Week 9: The Results, or 'And Then My Heart With Pleasure Fills'

           This week we had a very important topic for discussion. As I already said in the discussion earlier this week, I believe learning styles of the students are the second thing a teacher should have on his/her mind (after the objectives). I studied at the university after Howard Gardner presented his ideas on learning styles, but this theme was not in my curriculum, and I never heard my colleagues discuss or define learning styles of students… I would address different learning styles only intuitively. The first time I started reading on the theme was several weeks ago, when as a part of our weekly task we had to say what type of learning styles we were aiming to address. I am much grateful to Hassan and Vijay for summarizing Mr. Gardner’s ideas and offering technology based tools for each of the learning styles. Thank you, guys, you did a great job!!!! And Salam raised a very important question of students losing their interest though teacher is trying to make the best of the class. I did not write this in the conference, because I do not think my following idea a scientific one, and people might disapprove, but this is what comes from my personal experience – in some groups I feel inspired and elevated and have successful classes, but with other students I might feel dissatisfied and even frustrated. It turned out that if I have the majority of students in my class belonging to the same astrological element as me, I have better classes. And then families students come from also play a great role in their teaching – for example, students having no father or mother are rarely motivated. And there many other factors that influence the interest of students and the success of a class.

            When I learnt that I would have to write a project as a part of my Webskills course, I thought I would have not time, and would have to spent several sleepless night working on the project. I am much grateful to the instructors that they have created such a well-thought course, giving me time enough to write a project I am not ashamed for. Vice versa, I am happy there was the deadline for projects at last, because I could not stop polishing it, finishing with what seems much different from my original project draft.

             People started writing their farewell posts… And will say here what I am going to write next week – I am not going to say good-bye to anyone! I do not feel sad! I am not losing, vice versa, thanks to Jodi – THANK YOU, Jodi!!! - and Robert, this week I found the girl from Kazakhstan who is also taking the Webskills course from Oregon! I first saw in the webinar and was surprised to know she is also from Kazakhstan! Now even if I do not keep in touch with you (which is next to impossible), I have a person who lives though far away, but in my country, and I can discuss with her. We have exchanged so many e-mails this week, I feel I have known her for ages. Each e-mails begins with – ‘Incredible!’ It turned out we have so much in common – the name in the e-mail address (julia) and in the conference (Yuliya), she is almost my age and she works with the same course students as me; we have the same name for our university Chairs (each university has the right to think of the name of the chair, thus, usually they sound unique); she also chose blogging for her project (she wrote that some people from our group offered her peer reading ;). With Jodi’s permission, we exchanged blog URLs to know each other better and read about our experience on the project, and I was struck to read her ideas – they are like mine and expressed with the same words! Sometimes she has just the same title for the week as me!!!

             I learnt much from this Yuliya, she has her blog on edu.com, and she could not read my blog and she cannot read the blogs of her webmates on blogger.com, because she experienced just the same difficulty with it as me, but, unfortunately, did not find the way out. I am happy I could create the blog on blogger.com and feel a part of the group. I think I would have died of curiosity had I not managed to have my blog here. I also found out that Yuliya’s group they found how to convert a PP presentation to Prezi, and she used it with her students. I am going to ask her to teach me, too!!!  ;)  :)