Open and Distance Learning Final Assignment

 Ömer Zahid Esad Öztekin

E2170018
Prof. Kenan Dikilitaş
Open and Distance Learning

AÇIK VE UZAKTAN ÖĞRENME

GENEL SINAV

In the second part of our course, we have covered Blending Language Instruction, Online Feedback Practice, Online Formative Assessment, Innovative Digital Tools for Four Language Skills (LSWR & Vocabulary) topics. 

Q1. How did the course, weekly readings and discussions contribute to your digital teacher identity? 

Q2. How did you (if you did) connect these to your practicum experience? and/or How do you plan to connect these to your future teaching experiences? 

Please provide real-life examples or planned real-life examples for all your answers and you can also refer to your videos when needed. 

Instructions: 

Times New Roman 12

Justified (İki yana yaslı)

Madde Aralığı 1.5

Share your text/work on your website or social media for bonus 10 points.

ANSWERS

Q1. First of all I want to say that because of my job I couldn’t attend the lesson online but I have watched recordings of the lessons. This course contributes a lot of new information and new ideas to my teacher identity. Until the last year of my university education I was thinking that I don’t want to be a teacher at all but after your courses my mind has changed and now I want to be a part-time teacher, at least 1 or 2 private lessons students. Why my mind has changed is that after these courses I kind of started loving this profession because in every lesson I found out that I am literally learning and this information took me further in my career life. Honestly, while I was starting this department I was reluctant to the idea of being a teacher because the life which I want to live is not obtained by being a teacher. However right now I am planning to find one or two private lessons right after my graduation. This course contributes to my digital teacher identity that because of the Covid-19 the education around the world has changed into online education. Unlike the traditional type which is face to face education, we are now making our lessons online. Not just us but also every student in Turkey having their lessons online. This has some advantages like I am working but I can manage to attend the lessons after it is over. I think this is the biggest advantage of online education. This course made us learn more about the other techniques that are useful for online education. I owe a lot to this course. This course made us real digital teachers. Learning new terms like flipped classroom and blended learning took us one step ahead from other teacher candidates. Along with this learning how to give online feedback and online lesson designing are also crucial for our digital teacher identity. I hope all of this information we have learned from this course will help us in our future career life. All of them are very useful and they are all vital for us. To sum up, this course contributes a lot of crucial information, techniques and methods to my future career as a digital language teacher.

    Q2. Blended learning is an approach to education that combines online educational materials and opportunities for interaction online with traditional place-based classroom methods. It requires the physical presence of both teacher and student, with some elements of student control over time, place, path, or place.  In our lesson we actually use this approach. Before the lesson we read and record a video about the topic of the week then we attend the classroom and discuss it. This technique is called blended learning. I have used this technique once in my practicum experience. Just like we did in our course I gave a reading text to my students and I want them to read it before coming to the next lesson next week. 

They all read it, then we talked about that topic in our lesson and after that we did some exercises about the reading passage. I think this can be counted as a blended learning approach. I am planning to use this method in my future teaching experience because it makes students feel that they are an inevitable part of the lesson and again it makes students participate in the lesson. Moreover the biggest advantage of this method is that as a teacher we minimize the time loss while teaching or just talking about the topic. Since students have already read the article for example before the lesson we have extra time to talk about the topic and this is the biggest advantage.

    I was using an online feedback method in my practicum. I want to share one of my experiences about it. Once we did a writing activity with my 5th grade students and I wanted them to send those writings’ pictures or digital forms to my Whatsapp messenger and I gave them online feedback by using Whatsapp. I corrected their mistakes and let them know the correct forms of using a tense and articles by giving them online feedback on Whatsapp. Along with this I sometimes gave them feedback on Zoom meetings. Sometimes during the lesson I gave my online feedback  by using the chat box in Zoom Meetings. It helped because sometimes correcting a student’s mistake in front of his or her friends can hurt his or her feelings. That’s why I prefered to give my online feedback on the chat box in Zoom Meetings during the lesson. Giving feedback is the most important thing in teaching. If a teacher doesn’t know how to give feedback to students it means that that teacher is not enough to be a teacher. It seems that education will be mostly online in the future, so knowing giving online feedback techniques is crucial for us. I am planning to adapt this into my future career as a teacher. 

    Schools are closed but schooling goes on, and it remains crucial that teachers find ways to see what students are learning. Formative assessment is a process, and it’s important to collect evidence of learning over time. The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. Along with this online formative assessment has the same goal as traditional formative assessment but it has different ways to use it. There are several tools for online formative assessment which we have already learned in the previous lessons of our course. I didn’t have a chance to apply it in my practicum experience but I will definitely use it in my future career as a language teacher. 

Since having an idea about the learning process of the students is a very important point for a teacher to interfere with the missing parts of the chain and as I said that education will be mostly online in the future, online formative assessment has a vital role for our future teaching experiences. Knowing different tools for online formative assessment is very important. 

    There are a lot of innovative digital tools for language skills which are listening, speaking, writing, reading and vocabulary. With the help of improving technology a teacher should know about these innovative digital tools. Knowing these tools helps him or her a lot and takes him or her one step further from other teachers who don't have any idea about these innovative digital tools. I used these tools in my practicum experience. Since we did our practicum experience online, actually all the tools we used in lessons can be counted as an innovative digital cool. Along with this I am planning to use these tools in my future teaching experiences. The new generation live their life online, so using these tools in education is inevitable and also it is crucial. Thanks for your sharings in our lessons we have already learned a lot of innovative digital tools for our feature teaching experiences.

    To sum up, this course contributes to my digital teacher identity a lot of new stuff. As I said before, having ideas about these topics takes us not one step but ten steps further from other teachers. This is all very useful information and this information contributes to our feature experience a lot.