About me and my experience of using technology

 Let me give some background information about myself. My name is Alisa Pak. Currently I am an English teacher at Bucheon University in Tashkent. My teaching journey began in 2011 when I started working at school, where I worked for 3 years and met the most challenges young teacher could only have. I think I could also write my own book like Nikolay Ostrovskiy "How Steel Was Tempered" based on these 3 years😄. As for the technology usage in my teaching experience, it was minimal at that period: audio or video tasks during the lessons and nothing beyond them. 

Then I changed my working place to Study Centre where my technological world expanded a little by incorporating quizzez, different internet resources and opportunity to give some technology-requiring tasks as homework for the students. I assume, the conditions welcomed it. There were not large groups of students, which gave some time-saving benefits, equipment like laptops, speakers, projectors were provided, internet became more accessible and the digitalization itself grew drastically those years. 

However, the real Tech-boom, and not for me alone, happened since the Covid-19 pandemic started in 2020, March, 16. It was such a sudden event that turned the educational environment upside down together with the whole world. It seemed everything was on pause. People in different spheres and trade had something to give, doesn't matter product, experience, service, but the natural flow of life stopped and alternative ways had to be found. That's where technology came on the stage to play the main role, to be the main ambassador and mediator. 

I have been working at the university and we have been just in the mid of our second semester, when quarantine was announced. First couple of weeks everybody was lost and still hoping the quick recovery and going back to a regular lifestyle. At that time there weren't such notions as offline and online format lifestyles in a sense we understand them now, there was just a blank gap of perplexity.  And only when it was obvious that those couple of weeks is just the beginning of unknown, we had to put the life on “play” again and learn to survive in a new environment.

 Before the collapse happened, I used to apply to Telegram app as a means of communication and material deliverer outside the classroom. So students and teachers were accustomed somehow to it, but only as a supporting element of their study and now till the end of the second semester Telegram became a makeshift study platform. What can I say? That semester wasn’t one of the easy.  The main approach possible through it was Online Class Notes: materials and tasks were sent by Telegram for immediately created online-groups, students sent their homework to the same group, asked their questions there and got feedback from the teacher. You can imagine what a chaos these groups were, but we had to adapt and outlast till the end of the unfortunate study year.

 Everybody heaved a sigh of relief when the study year finished, now everybody understood that something different should be done to restore, at least, something similar to usual study process.  And we had 2 months of summer for that ahead. That’s where the journey of my upgrade in digital literacy started.  I was lucky enough to be enrolled into Emergency crash course of Enhanced Instructional Methods of Distance Learning (further EIMDL) organized by Kyrgyzstan Embassy, which I successfully finished.

I found that course very useful and opportune. Here are the examples of technology we explored there and which I used in my online classes the following semester:

The king of all technologies was so multifunctional Google Apps (Google Docs, Google Forms, Google Slides, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Classroom etc.)

This tool has a lot of advantages: it is free and you already possess it as long as you have Google account, user-friendly, easy to navigate, can be either individual or interactive. Students normally didn’t have any problems accessing it, doing quizzes, collaborative work online, which Google Docs allows.

We also were creating our own sites with sites.google.com and some of my colleagues saw mine and asked to give them access in order to use it as a real site for our pre-courses program.

The lack of interaction seemed to be the biggest drawback of online learning after Emergency Remote Learning experience the previous semester, but this course has proved that there are vast of possibilities how we can increase and practice Social Presence. It can be done by discussing topics and given articles together or recording videos and commenting and one of the best tools for imitating Social Presence is Flipgrid, where students can record videos of themselves introducing or telling some stories, or giving opinion and discussing it and then comment other’s videos.
 

I definitely used this program in my classes, especially at the first part of the term, that students and me  could, at least, get acquainted and know each other’s faces so we could recognize each other in the street J Certainly, it gave opportunity to know more about group mates and practice language skills as well. Though, it also caused a little wave of revolt among students who by unknown reasons still wanted to remain “incognito” and just sabotaged the tasks involving Flipgrid, even being notified that they lose the points. But in general, it was a great “jump start” for my new course in these new pandemic educational conditions.

The concept of a HyperDoc I learnt in that course was also the most frequent approach I used for my students as it was easy to navigate and follow the instructions without getting lost in numerous links, HyperDoc is a kind of a Quest- map in which steps are placed in order and each step is responsible for a particular task or exercises or riddle and students who cover all these steps become the owners of knowledge-treasure. No doubt, it was more exciting than just follow the bare links and instructions and students felt as explorers conquering shadowlands. The purpose of a HyperDoc is to make learning more and three targets it pursues are: engage, interact, inspire.

Thus, I described me and my, at first urgent and then pleasant, acquaintance with technology and since then we try to keep in touch.

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