Week 10: Analyzing the Past, Looking Into the Future

Truly great ten weeks. Learning to learn and learning to teach. Every week brought something peculiar and helped me discover new methods and techniques for future progress in the teaching field. Special time with special people. A little sorry that it’s all over…

A lot of topics have been discussed and quite a number of posts published (more than thirty pages of MS Word drafts before posting online!). Still more to reflect upon and ‘digest’… It all will surely take some time. To sum up, my UO Webskills Course discoveries look like this:

Week 1. Nicenet.com (!!).

Week 2. Noodletools.com. ABCD Model for Behavioral Objectives. Digital Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Week 3. Delicious.com.

Week 4. A technology-enhanced lesson planning. 

Week 5. PBL and WebQuests. Rubrics and Alternative Assessment (!!).

Week 6. Interactive Power Point.

Week 7. Learner Autonomy.

Week 8. Online course sites.

Week 9. Learning styles (!!).

Week 10. Tiers of technology integration.

This is a course to be recommended without any hesitation.

It filled me with great ideas and practical advice.

I had a chance to ‘meet’ nice people and professionals ‘on fire’.

I was honored to get acquainted with the American system of online university education.

I am happily tired and inspired and full of enthusiasm.

I would like to thank my dear course mates – Omar, Valeria, Pablo, Mariale, Diana, Sosthene, Daniela, Kum-wu and others for a great time of communication and fruitful collaboration. I do hope to stay in touch with you guys. If you don’t mind, of course! ;)

Courtney, thank you for BRINGING THE CHANGE. You are wonderful.

The course is over when a new academic year starts. Analyzing the past, we are looking into the future…

Week 9: Learning Styles and Motivation

Yet another week to reflect on motivation. I am convinced that teachers must encourage and support their students to perform to the highest standards and realize their potential. A purposeful and meaningful teaching job is likely to have a more personal impact on students and give them a sense of achievement and personal growth.

One of the theories that promote motivation is the theory of learning styles. It was new to me and I decided to try it on myself and test my own learning styles and see if the theory proves to be true. So I took the test at ‘What Is Your LearningStyle?’ and found out that my learning styles are:

Intrapersonal – 75% (Those with intrapersonal intelligence do well in careers where self-management is important, such as being a writer, a teacher, a counselor, a police officer, or a pilot);

Linguistic – 67% (You have the ability to use words effectively for reading, writing, listening, and speaking);

Interpersonal – 56% (You enjoy teaching and sharing your thoughts. Careers that require insight and the ability to read what someone else is thinking or feeling – such as teaching, psychology, or sales – would be a great match for those with interpersonal intelligence.)

Other styles showed the results of less than 50%.

I felt the results of the test were correct and proved once again that I am a natural-born teacher. It is a good idea to give this test to students at the beginning of a course to see how to plan lessons more effectively. Taking into account their learning inclinations and tendencies, a teacher will inspire and motivate and students will accomplish the tasks they like faster and with more aspiration which, in turn, will bring higher final results.

Learning styles theories have become the foundation on which to build adult learning. It has been known for some time that students retain more knowledge and are able to better

transfer knowledge to the workplace when they have been taught in their preferred learning

style. What are these learning styles (just in short)?

• Visual (Graphical Representations, Photos, PowerPoint, etc.);

• Aural (Learn by Listening, Enjoy ‘Lectures’, Need Directions Read Aloud);

• Read / Write (Written Word – Read or Write, Textbooks and References);

• Kinesthetic (Learn by Doing, ‘Hands-on’).

The important aspect of Learning Styles is that a variety of training strategies need to be in place to accommodate the different ways that we prefer to learn. A ‘one size fits all’ approach will not work and will consequently affect motivation and achievement of successful training.

PS: Other nice articles on Motivation and Learning Styles:

Motivation, Personality, Teaching and Learning Styles

The Relationships of Learning Styles, Learning Motivation and Academic Success in EFL Learning Context

Web-Based Learning: Relationships Among Students Motivation, Attitude, Learning Styles, and Achievement

Acknowledgements to London Permaculture and FreeDigitalPhotos.net  for the used images. 

Week 8: Classroom: Offline or Online?

To brush up my WebSkills Project, I chose to create a class blog and a Nicenet discussion. I have been blogging with educational goals for a number of years already while the Nicenet platform is new for me.

Why a blog? Well, a class wiki or a Google site can be easily designed as an option. However, the objective would be quite similar:

(C) Having registered at an applicable web site, (A) a teacher (B) will construct, design, plan, and maintain a class site (D) supplying it with relevant information, updating it regularly, and controlling online discussions, if necessary.

OR:

(C) Having registered at an applicable web site, (A) a student (B) will design and maintain his / her personal blog (D) publishing new works, video- or podcasting, blog commenting, and collaborating according to the pre-set rules.

Nicenet transfers discussions from a classroom to the online setting. Of course, it saves time for more live collaboration and, moreover, it gives students a possibility to practice:

-         

        reading,

-          critical thinking, and

-          writing skills.

 

Lots of theses have been written on how to use online tools for the benefit of students. What do we have to do? The answer is rather obvious – adapt them to our teaching goals and never cease using them because they are truly helpful and advantageous. And there is no need to argue what is better - offline or online. Both aspects complement one another and we cannot imagine our offline classroom without online activities in the digital 21st century.

Week 7: Still Looking for Details

Being a linguist, I pay a lot of attention to words and what they mean. The main word of this week turned out to be ‘detail.’ Let us see how some authoritative dictionaries define this word. Here, I have chosen some (not all given) definitions that perfectly describe my present situation and continuous work on the UO project. So, here we go:

1) Cambridge Dictionaries Online : the small features of something that you only notice when you look carefully.

2) Oxford Dictionaries: an individual fact or item.

3) Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English: the information that helps to complete what you know about something.

4) Macmillan Dictionary: one of many small facts or pieces of information relating to a situation. 

5) Merriam-Webster : extended treatment of or attention to particular items.

I mark red the most significant elements in the definitions. First, I AM to look carefully at every stage of the project to make it complete and beneficial to my students. Second, every individual bit of information makes the project function smoothly and without failures. Third, filling the project with details helps me complete the task. Fourth, I add every little fact to the project with total concentration on the topic of my future course – ‘Communicating Across Cultures.’ And last but not least, the final stages of the project require total – or extended – attention and treatment.

Every definition mentioned above describes the process I am going through at the moment with precise accuracy. A very short linguistic analysis shows how important details are not only for the current project but also for any task we undertake and plan to become more professionally advanced…

Week 6: Great Expectations

The course I am going to teach next semester is called ‘Communicating across cultures’ with the target audience of the fourth year International Economics majors. The course is absolutely new and the head of my department gave me privilege to structure the course the way I see it. I am very grateful for her confidence in me and I am full of expectations to implement the new methods and techniques I have been discovering since the end of June.

Following the general plan of the manual (Communicating Across Cultures by Bob Dignen, CUP, 2011), I will make a ‘technological framework’ to supplement the contents of the book. Two main goals I want to achieve are (1) to raise students’ motivation and (2) to introduce concepts of effective time management both for teachers and students.

There are two functional aspects that will cover the whole course. First, it is alternative assessment. I will have rubrics for every oral and written task and – optionally – I will have peer assessment. Rubrics clarify the teacher’s expectations and clearly explain how every part of the task is graded. Peer assessment activates students’ attention and responsibility. Second, it is blogging. Students will be asked to create their personal blogs to post their works there, comment on other students’ messages, and share external links and tools they find helpful. The course information will be consolidated in the class blog.

Every week the students will have a technology-enhanced task devoted to different skills: speaking, listening, presenting, critical thinking, etc. The tech tools are:

VoiceThread A tool that can be used to communicate a message using voice, video, and text. Topics: Becoming a better listener. Managing conflicts: (1) Ways to avoid potential conflicts. (2) Strategies to manage conflict situations.

Present.me An easy-to-use tool that allows to upload files and record voice messages. Topic: Differences in communication style across cultures.

Podomatic A tool to create podcasts and share them online. Topic: Dealing with difficult communicators.

Voxopop A voice-based e-learning tool that helps to develop speaking skills. Topic: What is the connection between cultural diversity and creativity?

Glogster A web platform that is used to create interactive posters loaded with text, graphics, music, videos, and more. Topics: Personal development plan to improve communication skills (conclusions on Webquest 2.) Negotiating across cultures: (1) The challenges of negotiating across cultures. (2) Language of influencing.

Prezi An online presentation tool. Topics: Presenting across cultures (final classroom Webquest 1 presentation.) Dwell upon a quote on culture / business / communication (the list of quotes to be provided) (final assessment classroom presentation.)

Zunal An online webquest maker. Topics: Presenting across cultures. Profiling your intercultural competence.

The fifteen weeks of the course under consideration will be accompanied by Nicenet discussions and weekly blog posts. The variety of activities will supposedly light up the students’ enthusiasm. Besides, as a large part of assignment will be allotted to homework, it will help them manage their work load according to their time preferences.

A lot of work is to be done before the course starts and I am still looking for details. However, I have great expectations connected with it!

Week 5: I Love This Game!

This week I wrote my first webquest and I liked this experience very much.

What I like most is that students get involved in the project literally from the very start of it – from choosing the topic! Let’s do what we all like, what is close to our national tradition, what will bring the best fruit to all of us.

The topic being chosen, we move on to assigning roles. Here again, we can distribute tasks according to what a person likes – collecting information, analyzing it and making conclusions, writing essays, or working on the technological side of the project. Everyone can choose a task that corresponds to his / her abilities and level of knowledge. This aspect is very important since it allows all types of students (weak and strong, active and passive, with various learning styles) to participate in group work.

The results of the work can be presented in all sorts of ways and it will bring creativity into the classroom. Modern technology gives a chance to make all our ideas come true – with pictures, voice, animation, virtual, or real. So why don’t we create something educationally profound and beautiful and share it with our classmates and the whole world?

And last but not least. Projects and webquests teach real communication and collaboration. Students learn to work together and it resembles real life situations – they learn to obey authorities depending on their positions, solve conflicts, and contribute to achieving the mutual goal.

A project / webquest is like a game. We do not teach / learn, we play it. Here education becomes fun to our benefit and, first of all, to the benefit of our students.

Week 5: New Challenges

In the beginning of this summer I became a lucky owner of a beautiful gray Merida – my super bike! And yesterday I rode my first 23 km (14.3 mi) tour around an amazing Baidary Valley near my home town. My first time. Sometimes I thought I would die – it was hard to ride uphill. But I did it! I felt like a champion. No! A super hero! How many ‘first times’ did you have when you were happy ever after?

Well, it all may sound like fun but let me testify to more ‘first times’ that have been happening and happening to me since the end of June. Participating in the UO summer course, I:

• wrote an ABCD objective,
• joined Delicious.com,
• created a WebQuest,
• wrote an assessment rubric,
• started a reflection online journal,
• wrote a technology-enhanced lesson plan 

for the first time!

Every task is a challenge and I feel really tired. This summer I spend more time at the computer and not at the beach (I live right on the coast of the Black Sea, two minutes of walking to the nearest beach.) However I am excited to do a task after a task because I want to learn more and I am open to new ideas. I want more ‘first times’ in the coming five weeks.

It’s a challenge that makes me happy.

Image courtesy of Dreamstime.com

Week 4: Are you a good … football player?

I am a great (European) football fan. This passion sounds a little unexpected for a PhD in Linguistics… Yes, I follow the main European leagues, know about the latest transfers, and am a happy and proud owner of the season ticket for FC Sevastopol games.

This is the right moment to ask me the question, “What are you talking about? How can football be connected with what we all are doing in ‘Building Teaching Skills through the Interactive Web’ course?” Well, I was thinking about comparing teachers and footballers – what similarities can you trace?

First, we all must always train and stay fit to correspond to the goals we set. A football player learns new tricks, a teacher learns about new 

teaching styles or CALL techniques. A footballer drills passes and free kicks, a teacher endlessly writes ABCD objectives and composes technology-enhanced lesson plans…

Second, all football teams go to camps between seasons for some extensive training. Isn’t it what we are doing now? We want to be better equipped, consulted by progressive instructors, and enriched by some advanced ideas we can apply during next fall semester (half season).

Friendlies… Friendly matches are often played to check players’ abilities and preparedness for a new season. It has been our fourth week since we started to write our Project. I believe it truly can check how we are ready to implement the new knowledge we are receiving from the University of Oregon.

And finally, what is your position on the teaching field? Are you a striker, a winger, or a defender? What role do you play in your school / university environment and how do your actions contribute to the team play? I would love to be an attacking midfielder. According to Wikipedia, “More complete midfielders require a number of skills on top of fitness: they tackle, dribble, shoot, and pass during any match. An attacking midfielder is any midfielder who is stationed in a more advanced midfield position to assist goalscoring. The attacking midfielder is an influential position and requires the player to possess good technical abilities, an eye for a pass, running, and dribbling skills.” This is it. This is what I want to become. A Zinedine Zidane for my students – highly professional and  reliable, ready to assist and develop, with skills ‘on top of fitness.’

So what about you? Do you like football?

Photo: FC Sevastopol

Photo: Wikipedia. 

Week 3: Teachers Going Digital

The 21^st century has brought lots of changes into our everyday life. We are surrounded by all sorts of devices and it is simply inevitable that we should bring technology into the classroom. To develop learning skills we can use CALL to prepare for lessons, on the one hand, and use equipment and web 2.0 tools in the classroom, on the other.

There are dozens of websites that can help you develop any skill in your students, for instance:

Speaking: Voice of America, Voice Thread, The Art of Storytelling, etc.

Listening: Randall's ESL Cyber ListeningLab, TEDTalks, VideoJug, etc.

Reading and vocabulary: BBC Learning English, Reading for Everyone, etc.

Writing: About.com, English Club, etc.

Then why don’t we agree to grab the chance to achieve better results with the tools students are so familiar with?

I remember presenting at a TESOL conference in Sevastopol, Ukraine in October 2012. My presentation was about web 2.0 tools in teaching and I was demonstrating the results of my work. It happened that the audience was divided into two parts – students and teachers (Ukrainians). To my utter incomprehension, I saw indifference in the eyes of the teachers and I was very very upset and sorry... However, at the end of the presentation all students – every one of them – approached me and thanked me for what I had said and shown. This time they were really sorry that their teachers were not like me and that they were reluctant to introduce technology into teaching. At that moment I was no longer unhappy. I understood that I was doing the right things, I was doing what students liked and not what was comfortable to me.

Yes, it is sometimes hard – I am far from being a ‘hacker’ and sometimes it really takes time to understand how this or that tool works. But now I clearly see that it is what students need. They are a little different from us and no one is able to ban ‘the generation gap.’ We the teachers should keep it in mind and not ignore this gap but try to build bridges…

Week 2: Writing Clear Objectives

Teaching is a two-way road. On the one hand, you teach, on the other – you learn.  The ABCD model is a new theory for me and I feel I will have to study this method more profoundly in the near future.

For me this model means analyzing your every step while planning and / or conducting a lesson. Identifying objectives transfers from a mere intuitive domain into a scientifically / pedagogically structured system.  There are definite questions that need to be answered:

1) Who are your learners? (audience)

2) What do you expect them to be able to do? (behavior)

3) How do you organize the learning process, what are the circumstances and context of the learning process? (condition)

4) How much of the task will be accomplished, how well and to what level will the behavior be performed? (degree)

From the first sight, it is not an easy task. However, if you perform it every time, I believe it will gradually reach an automatic level of performance. Bearing this model in mind will help you concentrate on the learners and not on yourself and keep the teaching process student-centered. 
Though it is not the end of the journey. in our digital century every theory tends to develop itself and change its approach taking into account new IT trends. Thus, traditional Bloom's taxonomy evolves into the following network:

(taken from  B'sDT)

As a result, we travel from ‘interpreting and summarizing’ to ‘blog journaling and twittering’, from ‘comparing and organizing’ to ‘linking and media clipping’, from ‘designing and constructing’ to ‘wiki-ing and videocasting’…  Incredible! But is it too difficult? NO! It is the same system, the same analysis, the same ABCD model but … different behavioral interpretation.

Teaching is a long two-way road and no one will ever abolish the learning side. We the teachers have to learn and adapt new ideas and correspond to the fast-developing world to be not only trip companions but also leaders and advisors.

Week 2: My Google Search

I typically search for different things – studies, teaching, entertainment, sports, kids, weather… Almost anything I need to have some information about. And information is power, you know. I always use the net to prepare for classes or keep up with the modern trends in Linguistics. I also search for currently available conferences and programs. I have always used Google. I just started with this one and it never changed.

Now I would like to share my experiment with the Google search. Last semester I taught Linguocultural Studies to one of my university classes so I decided to google one of our topics – “Canadian natives” – so my search was ‘Canada aboriginals.’

The engine gave me about 32 400 000 hits in just 0,32 sec. The sites were numerous and very useful, from Wikipedia to commercial organizations. It also showed links to CBC, Sun News, and other mass media editions. There were Government of Canada (gc.ca domain) sites with nothing but reliable information, sites for different age groups (e.g., Kids: Aboriginal Canada Portal), and different interests and hobbies (e.g., Canadian Aboriginal Minerals Association). Google Images showed millions of pictures to illustrate the topic perfectly. Google Maps gave me some destinations (I tried ‘Canada aboriginals metis’) (e.g., Club Bon Accueil 5110 Manson Ave, Powell River, BC V8A 3P1) and more external links. Google Video supplied me with millions of videos which are of different length (from 1 min. to about 40 min. long) and thus can support any teaching aims. I also tried Google News and found very interesting up-to-date articles on Canadian aboriginals (‘Assembly of First Nations vents frustration at Harper,’ ‘In Canada's 'war on drugs,' aboriginals are the biggest victims,’ ‘Kateri Tekakwitha becomes Canada's first aboriginal saint’, and lots and lots of others.) Google Blogs gave me more titles that looked captivating and sometimes controversial and provocative.

I think my search was rather successful and I am sure I could have done a nice presentation on the topic if it had been my goal!

Week 1: To Blog Or Not To Blog?

Modern blogging is more than just keeping a pen and paper journal. And these potential difficulties lead you to asking the question, “To blog or not to blog?” Start with evaluating existing blogs by asking questions like:

(1) What’s it about and what themes are covered?

(2) Who is the intended audience for the blog?

(3) What features are included?

For example, let’s analyze Nik’s Learning Technology Blog:

(1) Learning technologies websites, applications and the classroom usage of these tools.

(2) Language teachers interested in learning technologies.

(3) Commenting / Polls / Most read / Links / Past postings / RSS / Links to microblogs (Plurk, Twitter) / Downloads / The opportunity to ask a question, etc.

Answering these questions, you can identify whether you will need a blog in your professional activity or not and on the other hand, you can use these questions as some sort of guidelines for your own blog.

Before you start personalizing your front page, let us figure out the key features of blogging. In my opinion, some of them are the following:

comments by other people who are interested in this topic: it develops closer relationships among students and also with the teacher since it brings the discussion out of the official classroom setting and relaxes the ‘teacher – student’ tension;

personal opinions on a particular subject: it encourages individual research and develops critical thinking and writing skills; it encourages more responsibility for the written assignment because it is going to be read by the student’s classmates;

links to previous posts: it organizes the content and gives a good opportunity to easily find (or redirect your student to) the necessary information / material;

links to external websites: it provides space to collect all necessary links in one place and later on to use them quickly and comfortably at any necessary moment;

can include text, pictures, videos, and / or audio: all these resources are a part of the modern teaching process, and blogging gives an excellent opportunity to use them and involve students in various kinds of discussions and tasks.

You may ask students to create their own blogs. It can be very productive because they can apply their IT skills to make their posts stand out from others. It will look more appealing than simple text blog posts. Students can illustrate their stories with pictures of where they have been or of what they have done. Depending on the task, they can attach a video or an audio file to personalize their post.

In my personal experience I have used my blog for different types of activities, for example:

grammar practice 

writing essays 

translation exercises

writing for specific purposes

or

cultural studies

and so on.

Now I would really like to continue the topic by inviting everyone to contribute your ideas to the following:

Imagine you are trying to persuade a colleague to use blogs in his / her teaching. What arguments will you use to achieve your goal? Your ideas are very welcome here!

Image courtesy of  Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net