WEEK 5.0: More Teacher 2.0 Add-ons ...

Dear blog anh fellow bloggers,

The up-grade into teacher 2.0 is still going on. This week There were two main add-ons. The first one was creating a rubric on www.rubistar.4teachers.org .In fact, as I’ve already mentioned in my post on Nicenet, I’ve never ever created a rubric before. Honestly, I found the task very difficult in the beginning. So, I had to read many examples to get the inspiration before I wrote mine. All the rubrics seemed to be written with an unbelievable attention to details. I said to myself ‘how come these teachers write their rubrics with such precision and prediction to possible learning outcomes and how to be assessed ?!!’ I thought ‘ those teachers can’t be normal ! They must be super teachers endowed with extra adrenalin and unrivalled stamina !!’ Being of a stubborn character and refusing defeat, I started ‘wordprocessing’ my rubric and trying to condense as much as possible the texts to fit in the different boxes of the rubric. That was really exhausting and made me doubt the utility of this tool. That would be complete insanity to write a detailed rubric for each teaching / learning action happening in the classroom ! It’s just time consuming and and at the end the teacher would perhaps be left no energy to teach ! I was mistaken and the reason was I hadn’t paid attention to the pull-down menu on the left and its capability to generate pre-written texts that fit different levels of learners’ performances. My discovery of that option came very late. I spent a whole afternoon writing my rubric the ‘old-fashioned’ way, that is using Word. But, I’m very happy I made it at last with rubistar and produced my ruby rubric which you can have a look at by clicking on the following link : http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=ShowRubric&rubric_id=1927074&

The second add-on wasn’t as painful as the ‘ruderic’ ! We were assigned the task of creating a webquest. But, before embarking on creating our webquest, we had some articles to read, videos to watch and sites to visit to help us be ready for the task. In fact, all our ‘Delicious’ course facilitator Dr Deborah’s recommended readings proved very helpful and made our task much easier. Personally, the word ‘webquest’ was not new to me. But its significance, yes. This week I learnt how to create a webquest on www.zunal.com. It was an easy thing to do. My webquest was made to help my students review and further practise their English tenses outside the classroom and in their own pace. I think one of the great advantages of this tool is that it is likely to enhance learners’ autonomy. The sites I recommended for my students to visit offer interactive exercises and immediate feedback . They don’t need to be assessed by their teacher. After they submit their answers they can see their score and know where they stand. I also had some fun experimenting with Zunal. I managed to insert photos of mine and cliparts I downloaded from the Web. The following is the link to my baby wequest :

http://www.zunal.com/webquest.php?w=66373

Nevertheless, I think webquests would work much better with content disciplines like social studies, sciences or arts. The range of projects that could be done using webquests with EFL students is very limited , because they most of the time don’t have a good command of the language. This would be much felt with beginning students. Anyway, the virtues of PBL and Webquests are self-evident and should be adopted since primary schools so that students would consider them as a natural way to learn.

We were also asked to describe a technology-related change that will help us with the issues we discussed the previous week. Below is what I wrote .

‘I already noted in a previous post that technology is not a magic wand. But I'm quite sure it does have many benefits on both the quality of learning and teaching. As has already been mentioned, my school is not technologically blessed yet and both my students' computeracy and access to the Net are very limited. The technology-related change that I intend to implement this year is an ambitious dream, but within the possible. My plan is to introduce digital interactivity into the classroom. How ? With my personal laptop, a Wii remote and a data show, I intend to buy very soon, I will turn the whitewashed wall opposite students into an interactive 'smarter' board. Sounds incredible, but TRUE. I won't go into details, but, I invite you, instead, to visit the following youtube link to discover more by yourselves.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ

I know these are extra expenses and I won't be reimbursed ;-), but, deep inside, I believe the effort put in the tech change is worthwhile and will be much appreciated by my students. To make the classroom more interactive at a low cost, I'm also thinking of using mouse mischief instead of costly clickers. The following youtube link will show more how this is possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrsCatpI62A

As concerns the unwiredness of my school, I don't think it's a big issue. All I can do is get myself a 3G Wireless modem and the class will be connected to the net. Then, I could introduce my students to sites where they could practise their English more interactively while at home or in a cybercafe. I will also try to introduce them to some Web 2.0 tools that would help them interact with each other and their peers worldwide while improving their English.’

Regards,

Arbi

Polonius: What do you read Sir? - Hamlet: Wordle, Wordle, Wordle

Dear Fellow coursemates,

Web 2.0 has revolutionized the Internet . It's constantly offering new tools and applications that are meant to make our surfing as comfortable as possible. They also try to meet our ever changing needs and caprices. One of these tools is Wordle. It is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that one provides. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. These clouds could be tweaked with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle become yours to use in whatever way you like . You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with friends. To me, 'Wordle' would be a good way to present the key points of a lesson. Being visual learners, students would very likely find it easy to remember the 'Wordled' summary of a lesson. Another possible use of this tool is asking students to read a passage or a story and summarize it in a 'Wordle' manner. For language teachers, I think it could be used to recycle previously taught vocabulary and help students remember irregular verbs. There are, of course, other possible uses that teachers could think of depending on their particular teaching situations. Wordle is a fun tool and that's what I like most about it. Well, after I submited all my assignments of Week4.0, I thought to myself why not Wordle all my coursemates names and see how it looks... Hope you like the word cloud below

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2236143/Webskills_coursemates_names

Regards

Arbi

WEEK 4.0: UNDELICIOUS...

Dear fellow bloggers,

Week 4.0 was much tougher than the previous ones. Writing a tec-enhanced plan was particularly the toughest and most challenging of them all. Apart from our admirably diligent colleague Camelia, most coursemates submitted their assignments a bit late than usual. Personally, I found creating a technology-enhanced lesson plan to be the hardest part of this week assignments. It wasn't delicious at all! We were supposed to read about lesson planning and the different components that should be considered when devising our own. Dr Deborah, also, provided us with a template to facilitate this task. But even with that template, the gestation of the tech-enhanced lesson plan was very painful for, I dare say, most of us. In fact, my friends' lesson plans were very inspiring and helpful. I learnt a lot from them. And this is what I like most about this online course; LEARNING FOM EACH OTHER. However, I have certain reservations concerning the detailed fashion with which this type of lesson plans is written. As I said in an earlier post on our Nicenet discussions, a lesson plan like this one would be very exhausting and time consuming for teachers who teach different levels and syllabi. Perhaps, after they finish devising the lesson plan, teachers will have no more energy to teach ;-) Nevrtheless, I think textbook writers and designers should adopt this detailed method of writing lesson plans so as to make it easy for teachers to deliver their lessons.

This week major discussion centered around the impact of technology on improving reading and writing skills. We were assigned some obligatory and additional articles to read. One of them wasUsing the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction (2000) written by Jarek Krajka. Although the article was written before the advent of Web.2.0, the quality of its tips and the ways internet should be used for teaching purposes are far from being obsolete. The writer started with a summary of previous research conducted in the area. He then moved to list the merits of online instruction. Quite paradoxically, recency, a major characteristic of online lessons was missing in his article! Other positive points of online instructions are the fact that students get more engaged and motivated while using recent and authentic material which is not the case in the traditional mode of lesson delivery. Besides other advantages, students' cultural awreness is also enhanced through possible international collaborative projects. Yet, a minimum of Internet computeracy, Jarek pointed out, is required from both teachers and students. Otherwise, going online would be absurd and doomed to failure. I also read

Chao-chih Liao's interesting article "E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners' Reading and Writing Abilities: Taiwan Experience'. Needless to tell you about the content of article. Its title is self-explanatory.

The next task was to find two or more webpages that would work for us and write an ABCD objective that might go with it. Below is my Nicenet post in its entirety.

'I have been browsing through the treasure trove of sites since Monday and I’m really amazed at the overwhelming bounty of ELT sites the internet hosts. I was particularly hooked by the following URL http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html. It is a sort of crossroads where more than 200 sites meet to offer their services to both EFL/ESL students and teachers. Choosing a web page was not an easy task at all ! Below are the links to two the web pages I was attracted to and I’d like to share with you.

I. http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/0903/090323-students.html

What I liked about this web page activity is that it smoothly integrates the four

skills in a well-thought out lesson plan . My students ( teenagers whose ages are between 15 and 20 ) will absolutey find the reading topic appealing. School fights and violence are two issues that stimulate students to read and provoke them to express their opinions both in spoken and written forms. However, considering my particular teaching context and the type of learners I have, adapting and modifying the lesson plan would be a wise decision to make on my part. 5O minutes won’t be enough to cover all the detailed stages of the lesson. So, I would, for instance, content myself with just two warm-up activities and move straight to the listening and reading tasks. I also think the TRUE/FALSE statements are misplaced in the Before Reading/Listening stage. Since they test students’ reading/listening comprehension, they should be given during the While Reading /Listening stage. Reducing the number of tasks is, again, an inevitability to deliver the lesson in the actual teaching time. I would rather devote the post reading stage to inviting the students to discuss the issue of violence at schools and then ask them to write a paragrah about the reasons why students fight.

My ABCD objectives fo this this web page go like this :

- Students ( A ) will listen and read a passage on school fights ( condition) and answer the questions related to vocabularylistening as well as reading tasks (B) with reasonable accuracy (80%) ( D ).

- After orally discussing the theme school violence ( C ) Students (A) will write a paragragh about reasons behind school fights ( B ) with reasonable coherence and cohesion (70% ) (D).

II. http://www.dfilm.com/live/moviemaker.html

The above website is absolutely fun and offers a great opportunity to test your movie-making skills. It’s user-friendly and after just a few clicks one can write a dialogue for a short animated movie that could later be emailed to friends, classmates, teachers and probably seen by netizens wordwide. This is a chance to make it in the Hollywood movie industry ! So, don’t miss it !;-) The steps are easy to follow : you choose 1) background 2) sky 3) plot (action) 4) characters 5) type dialogue and 6) music. You can also add another scene if you want to. All you need is repeat steps 1-6.When done, just click "Finish Movie." Finally, put in a title, director's name (that's you!) , title design and watch your movie. However, there’s one little weakness about the site. Ther’s music bacground, but the characters can’t speak. The movie is mute !!

I fancy myself teaching writing through this site. First, I will introduce my students to the site and show them the different steps they should follow to create a short movie. I believe students will like to practise writing this way because it’s full of fun, interactive and brings the visual element to the act of writing. At the end each pair of students will act out their dialogs.

A possible ABCD ojectives lesson plan would be something like this :

Students ( A)will be shown how to to use the site features(C) to write a short dialogue where two people greet and introduce each other( B ) with reasonable accuracy using the common greeting and introductions expressions (80%) ( D ).'

And before you leave I invite you to play this video clip to have some well deserved fun after this exhausting but enjoyable learning week.

Yours

Arbi

WEEK 3.0 OR A MOST WELCOME TEACHER 2.0 UPGRADE....

Dear blog and bloggers,

Week 3.O has been exceptionally hectic compared to the two previous versions. We were assigned some very interesting articles to read and discuss. The theme was how technology could help teachers improve their students’ aural/oral skills. The articles provided insights into the various uses of technology to enhance both teaching and learning. The first one was particularly interseting in that Lindsay Miller invited us to reconsider the benefits radio and TV could bring in to our language classes. She stressed more the fact that this kind of technology is capable of providing teachers with real and authentic materials they can use to develop students’ listening skills. Such materials would not only ‘create good listeners’, but ‘offer’ learners ’a richer learning experience’ as well. Pronunciation was the major concern of the second artice written by Maria Grazia Busà. She mainly talked about the technology advacements both is its soft and hardware forms and how helpful they proved in improving learners’ pronunciation. The third article by Julia Gong drew our attention to the considerable impact of CALL on developping students’ speaking skills. She, of course, equally mentioned some disadvantages of the employment of CALL, but they were insignificant compared to its countless virtues. All in all, the articles were a good and illuminating read for me and anyone interested in adding an ICT flavour to their teaching practices.

Exploring a set of recommended skill-building sites was an enjoyable assignment to do this week. The exploration led me to some unexpected great discoveries in the kingdom of ELT in in the immense galaxy of the web. From my coursemates’ insightful posts I can say there was a unanimous agreement on the exceptional quality of Larry Ferlazzo’s blog and websites. An extremely invaluable jewel for ELT/ESL practitioners is the collection of Web 2.0 tools and websites he selflessly offers Internet users. What is more, he provides a concise summary what each site or tool is about. Bookmarking as well as recommending the man’s website was but a natural and immediate reflex from, perhaps, all coursemates. There were also other equally interesting sites on the menu, but Larry’s was an unrivalled star ! The ensuing discussions and reactions posted by my colleagues were an obvious indicator that we’ve already bought a one-way ticket to ICT land ! No return ! In fact, I learnt a great deal from all coursemates’ posts.

Social bookmarking was part of this week assignment. We were assigned the task of creating an account in de.li.ci.ous. Delicious was ,in no way, a misnomer. The task was delicious through and through. Now, I no longer fear the loss of my bookmarks in case of computer crashes. Also, accessing my bookmarks is no more PC-bound. Thanks to ‘delicious’, I’m capable of sharing and reaching my favorite sites and those bookmarked by my network despite being away from home and my laptop.

Folks, I’m learning a lot rom you and I do feel I’m being upgraded into a ‘Teacher 2.0’. What about you?

Yours.

Arbi

Below are links to the articles and sites mentioned in my post.

Teaching aural/oral skills - read at least two of the three articles here

Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials (Word .doc file)
http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc

New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation (right-click on the link to download it)
http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/2850/1/bus%C3%A0.pdf

The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills (right-click on the link to download it)
www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/research/resources/student_res/postscriptfiles/vol3/vol3_1_gong1.pdf

Speaking lesson plans (teacher resource)

Speaking lesson plans at One Stop English

Conversation lesson plans at esl.about.com

Communicative lesson plans at ESL-galaxy.com

Websites to explore

Listening (student resource)

Randall's Cyber Listening Lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/
This is one of the few websites that includes pre-, during, and post- activities. It's organized by topic and level.

Listening RealEnglish video - advanced; multiple dialects
http://www.real-english.com/reo/1/unit1.html

Pronunciation

Pronunciation links (student and teacher resources)
http://www.uoregon.edu/~dhealey/138/pronlinks.html

Pronunciation Tips from the BBC - exercises, videos, quizzes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/

Speaking

Best Sites to Practice Speaking English (Larry Ferlazzo) - high use of tech
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/the-best-sites-to-practice-speaking-english/

Additional Resources:

· English, Baby! - audio, video, and chat for English language learners
http://www.englishbaby.com

· NPR podcasts - advanced; many different topics, and most have transcripts
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php

· Pronunciation Thought groups (video)
http://nadeen-grammar.blogspot.com/2009/04/thought-groups-part-1.html

· The Pedagogy-Technology Interface in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (academic article)
http://lands.let.kun.nl/literature/neri.2002.3.pdf

WEEK TWO : Learning is not always an easy game ...

Dear fellow bloggers,

So happy to be back among you again.

Learning has always been a painful joy helping us move forward. What I mean by the oxymoron part of this statement is that as learners we usually experience certain difficulties and challenges during the process of the act of learning . Pleasure and and sometimes even euphoria begin once the end product is successful. That is, when we feel and notice that positive behavioral change in us, we just forget about pain. It becomes history. Nevertheless, I ‘m very happy about this online learning experience as it is allowing us to put ourselves in our students’shoes and eventually make us reconsider some of our teaching practices. And more importantly perhaps, adapt our teaching to our students’ different styles. After all, teaching is at the service of learning, isn’t it ?

Just like my fellow coursemates, I did have my share of challenges during the somewhat hectic episode two of the webskills course. But I must say I learnt a lot from both the assignments as well as my web-classmates interesting and inspiring posts on Nicenet and their blogs. The first assingment we had to do was describing a class we teach that would benefit from a technology-inspired change. I took an immense pleasure reading those rich and well-written descriptions. In fact, they gave me an ample idea about the different conditions under which teaching and learning interact in various classrooms /arenas of the globe. I would say the class descriptions relatively reflect the digital divide that exists between the Northern and Southern parts of the world. So, differnces are inevitable, but luckily, we do share something in common. Care about learners and enthusiasm to bring the best to our teaching practices are perhaps what unite us most wherever we are.

Later, I had to edit pages of our wiki. This was totally new to me. I was a bit familiar with just the zooming and unzooming functionalities of Google Earth. Nothing more, nothing less. But thanks to Deborah I managed to localize my home on the World Map and put a blue pin on it. The view is not as clear as it is of some other coursemates’ nice homes, but it’s OK. I had some fun doing the task, anyway.

Writing learning objectives in the ABCD method was another task I had to accomplish this week. Its seeming simplicity turned out to be very misleading. It was very demanding and required maximum of focus and accuracy. As Stephen rightly said in his blogpost, writing learning objectives is similar to a guiding « roadmap » whithout which teachers and learners would likely easily get lost. The suggested reading material for this task was very helpful. And while I was surfing on the net, I came across another method of writing objectives. It looks more detailed than the ABCD one. It is ‘acronymized ‘ the ASSURE model. You can check the link below to know more about it:

http://www2.unca.edu/education/edtech/techcourse/assure.htm

There is a common French proverb that goes like this : ‘Qui cherche, trouve.’, ’Seek and ye shall find’. Well, reading Deborah’s article on web searching tips has made me doubt the validity of the proverb when it comes to finding one’s way with search engines. Not any randomly typed query would get us the best hits we need.There’s more to it than simply that. There are tips and techniques, Deborah kindly shared with us, that one needs to gradually famaliarize himself/herself with to make a query more efficient and the hits more satisfactory. Another equally important thing I learnt from this assignment was about search engines. There are specialized and general-purpose ones and it takes just a little of patience and curiosity to explore the hidden treasures they have. So Google, despite being a powerful search engine, is not necessarily synonymous with web searching. ‘Noodletools’ website will certainly come in handy when Almighty Google fails to meet our searching needs.

Regards

Arbi