Week 2

There was about an hour left to write about what I have experienced during these weeks in the Webskills Course. I had been procrastinating that post because there were still too many thoughts storming in my mind and I really wanted to picture my experience in detail.

In two weeks I have read every post (and there are so many posts)  my classmates had published telling their experience about every topic. The greatest of these readings is that I have realized that even when  we are in different parts of the world, the  teaching - learning process behave almost the same everywhere.

Writing Objectives are not part of my tasks since I switch from being an elementary teacher to be a virtual tutor.  Virtual teaching environment has a lot of advantages and since I am teach virtual courses I left behind all the tasks a room teacher does like for example planning, writing objective and so forth.

Then Sean, my professor, assigned us to read and write about ABCD Model for Behavioral Objectives. These new words came up while I was reading: audience, behavior, conditions, degree; one by one they have a meaning I already knew, but the four together meant something totally different: an objective that explains exactly who, what, how and it is going to be achieved in the class.

New things to learn, new tools to work, more knowledge; words that describe my course in the second week.

Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.
Henry Brooks Adams

WEEK 1

 

After "Introducing myself", "Comments on the guidelines and ground rules for discussion" was the topic  I liked the most on first week. Reading all my classmates posts, gave me a wider point of view about setting up rules. I learned methods not only for discussion but also for email exchange in virtual environment.

 

In my position, one of the hardest job in virtual classes is to make students follow certain "etiquette" while posting on forums or requesting for help via email. Even when they are sent all the previous material, they are supposed to read it and follow instructions, this week I learn that we, virtual tutors, can not take for granted that they are simply going to follow rules if we haven't discussed.

 

Sean not only posted the rules, he also invited us to discuss if we agree with them. I now understand that most of the incongruences we have had with some students is because we never discussed  the rules, and even when the rules we post in our site are almost alike those I have to observe in my class, they work properly in my class because everybody agree that we have read, understood and were willing to work by those rules.

 

I have something very important to teach my colleagues, somehow I feel we had disrespected our students by simply demanding they to obey instead of asking them to discuss the rules and feed us back about them.

 

I feel positive now that we are about to have a new beginning and that everybody is going to be comfortable as we are going to first agree how are we going to behave and later we will do the course homework.

 

 

 “Are you asking me or telling me?” ― Irvine Welsh, Filth