What an exciting day! Today I am writing my last blog post for the New Technologies in TEFL course but I promise this will be the foundation of my future blogging practice.
I can see an extremely exciting experience when I look back with a lot of challenges and advantages intertwined. It is very hard now to describe my experience with this course: it gave me an unforgettable feeling that I have obtained a hidden weapon – technological solution for a lot of problems that language learners face in the 21st century, also it provided me with a professional development in this area.
An important strategy of our learning has been a deep understanding and interpretation of all the technologies and the benefits gained from them. The aim was to clarify whether the technology integration into the teaching and learning process will indeed solve a problem or not. Thus, we were always given a chance to have our own insights and views and no particular point was ever forced or bound.
The best thing I got from this course was the opportunity to be exposed to the vast number of CALL and MALL tools applicable in education and in FL learning in particular. Now I can bring real examples of how I use these technologies in my real teaching practice:
- I use Edmodo – a virtual learning environment for blended learning and it provided a solution to a number of problems such as effective time management, setting up collaboration between learners, giving peer-feedback,sharing content, conducting online quizzes and tests and a lot of other things. Also, this course gave me enough confidence to teach digital literacy to my learners which is of vast importance nowadays.
- My learners use chat bots (mostly Mitsuku) to have synchronous written communication.
- I use google shared doc with my learner for all the writing tasks where I can give a quick feedback, also share learning materials and resources with her.
In future, I am planning to integrate Digital-Storytelling for developing speaking skills and collaboration between learners, podcasts for fostering receptive skills and this is not all. I have a lot of other ideas which could be implemented through technology integration and I just need some time to plan everything carefully.
This was one of the courses where the whole content was entirely new for me and it was so motivating to realize at the end that all my efforts have been rewarded with deep knowledge and a pack of useful strategies and pedagogical techniques. Also, the most inspiring gift I got from this course is my blog which taught me to elaborate my thoughts, to be reflective upon my own learning and always to refer to the reliable evidence and data.
Really want to thank my instructor for this great experience:
Thank you, Dr. Madyarov!
TEACHING ENGLISH IN ARMENIA 