Week 2, Last 3 Days

My Reflections on the Last 3 Days of the Course

During these last three days of the course we spent most of the class working on our final lesson plans, which included finishing up editing our videos, creating activities in Hot Potatoes, looking for materials for our "cultural corner," etc.  It was lots of work but exciting to see that I was creating my own original lesson using a variety of materials I had experimented with in this course.  You can see my final lesson plan on my wikispace.
 

 We also looked at a tool called "Online Language Lab," which can be used for free in moodle and for a fee in some other Learning Management Systems.  This is a great tool teachers can use to create oral assignments for students, which can be individually evaluated.  What it doesn't allow is for students to communicate orally with each other, or share their recordings with anyone besides the teacher.  This leads to the question of whether a task should have an authentic audience -- wouldn't it make the task more interesting if they could speak to their classmates, and not only the teacher, when doing their recording?  I am still looking for tools that could allow students to communicate asynchronously with their peers (including voice), since it is not always possible to set up synchronous communication.

Along this line, I have tried to think of ways to set up projects involving communication at a distance through my TPACK lesson ( a lesson I created by reflecting first on content, later on a potential activity, and finally on the forms of technology that would help me carry it out).  Here is a google doc document with my TPACK lesson.

I have very much enjoyed working in such a hands-on fashion in this course and reflecting on how I can make use of the great variety of collaborative tools online to encourage my students to use the language actively.  It has been a great two weeks!