and main page of internet, interesting!!

I learned about  noodle tools and I read about the techniques tips which were very helpful. Furthermore, I learned that using different search engines and portals with many links concerning the same topic with various direct results which is more practical.

I also learned about the ABCD model which is interesting although it took me sometime to read the information provided by Sean over and over to understand it well, but reading my colleagues tasks and Sean’s comments on them helped me a lot by learning form their mistakes.

Planning for instruction; classifying objectives was another good experience.

Step 1 of the project with the details of my class assisted me to decide and take a step toward the start of my project that I am preparing to fulfill the requirement at the end of this course.

I cannot wait for week 3 !!

Friday, October 11, 2013

Week 1: Reflection


 

I have started this week with some difficulties I faced in terms of creating and sharing a blog, yet I am really impressed with the progress I made. I have explored the course homepage very well, read about the regulations, introduced myself and created a blog to share ideas with you all. It’s really amazing what I have learned so far and I am so grateful to have this opportunity.

A holiday of  two weeks  for  Eid  started today will aid me to devote more time to the course and to work more on the project I am preparing with my students  as an application of what I learn in this course. But I have already started another project with a group of my colleagues as the students are divided into many groups, each group with a different teacher,  that’s why I want to share the knowledge with my colleagues so we can all develop the process of teaching during the academic year starting on December considering  that  we are in the preparatory courses.

I like reading and learning a lot and my friends  call me ‘ bookworm’ and ‘knowledge consumer’ !

That's me !

Teaching is one of the most challenging careers in my country. It requires a lot of personal effort to create your own environment that helps you to teach and at the same time to help your students to learn ( sometimes you have to provide your self and the class with all equipment from board markers to loud speakers and microphone).

I have started teaching at the age of 18 where I taught at private elementary schools, private institutions and English academies for 4 years, now since after graduation in 2010, I have been teaching at Sudanese universities and institutions around Khartoum area. I have BA and MA both in English Language and Literature and currently doing a master degree on Translation. Now I teach GE and ESP at Sudan International University to multi-national classes of 50 - 60 of students aged 16 - 20. As well as I teach Literature at Al-neelain University to very large classes of 100+ to students aged 16-20 (immature) 20+ (mature students; some of them are just my parents age).

 In 2011 and after I have been denied my legal post as a TA at the university where I studied, I created a group with two of my friends to help extinguished youth graduates of English who wants to teach to help them get job opportunities as full or part-timers, teacher training courses, workshops and seminars to develop their teaching skills and we are doing very well so far. Beside, this course I am joining will help them all as I already started passing them the knowledge I learn from it.
 
Dear experienced colleagues you can all support us, guide us and teach us through your ideas and comments!
 
 Sarah