week 1

REFLECTIVE WRITING

This is a 10 weeks teacher online training with the American English Institute, Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon.

 The course started on Monday, April 1 st 2013 at 8 am pacific time. We received a mail from Donna Shaw, our instructor, with very clear instructions regarding the course materials, websites, and documents.

For the first topic '' Self Introductions”  we had to talk about ourselves, our professional background and everything that is related to us and which can be useful for the participants. Then everyone joined the class discussion on Nicenet  where we posted our introduction and discussed with the other participants. It was a very interesting task because we learned a lot from the experience of other participants. It was also an opportunity for us to brainstorm about the course topic. Consequently, we set a real learning community because since then we have been sharing through the three main sites of the course but also through different social networks.

The following day, on Tuesday April 2^nd, we were given some documents to read in order to prepare the next discussion. The documents dealt with the Ground Rules, the grading rubric and blogging. The documents are very interesting in so far as we discovered new ideas about classroom management and blogging.

On Wednesday 3^rd, we went back to Nicenet for Topic2 ‘’Discussion’’ to discuss about the Ground Rules and how we are evaluated. We posted our positions and commented some participants’ views.

Thursday April 4^th 2013 corresponds to the 4^th day of week 1. We were asked to create a blog, share our URL and write about what we have done so far. It was a little stressing at the beginning but it was done finally. The discussion on Nicenet, thereafter, helped a lot especially for colleagues who did not manage to do themselves. I really appreciated for instance when Monica Popluharova advised me to change my URL and assisted in posting the right URL.


The Webskills Google Map is an optional activity but it is very useful for at least two reasons. Not only will it help to use Google Map in our classroom but we can easily identify our fellow participants as well.

The instructions are well designed and very clear that’s why we are getting more and more involved. This is a testimony that ‘’a teacher is like a brick layer’’. At the beginning, I was very stressed, I was skeptical about my capacities to do all this myself. I am looking forward to practicing with my students.