In our first week, I started the reflective blog with the title [ a wonderful beginning… and expected the course to do wonders and it did wonders. Coming to the final week of the course, I feel this was the course that was with the most practically applicable value for me. All the topics that were taken up for discussion on nicenet were of huge importance, relevance and practical value and everything could be taken to our class rooms right away. I think all the topics were taken up very successfully for discussion by everyone and every discussion thread had at least forty posts by the participants and some even went over sixty posts. Of all, one topic that I liked best was Promoting Learner Autonomy, which was one of the most successful of all. I believe, technology is what can do that best, to promote self access and encourage learner autonomy.
The new tools that were introduced; search engines, concepts like web-quests, nicenet, delicious, ANVILL etc were all relevant and very useful for my purposes. I do not know any other tools that might have been covered in the course and I think we got introduced to many tools that are currently available and widely used and when new things come they will be introduced to the courses in the future. The tolls that are most useful to me are the ones like nicenet, ANVILL that will help me build an online course.
Overall, the course gave me a lot of knowledge, training and experience as to how to integrate technology into our teaching/learning and assessment activities to make them more effective. I wish to integrate all that learnt in the course in my class-room activities to make a very positive change in all that I do.
Tharanga
