My reflections - Week 8 Web skills

Hi Courtney and all other colleagues,

Greetings.

It has been a great pleasure to share my experiences with the Web Skills - Week 8 Tasks.  First of all, let me thank Courtney for making great explorations to be tried out to this week through several ways.  I have learnt so many things in this week and excited with the different websites to be tried out with.

Firstly,  I have created many class sites to the students especially when I come to know that I can create a class using 'Nicenet', I am really impressed with that.  I created one namely 'psgtechstudents' to the students who are pursuing 'Communication skills in English' course during this first semester.  I shared the classkey with the students and I have informed them that 'what i am getting through 'Nicenet', you are going to get the same.  The students had promised me to join the class once their internal test 'Continuous Assessment' is over in the mid of this week.  I am happy with that.

Secondly, I created a class Wiki to the students prior to this week namely 'psgtechfirstyearengineering.wikispaces.com' and shared with all the students because through this classwiki alone, I have passed the information about the final project task and in which I have incorporated my rubrics, youtube videos, listening task transcript and my interactive powerpoint and the guidelines etc.    The students are really giving excellent feedback about the implementation of the project task.

Thirdly, I created a blog to the students to comment on the various inputs they received from this course and I specified them the link 'psgtechstudents.blogspot.in' .  They were quite happy with the exploration of different tools for the class and methods to link their ideas in  future. After that, I am impressed with the different online exercise creating websites and amazed with each sites capacity to bring the best input and look forward to the enormous out put on the part of the students.  I accessed the 'tools for teachers' and happy with different types of templates to be used for the creation of different types of exercises.  I shared this web link with all my colleagues and they looked at me with jealous that I am getting such an input from this course.  Then I accessed 'lanternfish' and 'easytestmaker' and found that the excellent things from each site.  I created an account with each site for the free edition.  I found interesting to create on-line exercise for my students under the topic 'Emotional Intelligence'- a reading comprehension task including MCQ and Matching the phrases with the summary statements of the passage.  But I was upset that I could not make it on-line because it needs 'pay and use' but I had downloaded the paper-based test in PDF file and happy with it.

I had installed 'hotpotatoes' in my PC and going to create exercises based on the six types of task templates. I am going to explore more on this site and I am planning to set the 'final assessment of Objective test' for my students using this.  I believe that the students are going to be exposed with this new tool.  After reading the comments from the instructor, I wish to make an attempt on 'ANVILL' and created the course for 'ESL' and 'ELT'.  I am planning to upload the contents based on these two.

Finally, the draft for the final project, which really stirred my effort to make the best out of it.  I enjoyed the painstaking effort and pleasure to do the task based on the project task template.  It needs meticulous planning and i am really trained to internalize the topics under each section.  When I read the project draft of other colleagues and my project review partner, I identified myself that how this on-line course has a tremendous influence on each member not as faculty of English but as the first-learner of this course.  We are highly indebted to the organizers of the course especially Courtney.  Without her help, this dimension of each one of us could not have brought out.  After assimilating the input from the colleagues and from my project review partner, I worked out the checklist for the project task. Each and every section of the checklist made me not to give the ejust like that but to do justice to the belief with each one of us.

At the outset, my experience with this week is highly motivating and happy to be the mirror of my inner voice to reflect the practices of every single attempt to make me excelled in the profession.

S.Sankarakumar