This is the end of a wonderful and enriching adventure and the beginning of a new way to teach and connect to my students for me!
I really admire the efficiency of  the American teachers of Oregon University ,to present , organize , motivate and accompany a group of "students/teachers" from all over the world , with different culture background , motivation ,way of thinking , needs .

I really thank you very much for your professionalism and competence. It really motivated me .

As I was learning from the readings , the exercises , the discussions , the activities , I also tried to analyze how you had built this course . Everything had been well  thought out , planned : the course started little by little with a few exercises which were preparing us for our project and became more intense and demanding as the weeks went by to reach a climax during the week 5/6 and to lead us towards our own improvement and our capacity to implement new activities with new tools with our students.

The idea of the blog which was used to analyze our progression , our discoveries or to share our doubts and improvements was very appreciated and it help me see how our colleagues worked and felt .

I advise all the teachers who are interested in learning new web tools and in living a new experience to follow the course.

Here is the link of my favorite websites which I will keep on completing day after day and that I shared with my French colleagues :  https://delicious.com/cbostoni

Here is also the final project I wrote and changed my approach to teaching English to my students:

https://sites.google.com/site/seanswebskillswikifall2013/final-projects

To finish , I will say again that I missed meeting the people I worked with , I missed the real contact but I also know that I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to be accepted in the course .

Last but not least , I also want to thank  Rachel Schneller , the American consul in Toulouse , France  and her colleagues Aurelie Delaissez-Forstall who supported me in a friendly way all along the course.

I hope to see you all one day in France or in Oregon !

Learning style / week 9

It was the question of this week discussion!

I don't know if I could completely define my own learning style but the readings and the sites proposed to us were quite interesting .

This question , which should be essential for our students to answer has not really been taken into account in French schools since we are teaching a whole class with 25/30 individuals the same way .We can't propose activities adapted to each students , they are too numerous .It must be one of the reasons why  some students feel bored or not motivated ,that's why new technologies have their essential role . They will help us to individualize our teaching more easily .It seems to me it is the main message of this whole course : 

New technologies will help us ,teachers ,to build better adapted activities for each one of our students .

It has also been quite interesting to read some of the reports of my colleagues .

I started to read Sijing , Maida, Julia , Cecilia and Abdullah 's projects because I work in the same type of school or at least with the same type of students and we also have sometimes the same problems . It is very interesting to see how each one of us build their own solutions , propositions to improve their teaching . It helps us also see how we think differently , how we handle problems with our own learning style in a way !

One more week to go and it will be the end of the course . I definitely hope we will be able to keep in touch and to have access to all the documents and posts and websites we have had the opportunity to discover .

See you next week and have a nice week end !

Happy Thanksgiving !

Week 8 and its loads of activities , work , report writing ! The course is excellent but very demanding !

Day after day an incredible amount of new ideas , concepts , changes are proposed to us and I feel that I really need time now to digest , to integrate , to make mine what it was offered to us thanks to this course.
But after the end of the course I know I need to go over many things again but at my pace , little by little . I need to slow down the intake and to adapt what I discovered to my needs . It will take a while but it will require a time to think , to take a distance with the numerous opportunities which were given to us to change and improve our way to teach .

The small changes I made with some of my classes may appear insignificant to computer literates but they are tremendous changes for me.
I read some of the draft reports of some of my colleagues and I was impressed at the mastery of their presentation. I admire their capacity to deal with many of these new tools so easily and so cleverly .
But I also know that things were not as simple for others !
We are all trying to do our best , I guess !

ANVILL and the difficulties I had to understand the concept and to use it participated in my losing some of the confidence I had gained with new technology .However, I thank Jeff very much for all his advice and help and above all sharing his invention with us.

Fortunately , I could feel more comfortable with websites such as :
http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/create.html
I could create a few crosswords for my students : one on irregular verbs and one on famous American people which I put on the  nicenet thread.

I will use the one on irregular verbs with my 10th graders tomorrow to change from the boring recitation of the verbs!

I also liked reading my partner's draft report on a group of students with learning disabilities and the way she managed to make them feel more confident and interested in literature thanks to new web tools .It was very well done and very interesting to read and maybe to use with some of my own students.
And I also loved her conclusion about the importance of the physical presence of teachers to work with students . New technology tools remain tools to help us but I do not think they will be able to replace the human contact .
Thank you Julia !

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American friends !