REFLECTION MODULE 7: Final Project and Lesson Wrap-up

REFLECTION MODULE 7

Final Project and Lesson Wrap-up

I am writing these lines when I have just finished some last few words for wrapping up my ICT final assignment. Admittedly,completing the final assignment for the ICT course presented both challenges and opportunities for my personal and career growth. During the final submission period, I was overwhelmed by the concurrent demands of other courses, such as presentation of Curriculum Development or Cross-cultural Awareness and Intercultural Understanding team project, alongside my teaching workload at a language center. This situation has highlighted to me the necessity of better time management and avoiding the pitfalls of last-minute rushes.

Having recognized my students’ difficulty in generating and organizing ideas for answering VSTEP speaking test part 3, our group finally decided Mindmeister - a popular online mind mapping tool with the hope of enhancing creativity and logical thinking of my students. Despite many problems arising while we are conducting our lessons such as unstable Internet connections or Mindmeister inaccessibility sometimes, at the end, our group still can successfully manage all challenges with many witty and on-time responses. However, the biggest problem that our group has encountered was the limitation of free accounts on Mindmeister, which only allows us to create a maximum of three online mind maps. Keep moving forward, the solution of buying a teacher’s premium account and sharing links for students to co-edit would be the most cost-effective and brilliant idea. 


Not only did I gain benefits from the final project, but I also benefited significantly from the content of each module in this course. Some modules were extremely beneficial for my teaching practice, such as those on ABCD Objectives, which have equipped me with the tools to write clearer and more precise lesson objectives. The introduction to various skill-building websites like BBC Learning, Mini IELTS, and Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab was invaluable. However, the most surprising feature may stem from the flipped-learning format of this course. I hadn’t experienced any real flipped learning before this course was introduced, which has provided me with numerous practical applications alongside theoretical knowledge. Moreover, the ICT course also effectively integrated content from other courses, making it a more comprehensive and cohesive learning experience. The final assignment, which involved interventions and changes based on student attitudes and performance observations, complemented my knowledge gained from the Action Research course. Learning about alternative assessment methods and using tools like RubricStar further solidified my understanding from the Language Assessment course, making the creation of marking rubrics more efficient and less time-consuming. 


In the near future,  I plan to integrate the knowledge gained from this course into my teaching practice. Specifically, I will turn to adopting ABCD Objectives to clearly clarify the audience, behavior, condition, and degree in lesson objectives, helping me setting clear expectations and assessing student progress effectively. Furthermore, implementing tools like MindMeister to help my students organize their ideas better is also taken into consideration. This technological incorporation is believed to facilitate students’ idea generation and help them structure their thoughts logically, making their answers for the Speaking Test more coherent and critical. Last but not least, incorporating Internet resources such as BBC Learning, Mini IELTS, and Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab as diverse and effective learning materials for students is highly regarded by me especially after this course. Using tools like RubricStar to create efficient and effective assessment rubrics, may save me a lot of time in grading and ensuring consistency in evaluations. 


In conclusion, the ICT course has been a pivotal part of my professional development, providing practical tools and techniques that I will continue to implement in my teaching practice.

Comments

  1. Ngọc NguyễnAugust 4, 2024 at 9:16 AM

    Wow, I love your sharing. I learn a lot from the way you reflect what you learnt in the course and the work you've done with your group in final project. I share the same thought with you about helpful modules in this course assisting me in my teaching journey such as ABCD Objectives or Diigo to save the links.
    I'm really happy to be in the same Breakout Zoom with you and with your motivation to me from the beginning of the course.

    ReplyDelete

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