Course Evaluation

I think it is really useful to have such a class like “New Media in foreign language education” in university because of several reasons. First of all, it is said in the curriculum that teachers have to include the work with new media in their lessons. Therefore it is necessary that they themselves are able to use new media. It is good to learn it in the university and not later, because then we have the knowledge we need for the training period and the lives as future teachers.

I am of the opinion that it is good to create an e portfolio with www.weebly.com.
That is how it looks like:

Weebly offers you a lot of opportunities to create your own website. We learned how to type in texts, include images, screenshots, links or videos. Furthermore, it is possible to name and create different pages with different topics. The whole layout of your website is up to you and you can design it like you want to do it. I really like that we learnt all the possibilities weebly offers.

We had to do 5 different tasks through this semester which were all useful in my point of view.

New tools
Our first task was to present the new tools weebly, delicious and netvibes. I really like it because we have to think about the tools and get in touch with all the different functions. After writing about these new tools I knew more about it and can know use this new knowledge. I think it is good to know how it works to create a webpage as a future teacher, because then you have more abilities to include the new media skills in your preparation and your daily life as a teacher.

Delicious is also very useful because a teacher needs to do a lot of research in the internet and if you can bookmark all the important and necessary web pages, it is easier to find them later on or to check something for another class or something like that.

First field trip
I really enjoyed our first field trip and I think it is good to look abroad the course and speak to people who are already teachers and can tell you about the real working conditions with new media in schools. In my point of view, it is important to do this because the reality is totally different from what we learn theoretically in university. It was interesting to see the equipment of the Martin Luther Schule and how new media is included in the lessons and used by the teachers. Furthermore, I really liked that there was a person who showed us the classes with the “media boxes” on the walls and explained us how useful it is to have such possibilities in school. He also gave us a little introduction in the work with interactive whiteboards and explained how they are used in the biology room for example. That was very interesting because now I know how they are actually used in school and wherefore they are useful and helpful. Another very interesting thing was the fact that he explained us how much money the school spend for technical equipment, because I thought that it would be less than this. But that is of course just one example, I think in other schools the situation will be worse than in the MLS.

How should a school spend money on media equipment?
I think this task was a useful one too, because then we have to think about what is necessary and what is superfluous. The market for technical equipment for schools is still growing and growing. That is the reason why it is extremely hard to define what is really useful and what is only expensive but does not make sense or improves the quality of the lessons or facilitate preparation processes for teachers. I had some problems with this task because I really wanted to spend the money for the most important technical improvements. I thought what is really important in my point of view and for lessons that I will prepare later on. Because of the fact that we as future teachers have not any experiences, because we are not teaching already, it is difficult to say what is important to buy for a school. I just mentioned these things which I now think are very important, but I am sure that this will change when I am actually a teacher and experience the daily school life.

Comment on a teaching Idea
We as future teachers have to write always teaching ideas during our training period. It is good to start as early as possible to learn what has to be included and how to write a good teaching idea. I think the task to comment on an existing teaching idea is very useful for the process of writing own teaching ideas, because then you can firstly read how others write a teaching idea. It is good to read as many different ones as possible because you will see what you like and what you do not like. This will help you to write your own one. Furthermore, you get a lot of ideas what you can do in your lessons and how you can structure it.

Evaluation
The last task is the evaluation of the course, the piece of writing what you are reading at the moment. This is also a very useful task, because with the help of it, you reflect the whole class and decide which parts are useful for you personally and which you want to include in your lessons later on.

Further general aspects
What I also liked in this course was the fact that we had to write an own teaching idea. As I already mentioned, it is very important to know how to write something like that and on what you have to concentrate. I think it was a challenge, because I never wrote a teaching unit including aspects of new media before, but it was fun and it helped me to do this once in a while in the future.

All in all, this course was very useful for me, because I had no experiences with new media at all and did not know all the tools we discovered. Nearly everything was new to me, but it helped me to get another view on new media. I always thought that I cannot cope with these things and that is because I won’t work with it as a teacher. But my attitude towards it has changed after this course: I learnt a lot of useful things which will help me in the future and this seminar took my fear and doubts towards new media away.