Online Course on Technology in TEFL

Facilitator: Deborah Healey

Course Requirements

1. Complete all online course assignments (initial assignments are detailed below, but these may change over time)
2. Write a weekly journal at the end of each week. Discuss what you have done and how that may affect your teaching; email it to Deborah at Deborah.Healey@orst.edu. This should be a product of your reflections on what you have done and learned, not just a recitation of what you did during the week. You'll do three of these in all. The journals should be sent no later than Monday of the following week--don't plan on doing all three on the last day!

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Initial Syllabus

The syllabus will change in response to your surveys and wishes as we go through the seminar. Please let me know if you need more time or information on any topic.

Week 1 (Oct 27-31)
---Introduction to the seminar	Welcome to TEFLTECH, the listserv	Day 1: Send a message to the TEFLTECH listserv, introducing yourself to the other members. You can Reply to the Welcome message to do this. (tefltech@e-lists.usia.gov)
	Introduction to online work
	Quick questionnaire	Day 1: Read and Reply to the questionnaire; send your answers to Deborah. (The questionnaire explains how)
	Course description and requirements
---E-mail	Definitions
	Basic procedures	Day 2: Get email addresses of two more people and send a message to each of them. Reply to a message sent to you.
	Email extras: address lists and folders	Day 3: Create an address list with the TEFLTECH list, Deborah, and members of your subgroup. Send one more email message to your subgroup, describing your feelings about what we've done so far. Day 3: Create two folders for your email messages, one for messages from the mailing list and one for personal messages. Transfer your messages to the appropriate folder.
	Saving files to disk	Day 4: Save one or two messages to disk. Open your word-processor, then open the message you saved.
	Attachments	Day 5: Send yourself a message with an attachment to a message. Save the attached file to disk and open it from your word-processor. Strip out extra characters as needed.
---Intro to listservs	Definition
	Procedures	Subscribe to TESL-L. Send a message to listserv@cunyvm.cuny.edu and in the body, say SUB TESL-L firstname lastname (put your own first name and last name - only one each!) See more information
Discussion Times
	Wednesday Probably 6-8pm CET; read your e-mail to be sure. Initial topic: your successes and problems so far (but you can ask about anything else, too)	Send an email message to the Listserv (for comments from anyone online) or to Deborah and get an immediate response, if your mailer permits it. If you have mail that is sent in a "batch" rather than immediately, the response won't be immediate because we won't receive your message right away.
	Friday Probably 6-8pm CET; read your e-mail to be sure. Initial topic: your successes and problems so far (but you can ask about anything else, too)

Readings

(via e-mail and the TEFLTECH archives)

• Netiquette, from Lonnie Turbee
  
• Internet Do's and Don'ts
  
• Listserv Database - from Tim Rushing. This is in the TEFLTECH archives as LISTDB.file. Send a message to listserv@e-list.usia.gov and in the body, say

  GET LISTDB.file TEFLTECH F=MAIL

Week 2 (November 3-7)
--More on Listservs	Joining TESL-L, the mailing list for English language teachers.	Day 1: Subscribe to TESL-L (see Subscribing to TESL-L). Read the Welcome message, then subscribe to a sublist of interest to you. Set TESL-L to Digest.
	Digest and Index	Day 2: Set TESL-L to Index and note the difference between Index and Digest. Which best serves your needs: regular Mail, Index, or Digest? Get at least one posting from the Index. Get the list of files from the TESL-L archives by sending the message INDEX TEFLTECH to listserv@e-list.usia.edu
	Getting files	Day 3: Get LISTDB.file from the TEFLTECH archives.Try a search of TEFLTECH or TESL-L and summarize what you find. Post your summary to the group.
---Introduction to the World Wide Web	Definitions
	Searching the Web	Day 4: Compose a one-term ("simple") search on the WWW. See what results you get from different search engines. Compare those results with ones from a metasearch engine. Look at Searching the Web for help Bookmark the sites you like.
Discussion Times
	Wednesday Probably 6-8pm CET; read your e-mail to be sure. Initial topic: Navigating SchMOOze	Meet at SchMOOze, an online real-time discussion area. See SchMOOze information for how to get there and what to do.
	Friday Probably 6-8pm CET; read your e-mail to be sure.	Meet at SchMOOze, an online real-time discussion area. See SchMOOze information for how to get there and what to do.

Readings

• No talking please, just chatting What one teacher does with her classes for an online discussion.
  
  
• Get files from TEFLTECH called SCHMOO711A.file and SCHMOO711B.file to see a record of what happened during an online discussion at SchMOOze. Send a message to listserv@e-list.usia.gov and in the body, say

  GET SCHMOO711A.file TEFLTECH F=MAIL
  

  GET SCHMOO711B.file TEFLTECH F=MAIL
  
  

• SchMOOze information for how to get to and use SchMOOze yourself.
  
  
• Searching the Web for information about doing web searches. Make sure you work through all of the links, too.