EFL537, Cohort#3, 
Day #10, November 13, 2009
To the Finish Line & Beyond 

• Materials Archive & Blogging/RSS task - for those wondering how to show me you did these tasks, you can use your image editing/screenshot skill to attach screenshots to an EFL537 blog posts.  Examples at: http://www.efl537.com/blog/materials-archive-vnu-31  and http://www.efl537.com/blog/nga-phans-blogging-rss-task
  
• Final Report - If you want to impress the teacher, include the URL's of anything you mention (your sites or others).  
  
• 'Pay it Forward' Advice Letter
  Please don't forget the last optional (but strongly encouraged) assignment - a Vietnamese advice letter to Cohort#4.   Perhaps you remember the challenges, frustration, and confusion of Day#1.  Well, in a few months Cohort#4 students will be experiencing that as well.  I'd like you to write them notes (in Vietnamese) to help guide them through those early difficulties.  You can include descriptions and opinions of different tools,  strategies of how to make sense of Jeff's teaching style, and any other advice you have for those who will follow in your footsteps.  Post this as an EFL537.com blog post (create/blog entry).
  
• A few things we didn't have time to discuss, but I still wanted to share...  (no assignments, just sharing)
  
  • Perhaps some of you have seen this, but google has a pretty good translation tool at http://www.google.com/language_tools  It can translate copied text or an entire web page - here's this Day#10 page in Vietnamese (not perfect, I suspect, but sometimes helpful)
  • If you'd like to continue your professional development with a very global group of EFL Teachers, you can participate in the 2010 Electronic Village Online.   They offer  six week online workshops on different topics related to teaching EFL (all free of charge). They will be announcing the 2010 sessions soon, but in the meantime, you can see materials from last year's sessions at: http://webheadsinaction.org/node/331
  • If you are looking for certain types of programs, tools, or sites, I try to keep this page up to date with different options: http://www.efl537.com/tools
  • If you come across .docx or .pptx files, these are created with the latest versions of Microsoft Word or Powerpoint.   Older versions of those programs cannot open these types of files, but you can download an add-on program that will do so.  You can download it here or here. It's a pretty big file (27MB), so only download if you need it.   (This, by the way,  is one of the reasons I prefer to use Google Docs or OpenOffice - besides being free, they don't do annoying things like create a file type that is so difficult to open.)
    

Conferences with Jeff. - I  want to make sure each of you has a chance to speak with me one-on-one about your work. I will do my best to answer any questions you have or discuss anything related to the course or CALL in general. I'd like to begin the conferences by 9:30am and i think it would be easiest to use the same computer for all students (with a headset, not connected to the classroom speaker).

Finishing up assignments.
You have until the end of November 15 to edit or finish any  assignments.  I will aim to finish grading (as generously as possible) by Tuesday, Nov. 17 and will notify you of your grade by email shortly thereafter.  

Finally,  I want to thank all of you for your hard work and determination. As a teacher and a CALL practitioner, I always learn a lot from teaching this course and I am once again amazed and proud at the amount of progress motivated students can make in two weeks. I realize that because we've covered so many topics and tasks, some of you may feel  that you haven't had time to really absorb everything.  As I mentioned before, this course is just a beginning, not an end, and I hope that the seeds planted here will continue to grow.  You will always be welcome to visit EFL537.com and I hope many of you can virtually visit future sessions of this course to share your wisdom and post-EFL537 experiences. Until then, I wish you all the best with your personal and professional futures. 

OK, here we go with Day#10 - To the Finish Line & Beyond!