Week 2: …a great Going and Going…

Week 2: …a great Going and Going…

It has been a very productive week with a lot of new input and feedback. In the first phase, it really created a lot of new knowledge about the new search engines. Most of the search engines such as Intute, INFORMINE, Google Scholar etc proved to be very useful and I did not even know that they existed. Until then, I did not know even about the Google Scholar. What is important about these search engines is the way they direct us to important and reliable sites and articles for the specific information we look for.

  

Then, it was really exciting experience writing about learning objectives. I used to write learning outcomes or learning objectives for the courses I taught at university in the past, but I was never able to synthesize the meanings of students, background and conditions for TLA (teaching, learning, assessment) activities to get it onto one “objective statement”. This is actually what I learnt with writing clear objectives under ABCD method.

Posting the first sort of “getting into the real water” like paragraph for the final project was rewarding from a few perspectives. First, for me it established a very good background to sit and think about what I am really going to do for my project and in my real class. Second, It helped establish a good framework to think about working for an online English language teaching course. It was really good that we started to work on it this early so that we can think about and plan what we can incorporate   into our TLA activities from the input we get from this class (importantly) while the class is going on.

Another interesting thing is that though I was already familiar with the Blooms Taxonomy and used the components of its different domains for writing learning outcomes for my courses, this is first time, I heard and read about Taxonomy for Digital /Technology Domain. It was really interesting to learn the different domains in a hierarchical order such as literacy, collaboration, decision making, technology for learning, technology for teaching, and tech-ology (the study of technology). I think, I have reached the level  “technology for teaching” and if I get to the next level of tech-ology I will be better able to make effective use of technology for my TLA activities.

Tharanga