I am a little disoriented. I feel like I haven't been online for 10 weeks.
In fact, I was online all the time. When I wasn't working, I spent every waking moment online, typing, reading, playing with web tools. I was online, but I didn't update this blog. I didn't visit Facebook or tweet. I didn't participate in my forums and I didn't leave comments in your blogs.
I spent every single moment of my time online in my Webskills course. I even blogged elsewhere.
Webskills is a long-distance course offered through the University of Oregon's Linguistics Department/American English Institute (UO AEI). The full course name is Building Teacher Skills through the Interactive Web and you can find out more about it here. This is one of the seven courses offered through the E-Teacher Scholarship program. You can find out about other courses this program offers here.
It was amazing. That is all I am going to say at this stage. I will not even try to cram the 10 weeks of this wonderful course into a single blog post. That will not do the course justice. I want to take time and share at leisure. One thing I learnt in Webskills is that, every time we reflect on something we did or something that happened to us, we learn something new.
I can't promise that I will do this in an uninterrupted series of posts. There are other things that I want to write about as well.
If you are impatient, you can read my Webskills blog. However, it is a very reflective blog (even more reflective than this one) and it was aimed at other participants of the course. In order to share what I learnt with a larger audience, I have to start from scratch and present, rather than reflect.
If you pay attention to the Wordle I started with, you will see that it resembles a jigsaw puzzle. That is because going through the course felt like putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and, once the last piece was in, I could see the big picture.
I was going to write more about the course here, but I would like to try something else instead. I would like you to look at the Wordle-puzzle from the beginning of this post and tell me what you see. Listed are the topics we covered, some websites we used and some practical tasks we did. If you could describe this puzzle with one word or one sentence, what would it be?
I know this is a very difficult challenge. After all, I just spent ten weeks learning about something and now I want you to figure it out from a single Wordle. It is a crazy idea and it came to me while I was writing.
I hope this will at least peak your curiosity. Stay tuned.
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ReplyDeleteCongratulations on reaching another amazing e-landmark! And of course you got many of us tuned in for your great tips and insights. Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI guess my attempt at summing up your Wordle-puzzle would be 'connecting'.
Thank you Arianna. I hope I won't disappoint you.
ReplyDeleteI like "connecting". Isn't that what the internet is all about? And connecting the teacher to the students and the students to each other gives a completely new dimension to language learning.
Yes, I am sitting here in the middle of the night, gazing at the puzzle, trying to summerize the unsummerizable, and a phrase keeps coming back, I don't know why and I don't think I want to write it , but it is 'ever growing circles'! Congratulations once again for your hard work because it is what I see when I look at the puzzle!
ReplyDeleteThank you, my friend. I suppose "a lot of hard work" is the correct answer to the puzzle:) I like "ever growing circles" because that is correct too. That's what going online feels like. You are thinking "just this workshop, just this blog post, and then I'll rest", but of course then something else comes up.
ReplyDeleteI think you have become aware of this as well by now.