Good Morning and Happy Friday!
  I enjoyed reading and  listening to your assignments, group discussions, and songs :)  I apologize to many of Vietnam's elementary and high school students who have had very sleepy teachers this week .  I have great respect for how hard you all have worked this week and really hope you are able to get some decent sleep this weekend.

Today's Agenda

• Assignment Recap
• Talking to Jeff and Preparation for 'Talking to the World'
• Lab Time

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Please take some time to read what's below.   I then hope to speak with the class and answer any questions you have and discuss plans for next week.

 Assignment Recap
(See course overview for more details.  These are just some specific reminders)

• 2 Reading Reflections - the first one was about Day#1 readings (Chen & Szynalski).  I want you to choose the second reading. It should not be one of the Day#2 readings. It can be any article that discusses a topic related to CALL.  The reflection will not be due until Monday, March 16, but I'd like you to post a link  to the reading you select in this forum.  Part of the reason I want you to find your own reading is to have the experience of searching within the world of online academic articles.  Post the reflection itself as a blog entry DO NOT ATTACH a .doc file please. Copy the text directly into the blog post (screencast here)
• Bookmark at least 30 sites - make sure to include the 'efl537' tag for all bookmarks related to this course (see Day 4 description of Delicious Tagging)
• Materials Archive -save files in this kind of structure on your hard drive or flash drive - you do not need to send me screenshots until the end of the course. For now just keep saving any files that you might want to sue in the future. 
• Personal Website - this can be a Posterous.com, Wordpress.com, Wikispaces.com or other sites (as long as the site is approved by Jeff) and should include at least three posts - an introduction, a page about your EFL537 experience, and  a page about your SNHU TEFL program experience.  Of course, it would be great to see more posts and a variety of media (photos, presentations, audio, etc).  This is your site to use however you wish after the course. 
• CALL Plan Report - please don't do this until day#10 at the earliest.  I want you to have  as many CALL experiences as possible before putting this together.  (not due until March 22).  This should basically be a summary of what you've learned and how you can apply it (now and in the foreseeable future)

Assorted thoughts from Jeff

• Assessment -  My least favorite part of teaching is assessment. I wish I could simply teach what I thought was most important and students were motivated to learn for the sake learning without any concern about 'getting a good grade'.  Of course, I know that's not reality.  I do have to give students grades and it's only fair to recognize the accomplishments of students who have done especially good work. I just want you to know that I realize that everyone is working hard in this course and I will be as generous as possible.  Doing a decent job on the 'required assignments' will earn you at least a B. B+'s and A's will be earned by doing extra work., but please don't get two hours of sleep a night because you have to get an A.  Follow your learning passions, do your best, but  please take care of yourselves. 
• Extra Work - this can fall into three categories
  
  • Going further than required with the required assignments - bookmarking additional pages, doing extra reading reflections, building and awesome personal website, etc. 
  • Using CALL tools to produce CALL Materials - create a bunch of Hot Potatoes activities, build online lessons for EFL students,  upload presentation lessons to your Slideshare, etc.
  • Creating materials that will help future VNU EFL537'ers - Remember how stressful the first few days were?  I would love to have support material that helped students  avoid some of the overwhelming confusion when first discovering CALL tools. I think the people best able to produce that kind of material  are YOU!  You could create combinations of  text,screenshot images, audio, and/or powerpoint presentations that explain how to use certain tools and how they might be used. These materials could include Vietnamese language and be posted on your EFL537 or other blogs and help future students avoid some of the CALL suffering you've experienced.  They'll never know how lucky they are :)
• The course never ends - or perhaps I should say, this course is just a beginning and I hope your CALL learning never ends.  I'm not sure how long I will be teaching this particular course online, but I'm pretty sure I'll be active online for quite a while and will do my best to maintain this site and Learningcall.net as resources for all those interested in CALL.  I wish we had more time, so we could cover more CALL possibilities but I think the amount were covering in 10 days is more than enough (and I suspect most of you agree).  Still I do want to provide information about some other CALL 'buffet items' like the use of video, social networking, and virtual worlds'.  Feel free to explore these now or after the course. I will be posting  them under the Explorations page under Skills training.  There is no assignment associated with these. They are just there for your information.

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Talking to Jeff and Preparation for 'Talking to the World'

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Lab Time

• Try to post at least one photo and one audio file to your posterous.com blog, if you haven't already
• Update your profile page (My Account/Profile) to include the URL of your posterous, slideshare, and any other personal sites.
• Work on  assignments and tasks

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Assignments

• Second Reading Reflection
• Everything else