Week 10: Finish line or the starting point?

I really felt I have gained enough knowledge on technology in this course until I took the Loti-Digital survey. After that I found myself in the foothills of the Himalayas. That really means that this course gave us enough equipment to take that challenge…reaching the highest levels of Technology Integration in our teaching careers. This incorporation should be accompanied by students´ participation in the process of syllabus design and the consideration of our local community needs. 

Week 5 will remain my track record of challenge. As for the Project Based learning I still need to do some work. I would love to be able to create a motivating project for my students. ANVILL is the topnotch of my web tools; I will have time to explore it in details during the next weeks. Creating my own electronic worksheets was a wonderful thing I learned in this course as well.

In the final chapter of this course, I must say that this training have changed my life as a teacher. The tools and the knowledge that I have been exposed to were profoundly appreciated. I learned how to take better steps to meet the needs of students in terms of language learning and acquisition. I feel in the disposition to highly recommend the “WebKills” course from the University of Oregon. To them and to our instructor Janine, a BIG THANK YOU for their guidance and support. To my world-wide classmates, it has been the greatest pleasure to have worked together and learned from each other in our discussion forums and tasks. I will never forget this chapter of my life. Please, stop by this site once in a while; this will be my virtual “home”.

Week 9. Multiple Intelligences, LS and Tecnology.

This week we learned about Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles and the use of technology. In 1999, Howard Gardner said that “already, it is possible to use technology to vary the presentation of important materials – from physics to musical composition” (1999:153).  In 2012, this is not only possible but a reality to achieve what he envisioned as an “Individually Configured Education”; that is, an education that is tailored according to the student´s learning style and needs. How do we as teachers meet these learning styles? There are multiple ways to get to know our students’ preferences, like quizzes and standardized tests, but, primarily, observation which is a simple tool that should never be overlooked. Today, we have the availability of catering most of our students’ styles by providing a rich syllabus and varied learning environments. Technology-wise, there is an application that will surely fit and fulfill every cognitive trait towards learning. We as teachers should take steps to be aware of this toolbox and act accordingly. 

As for the final project, this week was very rewarding in terms of completing an investigation that was done by a teacher. We followed specific outlines for an Action-Reseach Project and it gave positive results. What I have learned from this experience? Teachers are able to tackle issues that he or she may face in the teaching or learning process by taking basic scientific measures that will lead to a change or improvement of a particular situation. My project dealt with English pronunciation during reading. I went through several stages which included a pilot experiment for an expected result, adjustments and a final solution. I feel very satisfied with the results but my students are the ones that got most of the benefits. They have improved their English pronunciation and have gained self-confidence and above all they learned how to solve problems of that nature by themselves.

I cannot believe this is it; the end of this course is coming soon. However, I feel that a new staring point begins for our teaching career. I cannot possibly be the same teacher after this training so for me it´s a brand new start; a rebirth in my profession. A BIG THANK YOU  to the University of Oregon and to our mentor Janine.

Week 8: The craft of an exercise.

This week we had the chance to explore lots of sites to create our own exercises according to the goals of our class or the needs of our students. There were different creative sites; the ones where exercises were ready to go just print and give away. Others required more teachers crafting. However, the one that caught my attention was ANVILL. This one is a super tool. It is especially good for developing listening and speaking skills. It also allows you to create classes and lessons with embedded audio and videos plus make evaluations with multimedia. I will definitively explore and use this platform in my future classes. It has everything a language teacher can ask for in terms of enhancing aural abilities. 

As part of our training we had the great opportunity to have a live webinar from Oregon with the creator of ANVILL, Jeff Magoto who “walked us through” the application and gave us a general overview of the tool and how to set it for creating our classes. It was nice to see and listen to other classmates and get to see our instructor Janine on the screen. 

On the other hand, we finally gave in our first drafts of the projects. We are working based on peer reviewing, so everyone is checking everyone´s work. It feels so nice that this revision protocol has been laid out very well and we all know what to do next. At the moment most of my classmates are engaged in the polishing phase of our writings and joggling with other things like creating an interactive exercise; but we enjoy it. I tried a Google Docs survey that I used for my project and I have seen some other examples of my colleagues in Nicenet which are very creative.  

Week 7: Autonomy and The One-computer classroom

This week I learned strategies to promote student´s autonomy and how to deal with a one-computer classroom for the benefit of learners. In our discussion forum, almost all of us have agreed that autonomy is not a concrete state that is learned in a single step but it is rather an ongoing process along the way of education. We also learned that the first step towards this transformation is assisting students in their own awareness of autonomy. Our education system has traditionally been very authoritarian and leaving a small space for students to develop their own interests and leaning goals in a manner that is consistent with their potentials and capacities. It is also true that this change of approach should also start with the educator. We as teachers need to see the possibility of teaching modification to enable a more autonomous learning environment. The promotion of this new aptitude towards leaning should come from the teacher’s trustful guidance and counseling and it may be expressed in the early stages by assigning seemly simple tasks like cleaning the tables, boards and any other classroom chore to initiate or promote mutual interdependency and autonomy. Others see independency when students engage in real world tasks like giving an address or explaining something in a second language, I do agree with this as well. As I see it is like a symbiosis between the teacher and students where the first lay out a propitious space for the others to develop their skills and abilities. This in turn, will benefit the teacher as to a sustainable teaching environment. 

Regarding the topic of the one-computer classroom, it may surprise some that there are still many places in the education world where technology is rare or of difficult access. We learned lots of ideas on how to promote learning with technology with such a shortage of resources. I particularly liked the combination of the Jigsaw group technique to work with a computer as a workstation and the colorary collaborative learning environment that results from this procedure. It is incredible the amount of ideas we learned this week for using just one computer. 

As for my final project, I chose and I was selected as a peer-reviewer of the first draft which is due next week. I have already started to type the first part of it. Last week I assigned a task to use a web-based tool to improve reading pronunciation. This week I sent a massive e-mail with a survey hoping to get some insights from my online students about their experience with the new voice recording tool. I am looking forward to seeing the results of that survey by this weekend.

Week 6: Engaging Presentations

Week 6 was another week full of treasures in terms of teaching ideas. Before, I thought of PowerPoint as a “One Way Only” presentation application, but, fortunately this old idea has been vanished. I learned that what seemed to be a boring, static, sleep-provoking media can be turned into an inspiring, moving, and motivating tool for engaging students during presentations. The benefits of using PPT in large classes were clearly discussed and we learned a lot from those teachers who deal with populated classrooms. Creating my first interactive presentation was an exciting experience; I learned new features like linkings, Conceptest, jumps, etc. As someone who runs a hybrid course, I need to learn more on how to deliver an interactive slide show for distance learning. PPT fits perfectly well for delivering content and language matters. This week we could also learn about PPT alternatives; for example, I tried an online-delivered presentation using Google Docs and some teachers in my course used Prezi for their purposes. We were fulfilled with the benefits of using such applications and for having learned about 36 interaction strategies.

As for my final project, week 6 represented the implementation phase. So, I have already assigned a small-scale project in which my students will make a recording of their readings using a web-based tool for it. This will be due in one week from today. They have to previously use a listening and speaking application to practice their pronunciation before doing the recording as a way to make comparisons, corrections, and improvements. The final product is the recording itself, but there is a whole process behind this scene. They have also been provided a rubric for self-evaluation; something I learned in this WebSkills training as well. I am very confident that this project will produce good results and my students will finally be able to modulate better English reading pronunciation thanks to technology.

There is a lot to be digested, processed and put into practice from this wonderful course. It will require time and dedication but I am sure we will learn more along the way. There is not destination point in technology training, there are just learning stop-overs in this journey.

Week 5: at the top of the stairs

This week was very rewarding in terms of learning new teaching strategies using web tools. PBLs, WebQuests and Rubrics made my day as a teacher. What a wonderful combination of topics! At the beginning they seemed a bit unrelated but after reading the material from the University of Oregon, everything fell into its right place. They are very interrelated indeed, and actually, I think from now on rubrics will be on the top of my teaching toolbox. I have gained lots of insights about PBL and WebQuests, and I have managed to pile up and share a lot of interesting links through Diigo and Delicious. However, I believe I will feel more confident after I make one or both of them in practical terms. They require lots of planning and “high order thinking” too. Being “inquiry-based”, the teacher should know what kind of topics will raise students interests the best. Not everything goes for a Webquest; only real-world questions or controversies work well. Timing is also a factor to consider when creating these digital tools but once you have gotten one you are able to recycle it or make small adaptations for future classes.  I have not dipped my toes into PBLs but, by the readings, it is another super strategy for learning and teaching. I was thinking: What else could we learn after week 5? I feel like I have already completed a PhD.

Regarding my final project, I have decided to work on oral production for beginners. A technological tool that I plan to use is Voicethread and Acapela. I worked on my rubric this week for that purpose. I am still taking small steps to learn how to square everything in this project. But we have a map on hand and that´s helpful.

What´s the problem?

Following the steps of the final project, on week 4 I had to find an issue in my class that could be solved with technology. I have already implemented some tech upgrading on my class by being in transit into blended learning which has been fantastic. However, new solutions bring new problems as well. Among the many old issues that still need to be focused on is the lack of opportunity to exercise student´s oral production (speaking) skills. There has always been very little chance to practice it in class since most of my previous classes were absorbed by “silent reading” and even if they tried reading aloud they would read the material as “Spanglish” not having a clue of the right pronunciation of words in English. Unfortunately, I could not help much on that regard. It would be time consuming to diagnose and make corrections on each one. 

Fortunately, however, I can see a little light at the end of the tunnel. Technology is offering new opportunities for teachers to tackle this type of problem. There are a couple of web tools out there that could help motivation and improvement of speaking skills. Therefore, this will be the issue I will work on:

•  ·         How to improve speaking skills using a web 2.0 tool.

I also would love to work on tutorial videos for my online classes but I would rather concentrate on ONE issue at a time. Let´s see.  

Reading and Writing with my shadow?

Learn in isolation?

This week I have learned a lot about reading and writing. The articles written by Krajka and Mei-Ya Liang were really thought-provoking and very illuminating.  They provided proofed-tested strategies to be implemented for promoting the development of Reading and Writing skills. There is no doubt that the guidance they provided will be useful for many years to come. I think that Krajka’s writing prompts are particularly valuable means to boost that skill. Who will not feel tempted to write about a special character in history or contemporary times? These articles, however, were written when the technology was not as versatile as today´s in the sense that, even though the made use of internet as a resource of authentic material, the focus of learning was still individualistic. Of course my perception could be wrong and by no means am I saying the strategies they proposed are incorrect, it is only that they need to be adapted to today´s technology possibilities to promote a more social learning environment.  As a teacher who has been in the field for a while now, I have felt the wind of change with respect to using web tools 2.0 to promote reading and writing. There is a world-wide tendency to favor strategies and web tools to foster collaborative learning. New terms like “Collaborative writing” and “crowd sourced books”, “social reading” or “social annotation” are trendy in many tech forums and other popular articles these days. Need an example? Search for these newly coined words to get a sense of what I mean.  If you check Breaking news English you will see a good example. These exercises are great and I think they were meant to be printed off for the use of the student, so they were designed for “the individual learner” and there´s nothing wrong with that, but it could be adapted to be used for a group. How much more learning could merged individuals learn? I hope to get my idea across. Any comments?  

Crowd-sourced learning?

On the other hand, I learned lots about writing lesson plans from a very outstanding School software :D  Yeap. I really liked it that its layouts included all the cards to be played. For example, each lesson included Institutional Standards, language level, objective, strategy, activities, technology standards, age, etc. Everything perfectly combined to get an expected result. I suspected of this equation combination before. Lesson plans involve more than just the learning objective. I wish I could have a software like that!! How they did it? 

To wrap up, after my immersion with readings and web pages during week 4^th , I came up with two teaching/learning paths to choose:  Should  I  take “in isolation” boosting or “crowd fostering” for reading and writing on my students? The answer my friend is blowing …in student´s learning styles and needs as well.  Or else? What do you think?

Planning the Final Project

This week I caught a glimpse of the final project by skimming through the PDFs from last courses. One of them caught my attention and it was from a participant in Nepal. I could see in advance the steps I need to take in order to write the final report. Last week (2) we discussed about the background of the students and their needs to perceive a possible problem. In this regard, I felt like having a map in hand.  The first step I took was the designing of a survey to gather primary information from my students. I decided to use an easy web tool for doing that online; I used Google Docs Form  I highly recommend it. There are other programs out there like SurveyMonkey to do the same but google gives you more options like seeing the answers in a graphical manner. Please, take a look at my survey here and I would appreciate it very much if you can comment from your perspective. Did I make the right questions? What should be added in the survey? What is your opinion?

Old and New Tools for Speaking and Listening

This week I have really enjoyed reading two good articles about teaching speaking and listening. I was particularly attracted to Gong´s description of the communicative competence which she divided in two aspects, the mechanical and the meaningful one. The first deals with phonetics and phonology and the second with speaking/listening purposely. These two sides of language have traditionally been thought by using devices like radios, TV, VCR, CD-ROM as a way to secure authentic spoken material but with the coming of Web 2.0 tools, genuine English speaking has become ubiquitous. The range of possibilities for activities in the multimedia world is still unforeseen as it was in 2002 when she wrote the article. I am in line with her in that I do not expect the computers to carry out authentic conversations with humans in the near future; that would be pretty scary too. Remember Hal 9000? However, I think Gong has laid the foundations to create typology of all the growing oral material on hand today.  As teachers, it would be helpful to have an organized toolkit of speaking/listening multimedia when choosing which web tool to use in order to write lesson plans, activities, objectives and tasks; so inspired by her work, I have devised the following table: 

 

P R O N U N C I A T I O N	O R A  L A U R A L	BBC Phonemic Chart	Shows consonant and vowel sound of English
		U. of Iowa Phonetics	Interactive IPA symbols and videos
		Antimoon	Interactive chart with IPA symbols
		American Pronunciation Practice	Minimal pair practice by rote and games
		Songs for teaching	Songs for teaching phonemic awareness
		Praat	Shows spectrograms of voice
C O N N E C T E D S P E E C H	L I S T E N I N G S P E A K I N G	Randall´s ESL Lab	Leveled English conversations
		NPR Podcast Directory	Radio podcasts from NPR
		ELLO	English Language Listening Lab
		Listen a Minute	One minute length listening practice
		365 short Stories	Short Stories in English
		ANVILL	Create your own L/S lab
		Voki	Create your speaking avatar
		VoiceThread	Conversation practice built around an image
		Voxopox	Speaking collaboratively
		Listen and Write	Very good tool for doing dictation

Of course, there are many more links out there but I just wanted to share those I really find useful for the purposes of enhancing oral and aural skills. I am sure that with the help Delicious or Diigo we are going to be able to collect and share many more. Please, if you have some links that fit this classification, I beg you to share them on your comment postings.  The use of bookmarking tools like these makes it possible to grow professionally and keep our personal connections beyond this course, so I hope.  Do you agree?