Sunday 2 December 2012

My reflections : Week 9 Web Skills course

Hi Courtney and my dear colleagues,

Greetings.

We have come closer to fulfill the requirements of the Web Skills course and I am happy to reflect on the practices and the experiences that i gained during this week.

First of all, I show my gratitude and heartfelt thanks to our course Instructor Courtney for being an excellent personnel and extending her help to me in accomplishing the project preparation task.  When I was in despair, she suggested Jasmina and Ashish to finish the draft review.  Finally, Jasmina, in no time, accepted my request and did complete the review with in three hours and sent her suggestions for the final draft preparation.  I extend my gratitude and my heartfelt thanks to Jasmina, without her help, I could not have completed my project work at all. A BIG Thank you Jasmina.

I am really elated to write my reflections on the Week 9 topics related to learner styles and the use of technology and Howard Gardner's "Multiple Intelligences" theory and its implementation in our teaching-learning process.  I accessed Multiple Intelligences and found excellent resources with different  intelligence and its related applications in our teaching using different skills.   I downloaded Gardner's article 'MI after twenty years' and found its amazing methods to assess the learners'  styles  and the ways to improve the intelligence of the learners.  What an amazing visionary he is!  Then I explored some other topics such as "MI", 'MI Smart program', 'MI a theory for everyone'','Research results of a MI classroom' and found excellent resources which are useful to understand the needs of each learner and to cater to the requirements of a classroom.

Then I accessed the MI Activity Chart, Multimedia and MI and worked out to find out my own learning style questionnaire.  I got excellent results related to that and reflected it in Nicenet discussion forum.  I identified an excellent activity that led to the different intelligence and to satisfy the learners' needs through Tony Buzan's 'Mind Mapping' activity.    There is always a method to make the topics interesting and I have learnt this through ennumber of activities.    Then I learnt another aspect of the learner styles through NCLRC - Sailing with 5-C's such as 'Communication, Culture, Communities, Connections and Comparisons' and how to link the different learning styles in our classrooms.  The major learning styles like Meta cognitive strategies and Task-based learning strategies  namely 20 types and referring all with different learners in order to attain self-efficacy and improving in their learning abilities.  Further, the different strategies to be taught to the beneficial of the students and the different instructional methods to be followed.  Finally, the article has shown the ways of creating different activities using different learning styles.

I am very much happy with the final out put of the project task.  Till Tuesday night, I have not had  any clue at all regarding my final project and its outcome due to my non-receipt of the draft report comments.  Finally, our course instructor suggested the names of the Saviors who have accepted to review my project report.  Jasmina showed her willingness to review my draft and with in three hours sent her report.  The comments are really worthy and made me rework on some parts of the project report and upload it on time.  It is an amazing experience to be shared and thanks to all the colleagues who had given me different inputs through out the course.  Yesterday, I went through most of the projects submitted by my colleagues and every one is unique in identifying the research problems and implementing the solutions and the changes to be done are quite convincing and some are exceptional and innovative.  I was amazed with the typical experience.  When I accessed my class Wiki inter link from the view part of the project (in word document), I was shocked  to see that  'Oops, the link cannot be connected', I was really upset with that.  I contacted my institution's Electronic Data Processing (EDP) personnel, Mr. Anu Prakash, he lent his helping hands to sort out this issue.  Even though, he was away from the office  at 7 P.M., he accessed it through 'Team Viewer'.  He also found that the link has not been connected message when he clicked on the link I inserted, which linked with the domain 'wikispaces.com' but does not lead to my webpage psgtech first year engineering due to permission restriction error.  I was unhappy with this technical - accessibility problem, I uploaded another copy of my project stating the reasons behind it.  My classwiki can be accessed by copy and paste the link in a new browser page and the same information also accessible from my blog psgtech students class blog where I uploaded the same input given in class wiki. I do apologize for the technical lag and I learnt so much out of this experiences.   I overcome this by the encouragement from my peers and the support from my family especially my wife, Suriya, who is a system administrator.

Finally, I received the communication from our university regarding the course feedback and I am working on it.  Thanks to all the support from our instructor and from my colleagues in this course.

S.Sankarakumar

2 comments:

Djordjevic Jasmina said...

Dear Sankarakumar,

Thank you for the lovely words in your blog.

Let me just say it was a pleasure to read your project report!

I wish you all the best,
Jasmina

Unknown said...

S. Sankarakumar,

Week 9 was quite a productive and exciting week for you. From the material on Multiple Intelligences to the technology glitches you encountered with your final project you gained so much new knowledge. Even better, you had a great support team to help you accomplish everything!

I enjoyed reading your reflection this week. You really give me the sense that the final project process was beneficial for you and I cannot express in words how happy this makes me. You even took the time to read the reports from your colleagues, which, I'm sure, was incredibly insightful.

Great work!