Week 8: Project Reports - Learning from Peers

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Week 8 is, among other things, devoted to Project Report Peer Review sessions. Groups and partnerships were founded last week and this week triggered a lot of interaction.

I have a great pleasure to be cooperating with Sharmila and Zulyar in peer reviewing. Both their Project Reports fostered a lot of self-reflection and learning in me. It is by having the opportunity to give feedback to your peers that you actually become aware of what you are expected to do and how you are expected to perform. A lot of new ideas can come to you by just reading different approaches to one and the same task.

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The same goes for our classes. By engaging our students into assessing each other, we actually engage them into unconscious autonomous learning process. Critical approach to other people's performance actually raises the ability of critical thinking as well as self-reflection. The benefit is mutual.

Week 7: Project in full swing!

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This week my Technology Enhanced Project has reached its prime. The students were working on their oral presentations, rehearsing in pairs and finally they gave their presentations to the class on Thursday and Friday.

The quality of the presentations fluctuated. Some of the students were great, both fluent and accurate, exhibiting a high level of presentation skills. Some of them had certain issues with accuracy or fluency. However, it was obvious that all the students had invested time into getting ready for the presentations.

The influence of the WebQuest used last week was obvious: they all used new vocabulary from the resources provided in the WebQuest and all of them completed the WebQuest task. The speaking skills of all students were on a higher level than in regular classes, which actually is my primary goal for using the WebQuest.

I was delighted to see that all the students were actively participating in the evaluation process. They made comments on each other's presentations and suggested certain options for improvement. Most of the students tried to comment in English, but even those who couldn't find the right words wanted to contribute to the evaluation so they used Serbian from time to time.

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I have learnt a lot from this experience!

Looking forward to more technology enhanced classes.