Gratitude [grat-i-tyood], (n)

Week 10, final week

There is a famous theme park in Holland called the "Efteling". Efteling was opened on 31st May 1952 as a Fairytale Forest with ten fairytale attractions in a woodland setting. In the years that followed, the park grew into what is now known as the World of Wonders, where fairy tales are brought to life in spectacular theme park attractions. With 4 million visitors each year, Efteling is the most popular tourist attraction in the Netherlands and one of the leading theme parks in Europe.

My favorite attraction at the Efteling is the garbage can. It is shaped in the form of a giant sailor (called Holle Bolle Gijs) whose mouth is wide open. He repeatedly says (in Dutch) in a deep resounding voice:  "Papier hier" (Paper here). Whenever you throw paper in his mouth he politely says: "Dank u wel!" (Thank You). The following video shows this splendidly:

What I like about Holle Bolle Gijs is his gratitude towards whoever "feeds" him. Not only is it a great gimmick to get kids to throw paper in the waste bin instead of on the ground, it is also an educational way of teaching kids how to show gratitude towards those who helped you in any way. I grew up in Holland and visited Holle Bolle Gijs many times. I learned to say thank you....

The word gratitude originally meant "good will" and came to us from the Latin "gratus" meaning "thankful, pleasing". "Gratus" is also the source for the word "grace".  Synonyms are thanks, thankfulness, appreciation, gratefulness. All these express pretty clearly how I feel.

I would like to express my gratitude to Robert, our course instructor for a job very well done. I have administered online courses myself and I know the amount of work that goes into the planning and the day to day monitoring and accommodating. I know from experience that it is sometimes even more intense than giving a regular F2F course. However, Robert's reactions were always prompt, on the ball and showed a lot of expertise. I think we were blessed, "graced", with such a wonderful instructor!

Furthermore, I would like to thank the American Embassy in Israel for sponsoring my participation in this Oregon University Course. I highly appreciate it and hope they will continue sponsoring Israeli English teachers so that these will help improve the level of Israelis studying English. I know I will most certainly use what I have learned during this course in my future lessons.

As they say in Dutch "Dank u wel!" 

Satisfaction [sat-is-fak-shuhn], (n)

Week 9

I worked hard on my final project for the course and I feel I did a good job. I set up a website with online quizzes for my students to take and the site works wonderfully. I am satisfied but also sad. Satisfied that I managed to complete the course successfully and sad because it is almost over.

The words sad and satisfied are actually etymologically connected. Satisfied comes from the word satisfy which came to us through Middle and Old French from the Latin satisfacere meaning "discharge fully, comply with, make amends," literally "to do enough," from satis "enough". When we look at the Proto Indo European base we find the combination of SA (= to satisfy) FACERE (= to perform). The root SA, meaning satisfied also came to mean satisfied as "having enough", slowly becoming "having too much", "too heavy", "weary/ tired of" until it finally became the base for the word sad, meaning "unhappy".

So etymologically speaking it is ok to feel satisfied and sad simultaneously and as this best expresses my feelings right now I will leave it at that.

Disappointed [dis-uh-poin-tid], (adj.)

Week 7


I started off this week in high spirits. I had ordered a computer room for my students and was all set to let them try out the webquest I had created for this course. My webquest is on the origin of the expression "Before you can say Jack Robinson" and I was really excited about having them go through it.

The result, however, was quite disappointing. First of all, I had not taken into account that for them too, this was their first webquest and they had no idea how to navigate the site. As Simon and Garfinkel sang "Slow down, you move too fast". Thankfully, I understood this right away and concentrated their attention to the board on which I projected the site and gave initial explanations, something I should have done from the start.

The next hurdle was a broken link in the quest which I had to fix on the spot. This took me longer than expected with students sitting and waiting for me. Bad, very bad.

But the biggest problem was that the quest turned out to be badly constructed, confusing and with an abundance of hyperlinks that only steered the students in the wrong way. In short; a total disaster. Students didn't understand what they were expected to do and even worse – lost total interest in the whole idea.

The word "disappointed" comes from "dis" and "appoint" originally meaning "to undo an appointment or to remove someone from an appointed position" – this obviously is a rather "disappointing" experience. To "appoint" comes from the Old French "a" (=to) "point". The ground sense here is "to come to the point" hence to agree on something, to settle something.

Taking this knowledge into consideration I understood that my Webquest must be clearer and more "to the point". I have therefore edited it and changed it considerably to guide students more and hopefully get them to where I want. This will in its turn, I pray, lead also to more student satisfaction. The revamped webquest can be found here. I will try it out with another group of students and keep you posted.

minimalism [ˈmɪnɪməlɪsm], (n)

Week 6

The topics of this week are Student Centered Interactive large classes and Interactive Powerpoint Presentations. Having worked 5 years as Manager at the English Content Production department of Time to Know which is all about student centered interactive large classes I decided to focus on the part of Interactive Powerpoint Presentations hoping to learn some new tricks.

In the past, I have created many interactive ppts with multiple hyperlinks and embedded games. I therefore expected some state-of-the-art techniques but when I opened the sample show by Deborah Healey I felt cheated and disillusioned. The "interactive techniques" presented (Blank slide, ConcepTest, Think-Pair-Share, Interpreted Lecture, Rapid Reflection, QuickWrite) were not interactive at all! Or were they?

Ever since my initial viewing of the presentation, I have been thinking about these tricks and have tried them out in class. True, they do not turn the presentation into an interactive one. They do, however, change the lesson/ lecture into an interactive one instead of a one-way presentation with teacher presenting and students watching (and hopefully learning).

I used the concepTest is one of my lectures projecting a question on the screen and having students discuss this in pairs and reporting back before I continued. I also used the interpreted lecture technique in which I stopped my lecture and asked students to explain in their own words what I had just screened on the board. But what I actually liked most was the "blank slide" - just a black slide with nothing on it. It refocuses the attention on the teacher and helps create transitions between different topics. It is so simple and so effective! A minimal addition to a slideshow with maximum outcome.

"Minimalism", a term coined in the1960s is the Anglicization of the Russian term Menshevik, and means the creating Minimal Art. Minimal comes from "minimum" Latin for "smallest" and the superlative of the Latin "minor" (which is still used in English for someone underage). "Minor" itself comes from the term Latin "minus" (= less), also a term which has been adopted into the English language. So minimalism, minimal, minimum, minor, minus are all etymologically connected.

As mentioned, I have become a frequent user of the techniques mentioned above. It is actually saving me time because instead of working hard on creating interactive powerpoint slides, I work less but more efficiently on creating interactive lectures. "Less is More" goes the 19th century proverbial phrase first recorded in 1855 in a poem by Robert Browning. Do others feel the same?  

Multi-tasking [muhl-tee-tas-king, -tah-sking, muhl-tahy-], (n)

Week 5, Middle of the Week

Doing this course is not easy. I am trying to juggle three jobs, a family life and this course all together and am sometimes afraid that I am dropping some of the balls.

Over the years, I have heard that women are better at multi-tasking than men which always made me feel slightly jealous but quite skeptic as I seem to multi-task better than many women I know.  Today I found research disclaiming the idea all together.  BRANDY R. CRISS of the DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, MWSU experimented and found unequivocally that there is no difference between men and women (concerning multi-tasking). Here by the way proof that men can multi-task:

The word multi-tasking comes from the world of computers and was originally used as an adjective to describe a computer that could do multiple computations simultaneously. Only in 1998 was it also used for humans. "Multi" comes from the Latin "multus" (much, many), cf with the Greek "malta" (very very much). I searched the Internet to find if there is any connection between this Greek word and the name of the island Malta slightly South of Italy but this is apparently not the case. So here I am again, writing a blog and searching the Internet at the same time; multi-tasking.

As teachers we multi-task all the time. One of my fellow students, Masafumi, listed the many tasks/ roles we have as teachers:
1. The Teacher as Controller
2. The Teacher as Director
3. The Teacher as Manager
4. The Teacher as Facilitator
5. The Teacher as Resource

With five different tasks/ roles, we should actually get 5 salaries! But keep dreaming, we are far from that.
You won't become a multi-millionaire multi-tasking as a multi-role teacher, but it is multi-satisfying.

Webquest [web-kwest], (n)

Week 5 - Beginning of the Week

The topic of this week for our course is "Project-Based Learning, Webquests and Rubrics".
Project-based learning I've done a lot, rubrics I am quite familiar with but although I know what webquests are, I have never used these in class and until now had never created one. So I took it upon myself to create my first webquest today.

A webquest is a quest on the web. A quest is a search or pursuit in order to find something. It comes from the old French queste (origin of the word "question"), from M.L. questa which is an alteration of the Latin quæsitus which is the pp of quærere  which in its turn is the source for "query" and this, in the end, became "inquiry".

A webquest is an inquiry oriented online tool for learning. It is an interactive lesson in which most or all of the information that students explore and evaluate comes from the world wide web. The concept of a webquest was first introduced by Bernie Dodge in 1995.

Webquests:
- can be as short as a single class period or as long as a month-long unit;
- sometimes involve group work, with division of labor among students who take on specific roles or perspectives;
- are built around resources that are preselected by the teacher. Students spend their time USING information, not LOOKING for it.

Learn more about Webquests here.

I used the webquest creator site http://zunal.com  to create my webquest. This site is extremely user friendly and intuitive. The only downside of the site is that one can only create ONE webquest for free. :-(

I decided to use an article I had written a long time ago as the base for my webquest. In the article, I explored the origin of the expression "before you can say Jack Robinson".
So without further ado, here my very first webquest:

Who was Jack Robinson?  

I hope you'll like it!

Exhilarated [ig-zil-uh-rey-tid], (adj)

Week 4 - Beginning of Week

Last week we were asked about the use of technology for oral and aural skills. We were invited to draw up a list of websites that could be used in class for this. This reminded me of my very own website I had several years ago. It was a website I had created for my students. It had taken me years to create and students all over Israel used  my webpages. It had a special corner with listening activities for students who were studying towards their matriculation examination (called "bagrut" in Israel). One terrible day, however, some two years ago, I found out that my site had been hacked and completely deleted by the malicious hackers. All gone, and no backup. I never managed to find the energy to start all over again. It was a great disappointment.

When asked to find Internet sites for oral and aural skills, I tried to remember the sites I had put up on my website. And then, completely by chance, I heard about the "Internet Archive". This is a non-profit organization aimed at building a library of the Internet. The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born digital" materials from disappearing into the past. In order to do this, the archive has been "crawling" the net from as early as 1996 and is archiving everything it finds. Using the "wayback machine"  one can submit the URL of a website and see how it developed over the years. Take a look for example at the first Google page. This first snapshot was taken on November 11, 1998. Didn't look all that impressive then, did it?

With trembling fingers, I submitted the URL of my long lost website. Would the Internet Archive maybe have a copy of my site? Could it be that I might be able to revive it? And lo and behold! There it was. My own site in (almost completely) working order!!

I cannot describe how I felt. I was completely exhilarated. I quickly copied a few of its links to the course site and then sat back to enjoy the sheer sight of my site.

Exhilarated means extremely happy, overjoyed, electrified, thrilled and intoxicated. It comes from the Latin prefix "ex" meaning "thoroughly" and "hilarare" = making cheerful. Ex, by the way, comes from the Greek cognate PIE eghs with its superlative form eks-t(e)r-emo and I can, without doubt, state that I feel eksteremo exhilarated at the moment.

Or "happy" as Jim would say:

Don't you just love how Jim explains what the easy word "happy" means by using more difficult words like "delighted, pleased and glad"? Now what kind of help is that?!

Anyway, if you ever had something get lost on the Internet, I warmly advise you to try and find it on the wayback machine of the Internet Archive.