My Experience Attending a Free Online Course on futurelearn.com

My Experience Attending a Free Online Course on futurelearn.com

This is the second free online school which I attended. The title of the course is “A Beginners Guide to Writing in English.” I decided to attend this course for the following purposes:

To experiment with studying in new online schools;

To get to know new people, and new ideas about modern methods of studying language;

To improve and retain my writing skills in English.

I studied before in similar online school coursera.org . They demanded the same basic rules from students, such as following a course schedule, participation in discussions through forums, taking quizzes and doing exercises. One difference that I noticed is that futurelearn.com allows students to catch/make up past lessons if they could not do them during the definite/alotted/assigned time.

I was impressed by the number of students who are writing their comments in the forum chat. Comments were appearing every few seconds for hours after a/the discussion on a/the forum was started.

Video lectures of the course gave students basic knowledge about writing essays. It is very important to structure text into a few parts: introduction, body and conclusion.  We need to care about logical wholeness of all essays in the main part of the text.

Due to lack of time I wasn’t able to go through the whole course.  I did not participate in the discussion enough/as much as I would have liked to and I didn’t receive replies to my messages (yet?). But I liked the quality of material which I received there.

Anatoly

This text was corrected by teacher Norell Leung from online school verbling.com

Nostalgia about present

Flash fiction classes of Stephanie in online school verbling.com are dedicated to discussion about meaning or more precisely the main idea of the story which we are reading.

Here is the link to the story:

http://flashfictiononline.com/main/article/honeybee/

In contrast to the stories which we read before this story doesn't focus on the plot. The narrator  describes feelings of future people who won't have possibility to interact with nature due global warming and other ecological disasters which will have happened there. The narrator brings to future world live honeybee from the past even the hive and it gives us hope that bright past would be returned.

Nostalgia will seize future generation about fresh air, clean water, trees, animals, food which would disappear, nostalgia about our present.

This story finishes with this passage: "...  in a future built from stolen pieces of the past, a wondrous thing happened. A honeybee fluttered its wings."

Sounds optimistic.

Once I compared deep discussions in the Stephanie's class with story which was pictured in the great movie "Dead Poets Society". Probably this feeling, nostalgia, will come to us in terms of flash-fiction classes.

Anatoly

Happiness as a riddle

In Today’s Stefanie class in online school linguistiko.com we talked about happiness. We explored this feeling in details. This is a visual interpretation this stuff.

There are two views for one point. Photo on left site is presented by one person, right photo - by the second person. Who is happier?

Poetry's creation English class

It is definitely new idea to give students task of creating their own poems in foreign  language during writing class. So did we in the Stefanie class in online school linguistiko.com

We used haiku style. Here is definition and description of this style http://m.wikihow.com/Write-a-Haiku-Poem :

Haiku (俳句 high-koo) are short poems that use sensory language to capture a feeling or image. They are often inspired by an element of nature, a moment of beauty or a poignant experience. Haiku poetry was originally developed by Japanese poets, and the form was adapted to English and other languages by poets in other countries.

Here is my interpretation of haiku poems based on the article and discussion in the class:

It is written in three lines description of the instance. Using not ordinary words is welcomed. It is dedicated mostly to nature. It needs to touch human feelings without showing them.

Here are two poems which were written during the class.

Baby leaves drinking water

Waiting for sunshine

Life appears in the spring

A lake like a mirror

Still and quiet

but below, power to infinity

The key thing in writing poems is Imagination, we need just draw the picture in the mind . And this class inspired for it.

Anatoly

Intensive English class: Synonyms

Description Stefanie Linguistiko class in the school www.linguistiko.com

Why intensive may ask you. Because only for 1 hour we passed through several activities. Here is a plan.

1. Discussion synonyms from the chart from here:

https://en.islcollective.com/wuploads/preview_new/full_26031_synonyms_of_adjectives_1.jpg

Some of this words use mostly in spoken English, some are only for written one.

Very important to use them in appropriate situation. For example we could upset if the rainy weather didn’t allow us to do an excursion in the city but describing our feelings as sorrowful would be obvious exaggeration.

2. Illustration of two Internet resources:

http://www.thesaurus.com/

http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/

Let’s look to the first one. If we write there the word “good” we can see lot’s of synonyms:

Let’s pick option “Common” in the right top corner:

How many words can we use in our lexicon - it’s also subject for discussion.

3. Watching a video clip through the google app inside Google+hangout.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1tOqZUNebs

Here is the plot of this video clip (as I understood):

Joey needed to write clever and distinguish letter-recommendation. His friend recomended him the resource in Internet which we just explored in the class. He liked it and paraphrased his letter using unusual words. He expected to look as very smart guy.

Here is what happened after (I found this script in Internet):

[Scene: Monica’s apartment. Joey enters the room]

Joey: Hey, finished my recommendation. (he hands it over to Chandler) Here. And I think you’ll be very, very happy. It’s the longest I ever spent on a computer without looking at porn.

Chandler: (reading) I don’t... uh... understand.

Joey: (sounding very proud of himself) Some of the words are a little too sophisticated for ya?

Monica: (also reading it) It doesn’t make any sense.

Joey: Of course it does! It’s smart! I used the the-saurus!

Chandler: On every word?

Joey: Yep!

Monica: Alright, what was this sentence originally? (shows the sentence to Joey)

Joey: Oh, ’They are warm, nice, people with big hearts’.

Chandler: And that became ’they are humid prepossessing Homo Sapiens with full sized aortic pumps...?

Joey: Yeah, yeah and hey, I really mean it, dude.

Monica: Hey Joey, I don’t think we can use this.

Joey: Why not?

Monica: Well, because you signed it baby kangaroo Tribbiani (Joey makes a ’and-what’s-wrong-with-that’ look). Hey, why don’t you stop worrying about sounding smart and just be yourself!

Chandler: You know what? You don’t need a thesaurus, just write from here, (points at his own heart) your full sized aortic pump.

The meaning of last joke is that “Baby Kangaroo's are called Joeys”. Ha-ha.

4. Writing practice.

Our task was to rewrite four phrases to the sentences with synonyms using resource which we had studied being creative.

Here are my answers:

Small boy = short guy

Big tree = massive stock

Interesting person = intriguing individual

mean man = tight gentlemen

His small height (shortness/ petite size) really worried him, and he wasn’t happy when his friends called him “short guy”.

A massive tree fell down onto the car during the last hurricane.

She looked like a very intriguing person when she kept silence.

Being a mean man is not a good feature for the prime minister.

That’s all. Quite a few exercises for one hour class.

Anatoly

January 25, 2015

10 things we didn't know last week

In the Martin's class “10 things we didn't know last week” we used this resource http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-30933170 and picked there some interesting topics. I shared my experience of attending free course on futurelearn.com . Martin corrected me we I told why I DROPPED OUT of a previous courses. we knew that word “bar” has a several meaning and “to bar someone” means “to ban someone” and discussed why “MI5 bars applicants with visible tattoos” and what is difference MI5 comparing with CIA.

After reading flash fiction “Star box”

I’d like to share the great resource for people who like the literature but don’t have enough time for regular reading, especially for people who study English. This is a link http://flashfictiononline.com  We can find lots of flash fiction stories there. Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity (Wikipedia). Last story which we read in Verbling class was “Star box”, it  published here: http://flashfictiononline.com/main/article/star-box/

It has a deep meaning and cheerful conclusion. We had a great discussion in the Stephanie’s class.

SMALL TALK LIKE A PRO

Class with Linguistiko HOW ARE YOU

My first class with Linguistiko

It was a very useful class in the online school linguistiko.com. We practiced with tricky words. Our teacher (Michelle) created a very positive atmosphere in the class and we had a funny discussion about confusing words.

I found interesting our discussion about which word should we put in the gap in this sentence:

She got ___ wrong on the test.

We had three options:  to, too, two.

I and another student decided to chose word “too”. But the right answer was “two”. Michelle explained us that in this sentence was omitted the noun “questions”. For English native speakers it sounds naturally: “She got _two_(questions)_ wrong on the test”.

I liked that this school used Google + hangout as a platform for the classes. I think for nowdays it is the best way for online education with excellent quality of sound, possibility using screen sharing and recording broadcasting (this class was recorded here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8aYRSvUWDs)

Anatoly

January 9, 2015