I’ve chosen a course that at this stage in the semester will be enhanced with engagement through an eportfolio platform. Early Childhood Education N363 provides opportunities for students to extend academic reading and writing skills. The course covers academic genres, textual structures and writing functions with an emphasis on syntactical and lexical functions, summarizing and paraphrasing. It explores the effective planning and organization of reading, synthesizing and summarizing of research articles leading to the writing a critical review using appropriate academic functions. The second goal focuses on vocabulary using the detailed reading approach, which supports an understanding of the writer’s purpose, genre stages, writing flow and voices in academic writing. Additional goals introduce and explore tutorial speaking and presentation skills. This course aligns with Education course N367 and N353.
Course outcomes include
1. Demonstrate the collaborative planning and facilitation of a class tutorial using an academic text as a springboard for discussion
2. Demonstrate the ability to plan and manage own learning effectively.
3. Demonstrate a firm understanding of the role of effective communication in both Arabic/English in the ECE settings as related to special needs of the students and identify SMART, IEP goals that meet the child’s specific needs
This project focuses on the introduction and use of PBWORKS as a course platform tool for student portfolio work on their critical review writing. This task comes at a new stage in the course and is a great opportunity to use a customized portfolio.
It will use the PBWORKS platform as a workspace for students, a discussion forum about the critical review and a repository for their academic research articles. This will allow interactive feedback or correspondence and progressive tracking as they independently write their reviews. I think that portfolios can be an effective way for students to work collaboratively, demonstrate independent tasks and record their writing and ideas as evidence of learning. It is also a chance for me to use and explore the use of programs such as VOKI to deliver content, share or update information.
