Hello, folks! Here I am again but I am not back for sharing my new experiences about novel material designs or teaching designs. I am here to bid farewell to you because this is the end of the course "Current Issues in Teaching" in my ELT journey and I want to share my overall reflections with you. If you are ready, let's get started!
First of all, I want to answer some of the questions that our instructor has asked everyone in the classroom to respond to and express our reflections in our final blog post. The questions are below.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the course?
What did you find easy or difficult about the course?
What was your most and least favourite task? Explain your choices.
What would be your suggestion to improve it?
What would you tell to the students who would take this course next year?
How would this course contribute to your professional development?
As for the strengths and weaknesses of the course, I think that the strengths of the course are well-organized syllabus, well-planned authentic tasks and task rubrics, the variety of interactive, collaborative, and up-to-day tasks, and the appropriate coursebook written and published by the instructor and the stakeholders with a great deal of effort. However, there are also some minor weaknesses of the course. For example, there were some technical and technological infrastructure problems in the class. Instead, the class hours could have been spent in the computer labs but the class was still adequate for our lectures.
When it comes to the second question, I found reading the assigned chapters, coming up with suitable applications or websites for carrying out the task procedure, or manipulating the technological tools for fulfilling the specific requirements for specific tasks easy although some of them had limited access due to the monetary issues. On the other hand, I had difficulty in integrating appropriate technological tools into educational and pedagogical aspects of the tasks from time to time. I had to think all the aspects such as the target context, learner age, learner level, their sociocultural and socioeconomic background, their anticipated needs and interests, etc. as well as thinking the technical aspects of the tasks. However, I was still able to manage all the tasks thoroughly.
My respond to the third question is that I liked "AR-integrated Teaching Material" most while "Corpus-based Teaching Material" least because it was quite attractive, effective, interactive and collaborative to design the movie posters in the Microsoft Bing Image Creator and subsequent tasks such as asking students to write a paragraph of 50 words by using their creativity to describe the movie poster and generate it. Additionally, students have the opportunity to reflect upon the task and discuss it extensively. They can redesign their movie posters while they improve their writing skills. By the way, I felt myself like a graphic designer in the cinema sector while designing the movie posters and this made me feel enthusiastic :) Anyway, the reason why I didn't like the corpus-based teaching material is that don't like using corpus that much because it seems like I deal with data a lot, especially in COCA. That's why I devised a way to use another corpus other than COCA and I discovered CorpusMate with its simpler and basic interface and speedy results without the need for subscription. Still, it would seem difficult for me and possibly for my prospective students to use and integrate it in the educational and pedagogical task designs if I had the chance to use it again in other tasks. My suggestion is to improve the task would be definitely exchange COCA with CorpusMate because COCA has a complex interface and systematic errors that it has such as in collocate or KWIC buttons and entry results. Also, there are lots of instructions for the instructor to prepare for students to use the website effectively. However, CorpusMate is simple to use by just typing the word and listing the concordances without even subscribing.
Here comes the fifth question. My tiny advice for the next year junior ELT students would be that they should work harder, put all their efforts to do their best and produce recyclable, re-usable, enduring materials if they want to be successful in their future professions. They should also read the chapters regularly, attend the classes all the time, and finish the projects on time. You'll see your progress if you do these pieces of advice, believe me :) I hope that you'll do your best and learn many things in this course and use in your future professions to share the innovations in the field with your students.
Actually, the last question is about what I have told you before but let me rephrase again. These tasks can absorb and expose students in any proficiency level to the authentic and communicative language and input. This is what educators wish in teaching English in the 21st century. These tasks can help students to be creative, collaborative, and innovative in their works. They can improve their pragmatic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competences through these tasks as well as improving their fluency skills. At this point, I can assign myself the role of facilitator, organizer, prompter, and a resource and guide students to improve their English in a simulated classroom environment through using my banks of knowledge about technology-integrated material designs and implementation processes. As a result, students can be exposed to a variety of language and differentiated learning as well as inclusive learning could be employed in my future classes by adopting learner-centered technology-integrated tasks.
To sum up, this term was fascinating with loads of new sets of information for me and I learned a lot of technological tools, how to use and implement them in my future classroom through fluency-based or accuracy-based tasks and I learned each type of task's affordances and constraints under the circumstances of the contexts, proficiency levels of students, age, sociocultural variety, socioeconomic status, etc. I really appreciate my instructor's efforts and hard work and I am super excited to utilize each task in my future classes with of course MagicSchool.ai :) Alright, that was all from me for this semester, folks. I hope that you can benefit from all my educational blogs and my experiences in your academic and professional studies. Hope to meet again, take care!
Tuğrul.