Running Head: CALL PORTFOLIO REFLECTION HAMEL 1

Computer Applications in Linguistics: Portfolio Reflection

Kathleen Hamel

Colorado State University

CALL PORTFOLIO REFLECTION HAMEL 2

The main facet of my teaching philosophy is that I want my students to become

autonomous learners. For me, this means that students have the ability, from the skills and

strategies that they’ve learned, to “take charge of their learning.” When discussing certain topics

or through creating projects during this course, I was striving to enable my students to learn the

skills and strategies needed to be able to succeed in becoming autonomous learners.

This can be directly seen from the website that Joel, my teammate for the assignment,

and I created about academic reading and writing. Although the information regarding each step

in the academic writing process is useful, it’s the practice that truly allows students to become

autonomous. Since they are required to review other classmates’ work, this compels students to

be more accountable knowing that they’re having their work checked by their peers. This

‘checking-in’ also allows students to have a better understanding of each step in the writing

process, since they’re analyzing each piece in detail, thus allowing them to become more

autonomous.

In addition to practicing material leading to autonomy, the inclusion of reliable online

sources surrounding these topics provides students with more resources that they can use on their

own time. It’s important for students to be knowledgeable in these types of tools so that they are

able to answer their own questions, when they arise. Not only does the website provide these

kinds of sources but the Wikispaces page does as well. This is the biggest strength of the

Wikispaces page discussing CALL in relation to reading and vocabulary, is its ability to be

extremely informative for the reader.

Despite that it provides an abundant amount of space for information, what Wikispaces

provides in content, lacks in interactivity. The Wikispaces page is one long page of scrolling

information with the inclusion of occasional videos and pictures, which are the only multimodal

CALL PORTFOLIO REFLECTION HAMEL 3

functions of Wikispaces itself. When building the page, Hui, my partner for the project, and I

noted that not only does it provide a very simple layout, it is also not very interactive throughout

the process of creating the page itself. We often struggled when creating it because only one

person was allowed in the editor at a time; often times when one person was editing and then

saved, sometimes these saves wouldn’t appear on the other person's page, meaning that the work

would have to be done again. Using a more interactive tool might have allowed for a more

productive experience.

One experience from this course, that was exceptionally productive, was through the

creation and implementation of an evaluative checklist for CALL websites and software. I found

this to be extremely useful because it allowed me to think about what is and is not important for

my students regarding these tools. Furthermore, it provided an opportunity to explore what kinds

of CALL technology I could use in future academic reading and writing courses that I might

teach. Having time to explore what resources are available provides me with confidence to direct

my students to places they could turn to outside of class, which again enables them to become

more autonomous.

From this course, as displayed by this portfolio, I have been able to continue learning

about how I can be the instructor that I desire to be; one who is not only knowledgeable about

their subject, and the subsequent topics, but also able to assess resources for my students. This

ability to assess online materials and then develop materials based upon them is not something I

have had experience with. However, these skills are something that I can continue to improve

upon and implement in my future classes, so that my students are provided with the best tools to

enable them to become autonomous learners.