Window

Dear All,

There's a window, actually, a pull-down menu at the top of the page in Moodle which lets someone who has administrator's rights or a teacher see the content of the page as 'a student', 'a teacher or 'a non-editing teacher'. Each of the roles allows a different depth of the view of the page content and a different degree of intervention with the page content.

This is very much how I feel upon leaving this course. It has given me an opportunity to switch from my usual role to that of a learner and see how it feels to be 'in class' again, also through observing other teachers teach and learn next to me. I have often been told that language teachers should occasionally take up learning a new language to become more aware of the challenges their students have to face as well as to get the first-hand experience of the phenomena of second / third etc. language acquisition. This course was very much in that vein: a consolidation of some of the focal points of SLA accompanied by the joy and pain of learning to do things I had not used before or thought of before in concordance: aspects of technology and methodology.

I have painstakingly tried to keep a record of those moments all in my blogs. Owing to their wonderful variety, combining the data from our weekly posts a three dimensional image of each week and many learning experiences emerges. Perhaps even more than that: at times this output is so rich that quite a few virtual reality moments could be constructed on the basis of it. All our interpretations and reflections, dialogues skilfully scaffolded by our moderators, sometimes also by some of our colleagues, combined with our memories of the course, the fears and sighs of relief, the I-made-it! pride, the knowledge and skills that have been augmented so much that we are almost afraid of losing them, forgetting that knowledge (as well as love) is one of the few things 'they can't take away from you'. Of course, it can dissolve if not taken care of, therefore we have to persist and keep learning. There is so much around the corner already, we already ahve glimpses of those new developments: iPhones and iPads in schools, for instance.

I was wondering what my piece of advice may be upon completion of the course: I was looking for a piece of advice to give to myself in the first place. I know there is a spring cleaning ahead of me: cleaning my room, tidying up my desktop (both virtual and real), organizing my papers, going back to my exams and many other things that I somehow kept at bay having committed myself to this course. After this course, there will be 'before' and 'after', as this immersion has been so powerful. Yet I imagine that, although the road ahead of us is just as full as surprises and bumps as it used to be, I feel that I am better at seeing ahead and listening to what is going on and that my ideas can form a more solid structure now, rather than branch out in too many different directions.

My word of advice would therefore be to try to keep a kind of record of what we do. How can we do that? In any way possible. Doing research along with teaching is awfully difficult, but keeping a diary of changes, doing class surveys (even as part of the teaching, through short self-assessment) and accumulating results helps us see where we used to be and how we got where we are now. It may be a form of our permanent practice. Even venture out and try out something new, comparing the expectations against the outcome. Keep track of changes that we invest so much into anyway it would be a pity not to let others know if something really interesting happens. It is easier said than done, but I am at least going to try to develop a habit of it.

Another word of advice to myself, which is just as hard to do sometimes: appreciate what you do and the progress you are making, even when things do not work out as well as you want them to. Set achievable goals. Go up one step at a time, following levels of complexity and refinement. Ask for assistance and cooperation – there may be more opportunity for that out there that we sometimes believe. Know that there will be ups and downs. Focus on the ups, learn from the downs. That is already too much advice for one day, I guess.

As these are our last posts on this course this time, many of us have expressed their feelings by means of delicate pieces of poetry and wisdom. I myself could describe my feeling as a passenger changing trains at the Grand Central station (I imagine it to be an architectural masterpiece). I know this is an outstanding moment of my life I will remember for a long time but I am somehow reluctant to leave my by-now comfortable compartment. I know that this is just a beginning and that learning to dance to the tune of tomorrow’s challenges that have nested inside me will continue. I hope we may accompany each other some time.

I will finish by expressing gratitude to all of you, my dear coursemates amd teachers. I could paraphrase Jack Nicholson as the unforgettable Melvin Udall in as Good As It Gets who, in one of the crucial scenes of the film, pays a compliment to Carol (Hellen Hunt) by telling her that she 'makes him want to be a better man.' Love or not, this is one of the true gifts of this course: it certainly made me want to be a better teacher.

What more can I say but: Thank you all.

Lots of love,

Andreja

P.S. My email contact used through Nicenet is likely to remain the same in future. Let's keep in touch.

Weaving

Dear All,

My 'Send to a Friend' word for this week is: integration. Making as many pieces as possible fit together. Seeing team members collaborate. Making the tasks and the content work go hand in hand. Making next week lessons follow-up on what we did last week. Seeing what we expect and what students deliver somehow compatible. Making a language teacher and, for that matter, any teacher, embrace what technology has to offer, inasmuch as the resources allow it. Seeing students taking the leap guided by the teacher. Seeing the teacher taking the leap with the students. Seeing the teacher scaffolded by fellow teachers.

These are the colourful yarns I have found in my box this week. Not all of them can be included in the fabric we as teachers have to weave. Not every one of them actually fits the pattern of our everyday classrooms, staffrooms, schedules, our students' schedules, educational policies and reforms, syllabi, and the ever-changing tide of technological and methodological developments. Some of these yarns can only be used as an ideal to aspire to in our professional practice. Others will lose their beauty and even wear off when fitted in that fabric. Some of them are only there to add the flair and sheen to the fabric and are to be used sparingly. Some are essential, so without them the fabric would fall apart. There are also a couple of loose ends at the end of each day – the reminder that our mission is not accomplished.

I have looked at the repertoire of human occupations this week to look for a new one that being a teacher involves and found that of a weaver to fit into my disposition. Writing a report of what I have been doing in my class was a challenge even though I had been taking notes from the very start. One of the reasons is that I knew I would have to make it as clear as possible to the reader – my peer reviewer, our moderators and, ultimately, my coursemates. Another reason is that, little by little, an image of the last month in my classroom started to emerge, the image that I and my students created, but had to write down to actually see it. Another experience which contributed to seeing my own class project and project report more clearly was reading my peer reviewer Dilip's report and taking a glance at those published early in our Wiki. On my way from the draft to the final report I felt I actually modified it quite a lot. Writing the report was a strenous task, as I tried to consider the reality of the project, precious recommendations from my peer reviewer, the rubric, the template, while also imagining the reader and listening to my inner voice. Integrating all of them, trying not to leave too many loose ends. I am very curious to see whether the image of my class project can be reconstructed effectively by means of the report I wrote.

Another opportunity for us to play at the weaving loom was using an online tool to generate an exercise or use one of the suggested services to create a class website. Among this week's resources I was attracted to the website that integrate a variety of really different tools: SMILE was surprised that the tools offered there are not limited to classic authoring tools tasks such as Multiple-choice, True/False, Drag/Drop, Sentence Mix, Paragraph Mix, Cloze, Multiple-Select (which are available in My Activities section), but also include a surprising array of Rich Internet Applications, about a dozen of them. They could be classified as Web 2.0 tools, as they enable the creation of tasks that are open-ended, and involve active participation of both creators and users /students. Moreover, it is not just an authoring website, but an initiative. A historic overview of task types development over the last 15 years is available here!

I was so enthusiastic about SMILE that I initially set out to create a mash-up containing a video, a graphic, record a couple of questions for students about the video to answer asynchronously and add a matching exercise and a cloze. I wanted to integrate all of them onto one page. Unfortunately, I could not finish my first Drag/Drop matching exercise, as it would not work properly. As I did not want to give up on the matching exercise, I tried Hot Potatoes, where I managed to create one, along with a sequencing exercise. I have learnt a lot form the SMILE website for the time being and will try to do the mash up on another occasion shortly.

So the image that my memory makes of this week is a very positive one. It contained a very significant moment – submitting our project, and another 'first' in my professional biography: my first online exercise in an authoring tool. More importantly, I managed to integrate the exercise into a particular lesson on the great Weaver of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

It is amazing how much weaving and technology actually have in common. The Jacquard loom, the first device used to make the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns easier about 200 years ago, was actually one of the first machines to use punched cards. The rest of the textile industry development is history of course. Yet to think of Mayan textiles in Guatemala still made without any computer technology by weavers each and every one of them is an artist – what does it teach us? It shows us the importance of the human creativity, vision and – inevitably, hard work – coming first and technology, with all its wonders, coming second. I see our authoring tools this week in this light as well: our tasks are the artefacts coming out from our workshops, for each of which a 'mechanical' tool, rather than a pre-programmed solution, was used.

I wish us all a wonderful week ahead of us!

Best regards,

Andreja

Acknowledgements:

• The picture in this week's blog was found on a website of a US fabric artist. It is actually a quilt, so consider it a variation on the texture theme.
• I picked up the story of life (and why not teaching?) as fabric weaving from a recent book by a person I admire, Professor Mirjana Krizmanić from Croatia, who happens to be a psychologist and a great teacher.

You can lead a horse to the water …

Dear All,

'You can lead a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink'. What light does this old saying shed upon this week’s discussion on learner autonomy? It is a meaning-rich light for sure, as for me it sums up some of the crucial points of the teacher’s role in motivating the learners. In that interplay the teacher provides the learners with the indispensable means for coping in the language learning adventure, if no longer with all the building block themselves. Students’ willingness and capacity to take control over their own learning may arise as an added value. It is great that I found these very words - motivation and their willingness to take responsibility of their own learning – voiced in Nina’s blog as well.

This week I have been reminded that, as teachers, we cannot expect students to act neither unanimously nor reciprocally to our prompts, tasks and expectations – because each student is different, and students, taken collectively, are different than we are. Their motivation differs too – some like learning the language for the fun or even the beauty of it. Some do it because they know it is an asset they can’t do without. Some, of course, do it because they simply have to. I assume that, as professionals, we have to respect these differences and try to direct the learners by trying to engage different learners in different ways.

In his article Engaging students as learners Jeremy Harmer refers to one of the features of an engaged and autonomous learner as that eager to ‘take over agency’ and, consequently, ‘responsibility for one’s own actions’. Autonomy is primarily discussed in the relationship of the student to himself/herself, or to the teaching material, or the teacher, for that matter.

Yet, learning is a process that heavily relies on the interaction with the environment, and in ideal circumstances, this joint effort, massive input and output, feedback and scaffolding, implies the learning community. Therefore it can be compared to ‘an orchestra’ (another term Harmer uses) in which everyone is a ‘player’. Still, there are students who refuse to take agency and become players, preferring the role of listeners. Interestingly enough, Harmer suggests that such students are necessarily no poorer for that.

Although my reflections so far seem to be more illustrative of engaging learners than encouraging their autonomy, the two processes are actually intertwined. Over the last few weeks all of us on this course have agreed that one of the benefits of technology is that we no longer need to be the sole source of linguistic or cultural information for our learners. On the contrary. What we can and should do is to direct, recommend, and help student aggregate and critically approach what they come across. Besides, technology enables students to be involved in learning even when the teacher is not there. So it is access and exposure that are vastly augmented owing to ICT. The sense of student’s individual ‘voice’ is further facilitated by the Internet’s democratic nature.

Yet where does this abundance often leave us? Sometimes students will take shortcuts on their road to autonomy – rather than taking trouble to perform their own searches, to take one example, they will happily embrace the most obvious search results. The ease of use is the king. Also, if not reminded that ‘learning is discovering things we already know’, students may feel they have learnt enough and stop being curious to explore further, having reached a kind of a plateau.

Our role as teachers is by no means diminished by no longer being a sole linguistic authority. There are many other, just as complex roles, we need to take on - equipping the students with strategies, be it cognitive or metacognitive. Also, the fact that human communication is being increasingly exercised through technology, makes the socio-affective strategies no less important – they are very much needed by our homo zappiens students to both cope and strive in the classes of the future. Personally, I find it extremely daunting, as a lot of our assumptions we gained during our professional growth need to be redefined. Also, there are some novel issues, like the large-scale introduction of iPads, for instance, mentioned by our moderator Jeff Magoto this week, which are bound to change the learning landscape ever further. The idea of a teacher as the students’ companion on this ever more demanding road to learning seems plausible to me.

There is more information around and more hunger for it than ever. Hoping that the thirst for knowledge will not cease either, I would like to conclude by saying that the hardest thing for us as teachers to do is probably to tell at which point our ‘leading to the water ends’ and our students’ ‘drinking the water’ starts.

I am giving final touches to the draft of my report as well. Like Zlatka said, it seemed easier to do than it turned out to be – the hard part being focusing on the important bits and making them understandable for the reader. Having the opportunity to exchange feedback on my own work with one of my colleagues here certainly helps me understand my students more.
Yet it is an inevitable part of our learning experience.

Best regards,

Andreja