Week 5: More Surprises

Dear all

We just had another interesting week of exposure to the great prospects internet offers to teachers and learners.

Getting to know about webquests was really interesting and honestly I am amazed at the generosity and large heartedness of teachers from across the globe who have shared their hard work on the internet to be used by anyone. Students can access these assignments from anywhere in the world, and can post their work on the same site. zunal.com has opened up another world infront of me and honestly the more I explored the site the more thrilled I was to visualise its utility for my own students.

I have to confess that I was postponing the task of creating a rubric as I always dread this part of setting assignments, and then I discovered how easy it was. I feel that this website is a service to all teachers who had to sit long hours developing a marking criteria for assignments. Written in simple language the options give lots of clarity to the teacher also, and of course the data is simple to understand for the students too.

Another dimension that we touched for this week was PBL [Project Based Learning]. The ideas present on susangaer.com were quite practical for almost all teaching contexts. I was motivated to read about Susan Gaer's personal experience with PBL and the kind of project experiments she had conducted in her classroom.

I am trying my best to complete the extra credit task, and hope I am able to submit it in a couple of hours time.

Cheers!

Saulat