Session 1

WHAT MAKES A SUCCESSFUL ONLINE STUDENT

I believe the qualities are needed to be a successful online student
are similar to the qualities needed to be successful traditional
classroom student, I, you need to be self –disciplined and self-
motivated. Also you have to be able to communicate trough writing
because even if you are in a traditional classroom you have to know
how to write. However I think that online education is not for
everybody , we need into account the fact that some students need to
see and to feel close to the person who is teaching them, some
students need to hear them and others are satisfied with just see
them.. This has a lot to do with the way each person learns… I mean
the "sensorial channels". Another online teaching limitation is the
fact that since we live in a country with a lot economical problems
is not easy for all the students to get access to the technology
necessary to online studies. This could be big problem because the
students (as me, for example) who do not have unlimited access to
this technology, as some of their classmates, could (as is my case)
feel frustrated. One the qualities of the successful online student
is be "willing to commit to 4 to 15 hours per week per course" but
we have to take into account the fact that maybe the students are
willing to commit that amount of time… but they can't do it because
of economical reasons. In despite of all its limitations, online
studies encourage people to be more "active" and responsible for
their learning process.

Strategies for Using Chat as a Communication Tool

The different ways of evaluating through internet are very
interesting, especially for learning a second language, since we
have to write instead of talking we can improve our writing
abilities, we can practice our grammar and learn for our mistakes.
Also we can learn new ways of working as a team by developing an
online group project. With this new way of teaching and learning
comes a lot of new opportunities but also, responsibilities since
the teacher has to face new challenges to determine if his/her gold
are being achieved, for example the teacher has to determine either
the student work is his own or he just copied and pasted from the
internet.

Using chat in EFl: a tool for collaborative learning

This reading is very interesting because it tell us how students
can"build" knowledge by using the chartrooms… the students from
Blanco's practical experiment learnt how to integrate all they
learnt and then, they were able to developed an opinion of their own…
they thought about they learnt in the first two sessions and by the
last sessions they were anxious to let the others know their
opinions. Chartrooms are an fantastic learning tool, however, we
need to have access to the technology necessary for this new way of
learning and that's not always easy to get.