Well, it's Sunday morning, 11:01 AM and I am in Jazzman's Cafe and it's quiet as usual, which is nice and why I come here to work on odds and ends. Sunday's are great, I love the tranquility of waking up at 7 am and making coffee while being freshly chilled by the autumn breeze that makes me quiver..... anyway, we're half done with class and I thought I'd share my perspectives on it so far.
Before this class, I'd done some research in CALL in the methods classes the year before. I truly didn't gauge at that time the immense propects and possibilities that CALL offers to us as teachers. Nor did I take into consideration the enormous amount of added responsibility it would bring on the part of a teacher. I suppose I was thinking in the R phase of the RAT proposal; CALL was just another tool to use to make activities and to make time pass in a more 'fun' way for the students. Now that I'm in a CALL class, I see where I way wrong with that thought.
I really enjoy the fact that we all have to teach and demonstrate the use of a tool. Last weeks presentations were excellent and am happy to say that I will be incorporating them into our group project. I think this hands on experience is great for our learning and for understanding the various details that go into planning a lesson, even a mock one, using a CALL tool.
The relationship of CALL with teaching pedagogy is probably the most beneficial thing I have learned thus far. As stated above, I never thought that it would be so important on 'how' to use CALL in class. The RAT proposal is a great thing that I will always be thinking about when I make future lessons, even in this class. I think it's a good 'golden rule' to utilize in this regards.
The final project seems interesting. The observations that I've been doing have been very repetitive, but I've been learning a lot from them. Writing field notes and my own thoughts is a great way to visualize what I am thinking and I can't wait to go back to day one and start identifying patterns that I see in pedagogical relationships with CALL. It will be quite the experience, I think.
As it's the beginning of week 9, I'm getting a little bewildered at the D2L discussions.... I like the fact that the class is going online, but I'm starting to feel like I have to start talking about things just for the fact that I have to. We've dsicussed this a couple of weeks ago, and it's just my own opinion. The ramping up of the requirements just doesn't seem to be more practicial as if I had more to say than I did before. I really enjoy using the blogs, I think they're more personalized and I enjoy reading the reactions of students from class.
The CMC project is turning out to be an interesting thing. My group has an outline of the three lessons that we are going to do and what we will incorporate into each one. We are sticking to the 'travel' theme and we are going to do some things similar to the Trackstar project that I did; although they will be fundamentally different.
Overall, I think that the things we are doing and learning in class are beneficial to our overall learning of CALL and teaching in general. It will be interesting to see what we all take away from this class in the way of implementing certain aspects of it into our own current or future classes.
Happy mid-semester
Jesse
At the beginning of this semester, I have no idea about the final project, but not it does make sense to me, and I hope I could learn something not only from my own observation, but also from my classmates.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way , Xu. The overall workload for class is not bad, in fact, I really enjoy the discussions we have every class about what we read in the chapters or are observing in our classes.
ReplyDeleteI like your reflection of what you have learned so far during the semester. I think it's especially interesting that you realize that you only thought about CALL before in the replication stage, and now you have a fuller understanding of the RAT framework.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how to respond to your D2L remarks. Perhaps this is worthy of further discussion.
I think I understand what you mean about the D2L "discussions." I find it to be more a bulletin board than a discussion. Why do I say that? A discussion involves multiple turn-taking opportunities. If we discussed one of the readings for this week in a ftf class, for example, there would be a lot of back and forth interactions. On D2L, 99% of the time, someone posts and gets a response, and that is the end of the "discussion". Others might respond to the original post, but rarely does the person who wrote the original post continue the conversation. I wonder if that is a limitation of all online discussions and if there would be a way to promote more authentic interactions in an online environment.
ReplyDeleteExcellent reply, Laura. How can we increase interaction in the asynchronous environment?
ReplyDeleteHow about making comments to your posts part of the 5 posts required each week? That'd add more interaction I think. Thoughts?
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