I have had difficulty with my Internet connection this week
and faced real problem with posting/working for the course. I could not even
watch the video clips recommended on the course site let alone Courtney’s
suggestion about a Webinar and PBL in Hong Kong at Nicenet. Aargh! But this is
not the only news! The week was dormant in terms of teaching as we had two days
of political strike in support of the war criminals (!) and classes were not
held. Things started get stormy from Tuesday as the verdict about a 1971 war
criminal was given. The public demand was death penalty rejecting the inadequate punishment. Facebook based bloggers association started a protest
on Tuesday and it grew enormous. I went there and saw the youth of Bangladesh
raising their voice against the verdict, participated in the protest, and met a
lot of ex and current students, and acquaintances. Just to give you an idea of
the mammoth size of the movement I’ve attached a photo from one Facebook page.
The others are taken by my cell phone and put into a collage. So
things have been quite invigorating for me. In the midst of this turmoil I was
able to attend the ‘Fusion Ecstasy’ presented by Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck, Ustad
Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Chaurasia on Wednesday. That was a treat to the soul.
I was done with the reading materials
early. I guess that’s why I could pull over all the other tasks on time. The
first one that I went through “Assessing Learning: Alternative Assessment”
makes a link between alternative assessment and learner-centered classroom. It
shows how gradually students can be oriented to alternative assessment and
benefit from evaluating themselves and peers. It also lists checklists,
holistic rubrics, analytic rubrics, primary trait rubrics and multitrait
rubrics with examples.
The next article “Practical Ideas on Alternative Assessment
for ESL Students” by Jo-Ellen Tannenbaum like the first one puts emphasis in
the very beginning that we need to focus on the students’ strengths than
weaknesses during evaluation. I came to know about the K-W-L charts along with
alternative assessment on nonverbal tasks, oral performance or presentation,
oral and written products and portfolios. This article also has lot of examples
to go with and an interesting read.
“Less Teaching and More Learning” by Susan Gaer shows the
transformation of a traditional teacher into a Project-Based Learning (PBL) based teacher. I think Susan’s
experience is going to be quite identical to some of the participants in this
online course! Starting with a cookbook project, then into a folktale project,
dealing with many more Susan takes up a student newspaper project which has a
larger impact. She opines that PBL has lot of motivating factors for the
students in language learning but also cautions us to gear the project to the
students so that they see value in it, and put necessary efforts and time to
execute the project. Susan’s website with lot of different examples helps
understand the ideas better. Most of the Nicenet discussions (including mine)
mentioned all the positives about PBL unlike the first post on the thread by
Sharmila and Bobby’s. Bobby came up with three problems – evaluation, restraint
of time and unsatisfactory results. I think in all the three cases the
teacher/instructor plays the key role. He/she needs to come up with strong
rubrics, motivate the students by having a project that they agree with and put
a little extra effort into it.
The last one in the list “A Project-Based Learning Activity
About Project-Based Learning” has a chart of different learning styles which
comes very handy. It shows how PBL can address different student learning
styles and offers a practical PBL activity.
My students have ideas
about the areas that I focus for evaluating them for a particular task. But I
have never given them rubrics (used checklists before). So making my rubric for
a specific task is rewarding – not only for myself but also for my students. In
creating rubrics I think the learning objective should always be kept in mind.
I wasn’t at all familiar with WebQuests. Creating a Zunal account and happily making WebQuests
was an extra task but didn’t seem like an extra burden. Rather it felt that
this is going to help me out with the execution of the solution to the problems
raised last week or the probable project plan. I have already chalked out the
project plan but feeling the necessity of suggestions/comments to mold and
finalize it.
I think all the tasks of
week 5 will come down to the practice in different courses I’m teaching. Like
the other invigorating and rejuvenating activities in the week,
teaching-learning has become very stimulating.
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