Like a wheel within the wheel

Dear All

Every week on this course brings up issues that coincide with some of the concerns I have been having related to teaching, technology, classroom management etc. Right from the start I knew that ‘Interactivity in large classes’ would be another such topic. The connection between interactivity and PowerPoint seemed self-explanatory until I took a better look, a fresh look, and realized nothing is obvious. The fact that I have been using PowerPoint for several years (after a crash course on how to do it and then learning by watching others do it – including my students) does not mean I can not use it more effectively to reach my students. Moreover, to make them ‘lean in’ for better understanding and tap into each other’s knowledge and ‘maximize their own’, in the words of the physics teacher .

As there are three basic components to any situation in which PowerPoint is used, there are at least three different aspects to using it more or less successfully: the PowerPoint show itself, the speaker / presenter, the audience. This is what books on presenting usually focus on, and this is where most of my focus has been going into. But this generic approach to presenting, as a business presentation is definitely not the same as the one in class, does not fully meet our needs, no matter how well it works elsewhere. In the classroom it is more about ‘give-and-take’, something you would not expect to have while presenting a paper at a conference. I think this conceptual watershed was very important for me this week. Next step was to try to translate this into practice. In that, adopting the guideline in Deborah’s presentation Interactive PowerPoint - Not your usual approach to ‘Use the PowerPoint as an organizer’. I had it in mind while creating my own interactive PowerPoint show. Watching my colleagues' work mademe even more aware of the possibilities.

Establishing interactivity and ensuring students would ‘plug in’ was one of the goals in the first week of the implementation of my class project, which also overlapped with my students’ first week on the course. Having set up the social network and see all the students sign up and create profile, I started activating the short reading and writing assignments (language profile and wiki) and was also quite content to explore other possibilities, like optional features that would make them visit the network more often.

By their second class last Thursday most of the students had completed their assignments. I did take a lot of trouble to contact them and encourage them by using network email and notifications. I also motivated them to try to improve their posts, which some of them did. So I guess this online communication, and having all the students in one place, able to see each others’ work as it is being published, was received quite well, as the turnout shows. The students received feedback in terms of credits published in Moodle, also through my comments on their Network profile walls, where their peers were also free to comment.

The second round of tasks was published the day before the class in the Network Forum. Each of the two tasks, which have to be submitted by next Thursday, was only started in the computer lab – so that I am sure they know what to do and where to continue once they have made the first step under supervision, Task 1 being a follow-up on someone else’s article in the course wiki and Task 2 starting a blog to report on the learning experience so far and the business topic covered, as well as adding a comment to another student’s blog. In the blog post both video and text are required.

Two most sensitive parts of the tasks to be done for next week are using the video widget integrated in the Network and ‘swapping’ the topics in wiki. My colleague (an ICT teacher) and I gave a video demonstration in class (not a hands-on one, though) and re-assigned the wiki topics. I find such organizational things need to be done face-to-face in class, if possible, to avoid conflicts and misunderstanding. The tutorial on recording and publishing videos was prepared by my colleague and is available to students.

So, there’s momentum and I hope we won’t lose it. I feel I am walking around with my little toolbox dotting my i’s and crossing the t’s. It is very demanding in terms of time. I am trying to make myself feel more like a part of the Network – they certainly do feel cozy already, creating events and groups, exchanging comments. I myself want to channel their good will and motivation by giving them prompts which are language- or learning-oriented, and not merely part of their general interests. So, apart from having them communicate in English about business topics, I am going to try to use the Network for their language learning awareness, as there is a lot of potential for that. One of the students formed a ‘Group of people who often find themselves thinking in English’. I responded by starting a forum discussion on ‘proficiency’. I wonder whether they will post any comments.

Channeling the way some of the students communicate, using Netspeak, is what I also have to deal with and hope to improve. Differences in their personalities and learning styles are also very visible in some cases. I’ll have to think about how to try to harness those differences.

This week I am looking forward to seeing more of their work: it may seem a lot to do, but I tried to plan everything carefully. and provide demos, I am only afraid they may leave it all for the very last day, which is when things often go wrong. Two students reported possible difficulties with Internet access, but otherwise this particular aspect should not be a problem.

My project implementation results will thus only be visible on Thursday – their deadline to submit. So far, they seem to have warmed up to it, one of the students even called it constructive. Not everyone will probably like and readily accept and participate in everything but seeing others doing it is a major boost, I think. In terms of affect and cognition.

Let me wrap my Week 7, as a lecturer, task designer, project coordinator and network moderator (in my Business English course) and a participant on this course, by referring to what Sandra wrote in one of our discussions this week – it is good to be reminded of all the possibilities we have as teachers. I cannot but agree with her on that – we try so hard to learn so many new things, but they will work best if we can fit it into the underlying structure of what we are doing, thus gradually improving our ways and alternating different solutions from our rich menus of options.

Reading Md. Mahamud Hasan's blog reminded me of another essential thing: that everything I have prepared, planned and learnt over these weeks would not have been possible without the people who accompany me, encourage me, teach me and guide me - all of you being among them.

I wish you all see more of all the little gears on your projects fit together in the week to come.

Best regards,

Andreja

The learner in me

Dear all,

So many of our thoughts and practical solutions about teaching has revolved around a very important question What ‘kind’ of learners are our students? To the issue of learning styles the need to adapt our teaching styles has been added. And finally, the question: What kind of learners are the teachers themselves? Mahamud Hasan quotes Terry O'Connor in ‘Using learning styles to adapt technology for higher education’ who commented that people rely on personally constructed filters to orient their relationships towards the world. As a result, we are very likely to teach the way we like to learn and expect our students to like things and methods we would like.

I myself, like Hassina, definitely learn best by reading / writing about it, that is, by visualizing and verbalizing and believe that input does not need processing but also outputting in our own way for something to be learnt. So learning by doing, whether it is ‘knowledge’ or ‘skill’ is very productive for me. I know that my students are visual/auditory types – lots of them – as they grew up watching English and listening to it. This week gave me a hint about why I do not seem to do a lot of listening tasks in class: I myself prefer texts, pictures, slides. So I will use this revelation as the basis for change and try to use more audio, whether pre-recorded or recorded in class. Also, the reflective / active learning style dichotomy offered me an answer to why I sometimes find it hard to respond to our discussions in the first half of the week – I start my reading and plan my task, watch my understanding of it grow and take shape before I write it down and post in it concrete terms. I will try out the proposed approach – take notes and summarize more often.

The fact that people are combinations of several learning styles actually helps, as chances are that by how we do something in class at least a part of a student’s individual disposition will be engaged. But awareness on the part of the teacher as well as learners certainly helps and may lead to fewer questions like: Why do we have to do it this way? Technology offers alternatives, in and out of class. One thing that George and my coursemates taught me in the discussion is that ‘technology’ in class is not only a computer. Cell phones, which I have not used so far but am eager to start using, and in close future, convertible PCs, add another dimension to fostering individual differences.

Another point of view we had to consider our students’ involvement from this week was designing assessment rubrics. Defining objectives, then dimensions, then descriptions, of course, which are then shown to students, seems a logical order of events. It is amazing that such an approach is totally ignored in so many educational systems, as Dilip and Hassina’s blogs seem to suggest. What the teacher expects students to do is not the teacher’s exclusive right to know. Also, by creating rubric we as teachers get an idea of what we expect from students. I have developed my rubric for assessing participation on a social network and along with it, for their text/video blog. I am afraid the descriptions are still too long, but am sure that presenting them to the students will be just as useful as task instructions they will get. Best of all, I saw how much I learnt from looking at my peers’ rubrics – I constructed my own rubric by using that knowledge just as much as the original tutorial.

By doing the second stage of my mini-project in class this week, I will try to build on what we started doing last week and expand the existing lane, as well as introduce another one. I think that on the social network there should be a combination of obligatory and optional contributions; activities that will make students ‘go back and forth’ and not just be involved in their own present task; it hope the communication will be even better and have tried very hard to post feedback to their posts. Most importantly, I want to use this network with a clear goal in my mind, but also by being attentive to the way they respond to it and create part of activities based on that. Finally, a teacher has to balance their own expectations against the students’ capabilities and willingness – and styles. (I wonder how making mini-videos and blogs will fit in this picture. Presentation of the task will be very important!)

What the teacher and the learner in me learnt this week from everyone on the course – our moderators, my coursemates, my colleagues at work (who I relied on a lot too this week) and my students (through the network) was very powerful. I can not wait to see how it will materialize this week. Then again, I guess that’s how all of us feel!

Best regards,

Andreja

In the pipeline

Dear All,

My Business English course starts tomorrow night. I have to admit that I am very excited about seeing my (new) students and telling them about the activities they will be involved in. I am confident that there is a sound balance between how I am going to start the course this time and how I would 'normally' do it, so the whole thing should not be too overwhelming.

Over the last few weeks, ever since Deborah and Sandra set us reflecting on spotting the room for improvement in our class, I have been going back to the previous years that my course had been run. The formulation 'this should be something new, something you have not been using so far' yet, evidently, something that can be set up in a couple of weeks and performed in only two of them forced me to think in very concrete terms. It is amazing how close deadlines can prevent us from getting carried away!

The combination of the existing resource (wiki) and a new one (social network, already has three members!) will hopefully prove an appealing, constructive and, most importantly, useful mix for the students. What needed figuring out was how to integrate the two. It took me some time to formulate the tasks that would be comprehensible to students – they are posted in the network Forum. I also wrote 8 questions students need to fill in at signup – their language learning profiles. The network, of course, needed setting up and customizing a little. After a crash course on social networking, I have a social network profile – what a wonderful experience. I have spotted another one on the Web already that I would like to join.

The course wiki took searching so that I would come up with topics that are searchable. I took care to prepare sample answers to questions and a sample article. Of course, this much handholding for the students (and myself, coming form my colleagues) may not be necessary in future, but right now I want to be sure they know what I would like them to do.

The feedback I have received so far from my colleague who has been helping me with implementing the network and my student assistant has been very positive, so that's what keeps me going. Besides, it is only now that I see how immensely useful the experience of being on our discussion forum and blog is – even more so considering this is the first time I have intensely participated in any such service. While expecting my students to do similar tasks, I have my own experience to rely on. I am a cat lover, yet have to subscribe to Mark Twain’s words, ‘If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.’ (May all the cat lovers among you forgive me, as it is a figure of speech anyway.)

Of course, the objective – emotions aside – is to provide the students with activities that would make them familiar with the course syllabus and with each other and do some reading, writing and speaking while doing so. I never thought you could do this in one go. So let's wait and see.

The preparations have also kept me from actively participating in other E-teacher assignments, so I'll commit myself to it as of tomorrow. I was thinking about learning / learner styles as I was cutting out some questions for my students tonight, thinking what difference it would make to have the questions scattered on the desk rather than listed in a neat predefined order. So my lesson outline is coming up!

I hope everyone else has started carrying out their plans successfully. I will keep in touch. We are in this together, so I am trying to imagine every one of us finding their way through the classes that took so much meditation, mediation and imagination as well as the hard skills to prepare. Owing to this, it has to be a week to remember, as some of this week's blog posts seem to suggest.

Best regards,

Andreja

Casting a new eye, making a difference?

Dear all,

how amazing it is to see little pieces start fitting together – if you are into 'little pieces' forming 'the big picture', like I am. This week I tried to search for ways of adding a sense of relevance to my English classes, as their role in providing an opportunity for them to learn a foreign language is hardly plausible, as they are surrounded by so many different Englishes outside the classroom as well. Of course, it is the classroom where things will be done systematically and therefore yield results, but adding the element of 'meaningfulness' combined with enjoyfulness, intellectual enterprise and a goal applicable to at least other subjects they learn or even a wider community – what else could we ask for as teachers? This week we have seen possible ways in which it can be done, even without assistance of ICT. Yet if we include the technology, then chances of getting more relevant input needed to do tasks and making output accessible are increased. So reaching out to your peers, other classes, even wider community (as some outlines of this week's WebQuests and PBL lessons demonstrated) becomes more possible. To make it work, everyone needs to be aware of the possible benefits it may bring.

Of course, there is a question of how to integrate that into the curriculum. Does your system acknowledge service learning? There is a website I came across a webpage that deals with such projects. Is it compatible with academic goals we set for out students? How do they fit in with the learning outcomes? I was convinced such projects would be reserved for some alternative extracurricular courses for enthusiasts. And guess what, I got a notification about a workshop to be held at one of the faculties in Zagreb (i.e. under the umbrella of the University) which is exactly about this kind of orientation – integrating teaching and learning with products applicable to our student or wider community!

This does not mean doing things 'on the side' of making a commitment to 'serve' and expecting our students to do so. This would be harmful for our professional autonomy as language teachers. The motivation to reach out should by no means arise only from our own ambition or our teaching style (complex as they are, I agree with Manana).

It is our students we have to put first. I believe it all starts by asking yourself 'How is what I am going to do with my students going to benefit my students, the students who will come after them, the students who have specific difficulties learning English, different groups outside this course, students in other areas of education, the general public, similar groups of students elsewhere. As Kazumi reminds us, one of the overarching questions for the teacher is ‘what do I want students to learn through the inquiry I present to them?’.

Focusing on one of the target groups over a period of time is essential, of course. For the time being, I have no idea about how this can be done without severe trade-offs, but I like to believe it is possible and hope it is not (only) a dream that will wear off that easily.


I wish us all a lot of luck with implementing our technology-supported changes next week. If things get tough I will remember Aleyda's tiger image.


Best regards,

Andreja

On a Quest

Dear treasure hunters,

This week's assignment and discussions did not only make me focus on the present state of my own teaching practice and the very near future – the following two weeks is when the implementation of our tech-based ideas is due – but also, at least for a second, made me think of the treasure hunts of the past. Pen-and-paper ones, of course, with a question sheet in one hand, getting to know my own town, and later on, the capital. Later, there would be poster exhibitions in the language school lobby where I used to work – I remember the 'Wordplay' expo provided by the British Council. Our native speaker colleague compiled a quiz even some of us teachers found hard to complete by searching the posters, as some of the questions required drawing linguistic or logical conclusions from several posters. Then there were treasure hunts for my teenage students on a summer course in Oxford – some questions related to Egyptian cat statues in the Ashmolean Museum, others to prices of bus fare for senior citizens. One thing they all have in common is: they all took place before the Internet era and, as far as I remember, there was an element of fun and discovery that the participants enjoyed.

How do the WebQuests of the present differ from their predecessors? Until this week I associated web-based treasure hunts with virtual tours around galleries, colleges, sights. So imagine the surprise when I encountered all the amazing projects submitted by fellow teachers in different languages and a dozen different subject areas at Zunal. There are so many different ways in which the knowledge in each of them is first collected and then processed into something inherently new and, ideally, applicable to real world.

Are our students ready for such tasks? Are the teachers ready too – not only to create their own WebQuest but also conduct them, even the ready-made ones? This is the question I have been considering – it probably takes getting used to. I sent a link to the Kabuki lesson to one my students who is an avid fan of Japan and he loved it, said he would do all the steps. Like all the new activities (web-based quests will be relatively novel in my educational environment), it is good to prepare students for this new way of thinking and relating facts and ideas.

What I occasionally do with my ICT students to make them think 'outside of the box' is make them write answers to 'Find the connection between ...' questions. Sometimes they assume they are trickster questions but when they give it a try, they come up with amazing (and diverse) answers. The questions include: 'What is the connection between climbing Mt Fuji and a job interview?' or 'Find the connection between Africa and open source'. (If you want to know what my original answers are, I would be delighted to tell you). I was inspired for this exercise by M.J.Gelb's book How to think like Leonardo da Vinci.

There is a ludic element to learning that we should not neglect and that does not disappear with technology. On the contrary. That, along with excitement and discovery can result in motivation mobilizing all the knowledge that would otherwise remain compartmentalized. I am sure that the wonderful ideas my colleagues have so far shared for their much-more-than-language-learning projects and WebQuests would / will be embraced by students. I will try to transfer the element of curiosity, collaboration and transformation of knowledge into my technology-enhanced project too, although it does not specifically include a WebQuest.

By the way, I see myself at the beginning of each week on the course as starting a new quest – we each try to find our own way through readings that direct us, the myriad of links and websites, draw conclusions and relate to each other, come up with our findings and present them – don't you feel it is a kind of a WebQuest as well?

Thank you for accompanying me on our road to discovery.

Warm regards from snowy Croatia * * *,

Andreja

The ABC of CMC

Dear all,

There was so much to learn this week – the discussions got really intense. On the one hand, new skills as a follow-up to last week’s skills, a lot of which were covered in multi-skills webpages we explored. On the other hand, the project task and planning getting closer to its implementation. Things on the course are gaining momentum as we are nearing the half of the course, which is also seen in the enthusiasm (Leslie used the term too) and the number of posts, lots of replies, links and, most importantly, feedbacks shared. It was revealing to see how Leslie and Sandra would handle this creative outbursts – an essential part of the e-moderator’s role that I also find interesting to observe. When the discussion starts going into too many separate yet challenging directions, why not start a new discussion, the way it was done here? Also, handling the length and the format are two important aspects that are constantly on my mind when I try to join a discussion. Apart from our moderators, there were a few other colleagues who would constructively point out these two features. It is wonderful to see how much l'istening' to each other is actually taking place on this forum.

I think that one of the great things about this course is how its creators expose us to such a variety of different tasks, with a number of tasks that are repeated from one week to another, and that we respond to differently as we learn new things. Like the project task, Part 2. It was very interesting to go back to my Week 2 description and resume the whole discussion, identifying problems this time. Also, having Leslie on the course made a remarkable impact, and I was surprised, with my scarce experience of online communication, to feel the kind of very particular energy that all the participants – our dear moderators and guest moderators included – have brought in along with their expertise. I regret not being able to join in more into discussions moderated by Leslie as well. Regarding lesson plans, there was an interesting feeling which recurred in a few posts – it turned up to be more demanding that it seemed. Making you feel like you have only begun to teach, as Marcia says in her blog. I fear mine is too long, but it was not possible for me to find anythuing redundant it it, if I wanted to make sure it would be understood.

Unfortunately (or shall I say – fortunately, because this is a safe learning environment, and over the weeks it has started to become my comfort zone), this week I learnt a few things about CMC the hard way. Having no previous experience using forums or other asynchronous means of computer-mediated communication, I have not been using the potential of our discussions in an optimum way. Seeing other colleagues, like Aleyda, who, like me, have been hung up with things outside the course, helps you feel less bad about not doing your best Iwhile wishing to. The rainbow image is very appropriate too, as one should always hope for improvements. And they sometimes come with an improved awareness.

After this week, I am more aware of how things could work better for me. Taking too much time to come up with one’s own post, too much time for my ideas on a topic to grow before they are posted simply does not make sense. While I am waiting for my vision of each week’s topic to emerge (it always takes a couple of days), I am missing out on the discussion that was engendered on Day 1. Then it gets very hard to join in, knowing you have already missed so much. Thinking ‘on the side’ is not useful for anyone on the course if it is not visible, i.e. posted, and reading what your peers have to say may be just as important as what you say. So a more dynamic approach is needed – a kind of a strategy.

I am going to employ it this week - post earlier and more often. I hope it works – and will appreciate to see I have moved on in that respect.

So, 'I am still here', to quote Aleyda, willing to improve my CMC skills.

Warmest regards,

Andreja