Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Scenario

Here is the scenario to discuss on your blog. If nothing else, it will save us from writing about our pets ;-).

Good Quality Pet Blogging


'You are a 'blind optimist' who believes that by using blogs in your
lessons you might afford new learning opportunities for students and
perhaps encourage your colleagues to become interested in using Web
2.0 tools. You would like to present 'A Vision for Incorporating
Blogging into Lessons' at the first staff meeting of the year. Explain
your plan for incorporating blogging. (What do you have in mind and
how you will accomplish it?).'

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Connections

One of the learning outcomes for this week is to identify at least two contexts in which instructors face issues similar to your own. We thought a nice way to visualize this was with the the idea of a chain. Your teaching situation and lesson planning may have strong connections to the one that went before. In reality, it may be connected to many of the other examples, so the chain idea is a little limited, but it serves to highlight the idea of posting about your context when you feel a strong connection.


Picture by Keith Hall. Republished here under a creative commons attribution license.

Activity: post about who your learners are and what you do to plan lessons

Directions:

1) Post about your own situation and what you do to plan lessons. There is a link called comments at the bottom right of the screen. You can add the details there.

2) If you see an explanation that resonates with your own experiences, explain where you see the similarities and also identify further differences in a comment.


Example:

Posting
Hello!
My name is Julia, Green Fingers, I teach advanced and intermediate English to teenagers and adults at the U. of M. I've been teaching for 3 years. I work with predominantly Asian students. My main challenge is to keep a consistent flow of information while going into the basics once in a while, to learn to make lessons plans may help me.

Posting
Hi Julia!
My name is Amanda, Coffee-a-holic. I hear you, I've been teaching for over 30 years now and I remember well how hard was for me. Lesson plans are useful but honestly, I don't use them, I go with the flow and have only a general outline of topics. I guess that comes with experience. However, if I had known how to make a lesson plan when I started it would have helped me a lot. I teach kids at a primary school called BaeL. My main challenge is to have energy to keep up with this kids!


Hopefully, we will begin to see some patterns that are the same across the world.

Enhancing Lessons Team