Week8

I have the following events/tasks on my planner this week: **
 * __Workload__
 * Volunteer as counselor in a 4 days Youth Camp at Thetis Island
 * The first week of my design for learning writing class. (I need to teach a lesson and a narrative writing)
 * DFLIT Short Paper (Due on July 2nd)
 * DFLIT ellunimation lesson
 * EDUC 411 Movie Report
 * EDUC415 Reading + Reading Response
 * July 1 celebration with mom (The last one was in May, so this becomes something urgent and important.)

Consequently, I had no time to work on 1) DFLIT Blog 2) Contribution to the DFLIT community and 3) ICT research.

Like us,a lot of my students also have busy schedule every week. They may have 7 different classes, sport teams, volunteer work and familiy obligation. Like me, there will be time when they wil be too busy to participate in the auxilliary learning activities. How should teachers respond to that? Afterall, these activities are important to the students' learning. What can we do to encourage them to paritipcate in these tasks even when they are busy?

May be we can lower the requirement for the particular task from students? Or we can allow students to work on the task at later time. Teachers need to be alert and compassionate of the students' busy schedule. Most students are probably still learning to prioritize their tasks. They may not know how to work and study efficiently. It is the role for teachers to help the students to acquire these soft skills.

__**Short Paper**__ My big DFLIT taks of the week is the short paper. I identify several other challenges faced by the 21st century learners in my paper:

Interestingly, one of the discussion I had with my fellow DFLIT classamtes is whether the short paper is necesssary for our learning. Some of us argue that the short paper is redundant; our face-to-face and blog discussion has already served the purpose. Is it really the case? I believe this short paper can be perceived as a summative assessment of our own learning in the first 2 months in the course. It does help me consolidate my stance regarding these issues. I just wonder whether we can replace the activity with other alternatives, like a iMovie or a PowerPoint presentation. I do believe that we need a summative assessment for this topic; I just don't think a short paper is the only choice.