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!