Week 1

  Welcome to my blog on "Building Teacher Skills through the Interactive Web"

An e-course scholarship by RELO (Regional English Language Office), US Embassy, New Delhi India has made it possible for me to join a 10 week e-course titled "Building Teacher Skills Through the Interactive Web" being offered by the American English Institute, University of Oregon. 

My Experiments with Online Teaching and Learning

The course began with an e mail from the Course Coordinator Robert Elliot asking the participants to visit and explore the course website  (https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/ to understand the course contents and the course delivery system. To me the course seemed to be pretty hands on and pragmatically designed for it included the basic pedagogic considerations likePresentation - Practice -  Reflection.  I hope my participation in the course will not only update my knowledge and improve my skills as an online teacher but it will also help me understand various people and  cultures from across the world.

Week  1

Robert assigned the participants the following topics to work through in the first week:

• Introduction to the course
• Setting ground rules for discussions
• Doing a needs analysis related to teaching and technology
• Looking at rubrics for self-evaluating discussion board posts
• Discussion: Self-introductions; ground rules for discussions; rubrics for posting

A virtual classroom was set up for the participants where they could log in using a website link http://www.nicenet.org/.  Day 1 in this virtual classroom was very interesting where I introduced myself to other participants and got to read their introductions.  I must say that these introductions were quite friendly and warm and Robert's crisp and encouraging comments created a warm and friendly learning environment for all participants. My course mates had wide range experience in teaching English from primary to University levels. In spite of their diverse backgrounds and they all seemed excited to explore web resources for effective teaching of English. 

On this day I also set up the present blog visiting www.bloggers.com and responded to the Needs analysis survey on  http://tinyurl.com/webskillsAfall2012.

Creating a new Blog

Creating a blog is very easy. You visit the website www.bloggers.com and click on the template 'create a new blog'. Just see the demonstration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSs3XXSCuoE or follow the simple instructions posted by Robert and you will be excitedly writing your first post on your blog.

To know more about writing blogs for ELT  I found the article in link http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/blogging-elt "Blogging for ELT"  very useful where she talks about three kinds of blogs for Teacher, Class and Learners for teaching English online.

I also found the examples of writing reflective blogs in link http://deborah-teachingonline.blogspot.com/ very useful.