Internet in the Classroom

My name is Aaron and I am excited to be pursuing my Master of Education in Instructional Systems — Educational Technology.

Here is a picture of me at the beach in Greece:

I am interested in the integration of educational technology into second language classrooms (both in-person classrooms, as well as virtual classrooms). Within this, I am interested in how communities form and work with learning. In addition, I am currently studying digital stories in EFL (as inspired by a class from PSU).

I currently live in Brno, Czech Republic, where I teach at the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University. Brno is a nice city: not too big and not too small. The public transportation is great and gets me everywhere I need to go, and they have some nice theaters and sports and such.

At the Faculty of Education, I am a foreign lecturer (though I only teach seminars) and also the Head of the Practical Language Section. I teach classes on English (the practical language part), both in-person and online. We have a rather large department for the faculty, and one online course we teach has reached up to 3,500 students in a single semester. Most of the day students we teach are college-aged (19 - 25), but we also teach extension programs for adults. The main program is 3 years for a bachelor's degree plus 2 more for a master's.

In addition to practical language classes, I teach writing and drama courses. In the drama course we write a play one semester and perform it the second. In most of the courses I teach, I try to incorporate a variety of formats, though more and more seems to be shifting online with more projects, both group and individual. So some classes are entirely online, while half of the practical language classes are taught in a room with computers for each student (even though this is usually a very bad layout for a language class, because the computers interrupt the ability to talk) and the other half have one computer connected to the Internet and with a projector.

For my computing needs, I generally prefer open source solutions, so I have Ubuntu Linux installed on this computer. Unfortunately, the computer I have is not as open as I would like, and I have some problems with Ubuntu, so I use Windows just as often (and it is what I use at work).

Below you will see a list of other assignments from this course.