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?

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.