Week 6 - reflections

Another week is behind us! The most important thing that we learned this week is that PowerPoint presentations can be interactive, and  that they can be used to launch a  number of different, interesting activities. We also created our own interactive presentations - mine was about phrases (and how we differentiate them from clauses). I am going to include interactive presentations in my classes in future since I believe it is a great tool that can facilitate teaching and learning a lot.
As always, it was nice and beneficial to read interesting posts of my colleagues about their ideas how to manage big classes, and how to harness technology to do that.
This week we finally started implementing ideas for the final project! I created a virtual classroom on Nicenet for my translation class students, and sent them detailed explanation along with instructions how to join Nicenet. This is something completely new to them (as it was to me only 5 weeks ago), so I talked to them about all upsides of such an online tool, and how we are going to utilize it. Their first assignment was to join the class and write their first impressions. They all wrote positive comments and they think that this tool will bring a positive change to our classes. I already gave them a new assignment - to post their translation of a poem and to comment on one another's posts. We'll see how it works.