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?

A Puzzling Objective

At first, it was kind of surprising to see Bloom’s taxonomy back on stage. Anyone who has been in college in the western hemisphere may be familiar with that taxonomy but it might be a bit hard to hear that someone is using it today (in my geographic context, at least). For some reason, this taxonomy faded away, probably to give way to new teaching approaches like Task-based or Competency-based learning in many institutional arenas. Perhaps, some of the reasons, if I recall well, was that Bloon was closer to the Structuralist/Behavioristic approaches for language teaching and learning by relying too much on conditioning “verbal behavior” and less on “success indicators”. It was also accused (by some) as being teacher/form-centered and less student-centered. For instance, there are 2 updated books on my desk from 2 very distinguished ESL authors (gurus) from both sides of the atlantic where Bloom or his taxonomy is not even mentioned in the bibliography.  (For ethical reasons I will not mention names here, but you may request the authors and book titles by e-mail)

Therefore, I was curious to know why it survived in the University of Oregon. To begin with, I was not aware of the review made by Anderson and Krathwohl (2002), or the work made on the knowledge dimension by one OU staff, Dianna Fisher. That is a very interesting work and it adds value to the taxonomy. 

Now, when it comes to writing an objective for language learning, I realized that there are many factors or elements that merge on the teacher´s desk. What should, in my opinion, be taken into account? Students language knowledge or level, Standards alignment, the type of knowledge dimension in target expressed by its category, level of cognitive order, linguistic skill to be developed, means to achieve the objective, and the product you wish to obtain in order to judge the final performance. For that reason, writing an ABCD objective is not a goal, but it is part of a whole broad equation. Oops!, did I forget to mention the slot for Web 2.0 tools?

To wrap up, I must say that even though I may not be finding myself writing ABCD objectives for everything I teach, knowing its benefits have given me a better perspective in terms of the essentials called to play. Teaching with objectives in mind should provide a clearer focus and a paved path to teaching and learning.

Amazing browsers

Web searching is something we almost take for granted, especially when a browser like G**gl* gets enshrined in our minds as the only and the best one available. I knew a couple of search engines before taking this course; actually, I said elsewhere that Google, Altavista, Bing and Yahoo were the 4 horsemen of the internet. But after clicking on the Noodletools link posted in my WebSkills course, my mind got shaken. I really didn´t  know there were so many search engines out there, enough to stack up 2 supermarket aisles; and I take that number will grow up in the future. By following related hyperlinks on the screen, I realized that many of the web engines are designed to work with specific OS (operating Systems) as compiled in this page. I started to click on a couple of the ones listed in noodletools  to compare their results and I could see that they actually pull out information in different formats. For example, I searched for “oil drilling” on Ask.com  and the entry came up with a bunch of tags on a side panel for further searching and that´s sweet!  In Sweet Search the same phrase came highlighted inside the text in different colors whereas in Google I only got webpage titles and a short chunk of texts.  It is good to know this kind information; we don´t have to pretend being system engineers but a decent background of this context fits perfectly well for a teacher who is getting ready to face the future and its digital natives.

For my own purposes, however, I tried the same topic on Twurdy, which I found especially helpful for English teachers in that it shows its results based on readability complexity from Gunning Fog index. It basically states that anything bellow level 12 in the index is understandable by the vast majority of people. The higher it gets the more difficult. There are a couple of interesting web-based tools like Twurdy by which you, as a teacher, can measure the complexity of any text by just copying and pasting. Here is one. I recommend using text under 8, for beginners. Find the text you would like to use in class and run the software on it, that´s it. 

Finally, even though we learned a lot from browsers and found the treasure list, it is important to highlight that lots of information still remain “hidden” from users; some people have called it invisible information or deep web. In any case, it is also important to know this fact and be ready to do your best in favor of your learners.  

Meeting the World through 'UO WebSkills'

 

The week is coming to an end and after taking a look at all of the blogs, I feel like I´ve been travelling around the world already. I have never had the chance to be in such an international group. People from neighboring countries (my case) like Paraguay and Uruguay and from so far away places like South Korea and Taiwan. I believe this is the perfect formula to see what´s the world doing regarding technology into the classroom. In this regard, I would love to sense the pulse of the degree of implementation that you are actually doing. Specifically the way you are using not only blogs but other web tools as well. In my opinion, blogs are 'work spaces' on which other web tools can be adapted. Blogging should not be seen as the final goal but as the beginningof the stepladder, setting the ground for cooperation, participation and mutual learning, whereby other web tools could be used, specifically web 2.0 tools. We have seen already, that we can network our blogs by using Blogger’s gadgets. Just click on your Layout, then on Add Gadget and you will be amazed at how many options you can get for your blog. Needless to say those gadgets are cosmetic elements to liven up the dynamics of a blog whereas Web 2.0 tools involve the operation of software to achieve certain tasks. For example, a talking tool like Voki (avatar maker) can be posted on a blog. I am pretty sure we are going to cover these tools in the near future. 

On the other hand, it took me just a bit to adapt to the 3 work platforms that are being used for running this 'Web Skills' course.  We have a lobby page (run by adm) and 2 activity sites (with user privileges) which required either password or authorization. Three separate spaces + participants' blogs. This whole bunch may require a dashboard :D I like the way it is. Likewise, I found it very thoughtful to have us debate about our own Grounding Rules for Discussion. That´s an excellent idea and it shows a very democratic approach to deal with this issue, and I am very grateful for participating. How wonderful would it be if many of our proposals as teachers were conducted like that.  This is something worth looking up to.

Also, I must acknowledge the efforts made by our core instructor , Janine, to be able to guide such a diverse group so smoothly and effectively. I can´t but imagine being on hers shoes. I have enjoyed being a student and tried to be on the side of the learner, but sometimes I just can´t resist to switch my view from a teacher perspective. Janine has been able to cope with such a demanding circumstance. Being able to read and post messages and answering through the 2 platforms + many blogs must not be so easy. I, respectfully, picture her like the following pic ;) And believe me, I have been there!!

What have I learn so far? I have experienced first-hand how it is to embrace a new learning environment from the point of view of a student. Metacognitively speaking, I am taking notes on the steps and procedures a teacher must follow when implementing an online course. UO people have set an excellent example. What kinds of e-mails to send first, how to present the information, how to keep participants from cognitive indigestion and the types of praises to deliver to promote a healthy learning atmosphere. 

Being a teacher I couldn´t resist making a list of my classmates and add some bio based on the information from their introductions. I did it to have a “big picture” and be able to track my postings on the blogs by the weeks. I have seen them all, they are all great, but I have not been able to give an answer to everyone yet. I hope to do that as the time goes by. By the following weeks I should be able to pay a visit to each one of you. Please, feel free to use this table if you find it useful. I plan to check-mark my postings so that I make sure not to leave anyone behind.  As for today, these are the blogs I have visited, skimmed and replied. Am I missing anyone? I appologize if I do.

	Name	Country/ level	Blog visited	Reply posted
1	Janine Sepulveda	USA – Core Instructor	√
2	Chiara Morandi	Paraguay - Elementary
3	Hyesun LEE	South Korea – High School	√
4	Mohini Bachani	India – University	√
5	Batool Albashier	Sudan- University	√	√
6	Erika uribe	Mexico – High School	√
7	María del Carmen Serrano Fernández	Spain- Secondary School	√
8	Ilham Zeroual	Morocco – High School
9	Andrea Argüelles	Mexico – High School	√
10	Maria de Fátima da Costa da Silva	Portugal – Teacher for 20 yrs.
11	Dzemal Spago	Bosnia - University	√
12	Naif Salem Alabri	Oman – Junior High	√
13	Juan Garcia	? – H.School/Univ
14	Fernando Baiza	Mexico – Univ/Teens	√
15	Diana Lira	Mexico – Basic level
16	Roxana Sordo	Uruguay – ?	√	√
17	Po-Yu Pen (yorpong)	Taiwan - Elementary	√
18	Samira Bakr	Egipt - University	√
19	Shirish Krishnarao More	India - Tertiary