Seeing the Big picture of Webskills Projects Building

This third week in our webskills class was the occasion to skim through the previous projects reports to see what has been achieved in terms of teaching through the webskills. 

The Learners:

The target populations of the projects is various diverse. They range from k12 to post graduate students and in service professionals. Likewise the social and educational backgrounds of the students are diverse.

 Below is a recaputilative table of the students target populations

Age group	Number	AGE in years	SCHOOLING
teen	24	15 – 16	Grade 9 technical school
teen	30	12 -13	unspecified
adults	20	unspecified	master
Teens and Adults	80	17-24	Grade 13
adults	16	19-30	undergraduate
adults	22	unspecified	Graduate and post graduate
adults	35	22-23	Master

Common aspects:

The classroom settings is one common feature. Often, teachers who have worked on the project have relatively acceptable numbers of students in the classes. It is far more acceptable compared to Senegalese settings.

Different aspects:

A major difference between the projects can be related to the type of learners needs. When young learners acquire basic level skills (reading, speaking, writing, listening, adults are seeking assistance are more learning for professional needs, hence; the orientation towards more general or meta skills like reseaching, teaching. 

 Issues raised in the projects:

 The issues raised in learning include:

• improving grammar practice inside and outside the class (Linares, Honduras) 
• building  writing skills (Nikiema, Burkina Faso) 
• building speaking and writing skills(zubel, poland) 
• providing distance online support and capacity building for teachers (Reddy, South Africa) 
• building students confident through task based communicative project (Niccolici, Poland) 
• addressing multiple intelligences  through web based actitives (Pagila, Romania) 
• developing research and accademic writing skills (Phyak, Nepal)

After reading the reports, even though few have attempted to integrate the speaking skills in in terms of pronunciation at K12 in the project, it appears that most projects deal more with production reading or writing. This is to consolidate the view that teaching speaking through the web remains a major challenge. 

Approaches:

Two tools that have been mostly used are  blogging  and webquests. Other options include emailing, google website, nicenet discussion,

Projects cycle:

NB: It's interesting to note that the material design and implementation process phases can be sometimes fuzzy as, some projects approached teaching from the "learning by doing" apporach. This made the the students part of the design and implementation process. The teacher is not the only creator.