And so the end is near....

So, today is my last day at AMU. I can't believe that it has gone so quickly and I could quite happily stay longer. Just starting to get into the swing of things and now it's time to go home :-( It has been a great experience and I've been made to feel part of the team by Prof Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, Dr Przemyslaw Kaszubski and Dr Michał Remiszewski as well as the other staff at IFA.

I'm currently looking at some work being done by Dr Przemyslaw Kaszubski that 'provides a platform for annotated concordancing activities for EAP learners and teachers' http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~ifaconc/ We're meeting up later, my final session, to go through the project in more detail.



However, my Erasmus trip is not completely over. On Wednesday we had some technical problems with the Second Life session so we have rescheduled it for a couple of weeks time. I wonder if you can get expenses for going into SL?

Is teaching online different?

So, my final session with the MA ICT in EFL class and my final presentation of my stay here. They are a very nice group of students and it has been a pleasure to work with them, albeit briefly. This session was about what similarities and differences there may be between teaching online and teaching in a more traditional classroom situation.

MA ICT for EFL - Is teaching online different

View more presentations from Chris Hall.

It was an interesting session but I'm not sure if I 'performed' as well as the week before. I felt I got pretty waffley in the second half of the lecture when talking about blogging. We some very interesting discussions though, particularly towards the end when there was quite a debate on what constitutes a 'real' conversation. One student proposed that she liked the idea of using blogs for teaching and learning writing in English, as the 'conversation' between the blogger and those making comments would be more 'real' than in a rather more 'artificial' traditional writing exercise. This sparked another student who felt that any such 'conversation' could not be real in the way that a face-to-face conversation is. The debate flowed back and forth and interestingly mirrored some of the conversations the IFA staff had had about what it means to meet. All very interesting stuff that I left Prof Sobkowiak to deal with later in the course :-)

Research, development and IPR?

Today, as well as planning for tomorrow's lecture for the MA ICT in EFL class, I had a chance to look at some very interesting work being done by Dr. Michał Remiszewski Assistant professor in the Department of Computer Assisted English Linguistics here at IFA, AMU.

He's working on a powerful assessment tool, which has great potential for teaching as well as providing a good deal of research material. I'll be very interested to see where this goes. It also led to an interesting debate on universities attitudes to Intellectual Property Rights. A recurring theme around the world I think.

Jestem jaka jestem i jestem nauczycielem.

It's Thursday so I must be teaching. The class was on IT for English language teaching, which is an elective for second year MA students. They were in the middle of doing some history of CALL but we jumped ahead to later in the course and I looked and using wikis for collaborative language learning. The standard lectures are 90 mins, so you have an opportunity to get students more invloved than in a 50 min lecture. This suits me fine as once a TEFL teacher always a TEFL teacher and the first part of the lecture involved lots of bits if paper and the students doing all the work. I'm not sure they are used to that sort of thing in a normal lecture and suspect they wondered what this mad Englishman up to. I think it went down well or perhaps they were just being very polite.

Although the University uses a VLE I chose not to use it for the class as most of the students are or will be teaching in primary and secondary schools, very few of which have a VLE. I thought it made sense for them to look at something they could try for themselves and with their classes. I used PB Works but could equally have used wikispaces as well.

I used the wiki for the presentation as well as showing a small number of example uses.
http://inveniotech.pbworks.com/

During the last half hour we had an interesting debate on the whys, wherefores and practicalities of group activities, with a number of contributions from the three members of academic staff who also came to the lecture.

After a planning meeting for next week that followed the lecture, I got back to my flat in time to get something to eat and then watch the election debate on BBC World. Interesting stuff but not nearly as interesting as the Presidential election in Poland is going to be. The Speaker of the Parliament was the favourite to win the next election against the former President who has just died , which has now been brought forward. However, as Speaker, he is now the acting President and has to arrange the election. It is also likely that he will be now running against the former Prime Minister, who happens to be the dead President's twin brother! Interesting times in Poland.