First week ‘almost’ over

As soon as I received the first two emails from Jodi on Jan 8 welcoming us to the course and introducing the wiki page of the course, I went through the site thoroughly and read all the posted material and checked the links attached to the page to get myself familiar with the course, the material and tools, the assignments and the instructors. This helped me to set my motivation for this course as well as incited me to start my planning to get the best out of the course.

At this point, I created a Webskills label on my Google mail account to gather all the correspondence related to the course in one location for easier access and follow up. I also added Jodi and Sheri’s email addresses to my contacts to avoid having any of their messages accidentally slip into my spam folder and thus, miss reading them. 

Next, I filled out the online course survey following the ‘first’ URL Jodi had sent to just find out in a later message from Jodi that I filled the wrong survey and had to do it again on the new and correct URL she communicated to us on Jan 11. It wasn’t much of a hassle since I had already saved my initial answers on my hard disk and it was just a matter of copy/past. Once finished my input, I went through the summary of the survey and got a feeling of the participants’ responses. Unfortunately, it was a ‘summary’ and I couldn’t access the elaborate responses especially the goals and the additional comments. Pity!

Later, I logged into the map and ‘pinned’ my location on it. It is interesting to see how diverse the participant’s location is. Spread across the globe, I am looking forward to learn more, not only about their countries and cultures through their postings and blogs, but about their experiences teaching EFL in their respective communities.

While waiting for the instructions on how to create a blog on bloggers.com, I had the curiosity to try it myself and experiment in the process. After all, what could go wrong and can’t be fixed once the instructions are posted?!

On Jan 12, I received the Nicenet course key from Jodi. I signed up to Nicenet and browsed through the site and introduced myself on the wall. Through this exercise I learn how to navigate this site and got myself familiar with its tools and uses. I believe I will use it in my teaching once I get more experienced with it.

I check the few blogs of my colleagues and commented on them. I also used the tool to follow up on their postings by setting the “Join this site”. It is going to be quite a challenge to follow up on each blog and comment, but I am eager to do so.

Because of the bad storm we had yesterday, I had a power failure at home caused by a short in the main supply on our street. I woke up to the siren of the fire truck as the local transformer blew up and went on fire. I am surprised that that it was fixed and the power went back on today.

My posting was put on hold till now. Now, I am trying to catch up with the reading, posting and commenting on my colleagues’ blogs and postings on Nicenet. I feel quite behind on this.