Not the cry, but the flight of a wild duck, leads the flock to fly and
follow.
Chinese Proverb
This well-known Chinese proverb is one of the most
enchanting one which shaped my career as a teacher. I belive that teachers are
the leaders with a lot of responsibilities. As being the leader of the learning
environment, the responsibilities of a teacher has increased especially in the
last decade. Having a good “subject-matter knowledge” is not enough for a
successful teaching anymore. Being a teacher means a lot more than that in
these days. Teachers should give inspiration to their students by the way they
do things. Teachers cannot fall behind their students.
Having such ideas in my mind, I found myself falling
behind my students in using Web tools. I had to do something, so I am here as a
part of the “Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web" (Web
Skills) course with the American English Institute in the Linguistics Department
at the University of Oregon (UO AEI).
It is going to be a 10 week course and during this
course, I am going to publish my reflections about the course in a blog that I
have created. Creating this reflective blog is one of the first week tasks. Every
week I am going to write my reflections about that specific week.
The first week of our journey started with excitement and curiosity. When I
got the first task, I felt nervous as blogging was something new for me.
Although I was very well supported by our trainers, still I had to do some
extra research and reading about how to create a blog. I also visited many blog
pages including the ones which were created by my coursemates.
One other task in our first week was to get as much information about the course
as possible, so I also had to do online research about the course and do other
related readings.
To be honest creating a new blog wasn’t as difficult as I thought. I have
lots of other things that I have to learn but I am very positive about being creative
on the studies I will be conducting during this course.
