....Blog 0.5....

I'm something of a tech junkie, however I'm not an experienced blogger. in fact, this blog is very much an alpha release. I expect there will be a few bumps along the road, but looking at the toolbox provided by the blog hosting site, I'm quite excited by the possibilities this forum provides.



Topic one:
With my tech-loving roots, I was quite excited to hear about using a blog as a means of reflecting on this course. Looking back to last term, I have to admit that even after reading the directions several times, I was somewhat unsure what was expected of me. My hope is that I will better be able to reflect upon the class as a whole and how I can use CALL in developing my curriculum. In fact, I am playing with a few ideas right now that involve the use of mobile applications to teach business English as part of my LT 548 class.
Setting up the blog itself was a piece of cake. I chose to use blogger instead of Blackboard because I did not want to watch the blog disappear at the end of the term. My hope is with this blog to maintain it and build it into a resource for CALL materials and activities. In fact, there are a ton of widgets available on this site which should make blogging here a far richer experience than it would be otherwise. 

Topic two:
I was a little concerned about how topic and group division was handled in class. In fact, it seemed a little haphazard with people milling about, unsure what the topics are really about and unsure how to find partners. Perhaps it is because we had so little time to look over what the topics are and what the latest research into these areas entails before everyone could agree on something. Also, looking at how the presentations have broken down, we have several topics untouched while others have multiple teams. As it stands, my team has yet to solidify how we are going to present in class. My original thought was to develop a team wiki, yet after reading several of the discussion boards, I am concerned that we will once again see "overload" like we did last term, yet instead of death by Powerpoint, we are going to see death by website.
Setting all of that aside, I am quite excited by the topic and the challenge being presented to us as students. In fact, I am hoping to develop a MALL (Mobile Assisted Language Learning) materials portfolio for my terminal project. Plus, the fact that so many of us are thinking alike means I will have to dig deep into my imagination and become quite creative in figuring out how our team will present the topic. What truly excites me about this task is the research on telecollaborative projects. Hopefully, I will find the time in the next few days to dig up the journal articles.

Topic three:
The time we spent working with Word to build highly polished documents was far and above the highlight of the course. In fact, I have already used several of the techniques to create documents for the oral skills class I am teaching at the AEI. What I am truly excited about are the tips that allowed us to create columns on the document for the references. I can see using these tips to develop great looking syllabuses, course descriptions, handouts, and a variety of other classroom related document.
The biggest issue I had with this part of the class was that is was very much geared towards Word. Now, I am not the biggest fan of Office. It is expensive and not the most friendly piece of software I've ever encountered. Much like LeeAnn, I would rather use OpenOffice. What would have been helpful would have been a side by side breakdown of how to make the same polished document on OpenOffice. I figured out how to do everything on it, except for the special bullet points on the second page of the document. So, I found a youtube tutorial on how OpenOffice works and thought I should post it here. To top that off, here is a link to the OpenOffice wiki which has a ton of information on document creation. I hope these links are helpful.