Reflections: Week 2

Learnings of the Week:

WOW! 

A very hectic week! I have never studied so much after my Post Graduation; but I have not learnt as much before as well. 

Beginning this week, I came to know about the various kinds of search engines using noodletools

http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html

Then I was amazed at the various search engines as well as library resources available to a teacher or a researcher. Intute helps us investigate annotated academic sites. One of the participants in the forum on online search also shared this link which I found very good. 

http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/weblogs%20in%20the%20classroom/

It helps us to or rather guides us in using the various online resources for classroom teaching. 

Earlier I did not know that the world of the search engines lay beyond our dear old google and bing. One of the better websites that I found for educational research is http://education.iseek.com/iseek/home.page. I was searching for matter on listening comprehension and it did provide me with very good material on that. 

I must state that beyond these websites, I discovered one very good website while net surfing and that is www.answers.com. The good thing with this website is that it has links to most of the encyclopedias online including Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica to name just the two. 

Accessing original documents/ letter written by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln is a dream for all of us here in India. Searching American memory at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ helped me see some of the letters of some of the greatest men in the history of mankind. I also saw some of the letters of the author I did my Ph.D. on i.e. Henry Miller. 

I have a very long list of what I did during the week on web search which I will not discuss here.

I also managed to describe my classes and after the suggestions of my colleagues I decided to take the BA Semester I class on poetry for the purpose of writing my final project.

During this week I was more interactive with most of the participants in the group and have developed one to one interaction with Jasmina, Cherry, Muhamad, Sankarakumara and others. Thanks to Jasmina, I was able to remember an activity which I had created during my days as a teacher in law school. In order to assist her, not only did I document that activity step by step but also posted it on this blog.

But I still have more friends to make and have to improve my writing skills so that more and more colleagues comment upon my posts.

This week I also decided to open this blog to my students for their training into poetry.

I am eagerly looking forward to the assignments of the next week.

Towards the end, I would like to invite all my friends to make a list of the films that can be used for motivating teachers. I will start with a few myself.

1.     Dead Poets Society

2.     To Sir With Love

3.     Mona Lisa Smile

Waiting for your suggestions

Ashish Pande