TESOL 2013 Highlights – Day 3 – Part 4 (Electronic Village)

Integrating Google My Maps and Language Learning: The collaborative creation of virtual tour guides by Brazilian students. I sometimes wish there were two TESOL conventions, one for academic sessions and one for workshops in the Electronic Village. There simply isn’t enough time to visit every presentation you want to hear. I had hoped to spend more time in the EV, but I found only one morning in my busy schedule to devote to this room, which is like a smorgasbord of ideas for using technology. I wasn’t disappointed, though.

First, I heard from Marcos Racilan from the Federal Center of Technological Education of Minas Gerais. Marcos works with high school students, and he shared samples of group projects using Google My Maps. His students were beginners, and the two-month project he led was designed to be meaningful, use authentic materials, promote autonomy, and engage students in collaborative work. Google My Maps allowed students to plan and present virtual tours. They chose their destinations, set their own budgets and itineraries, and made use of images, texts, audio, and video. Imagine each destination point being marked on the map and accompanied by a description with rich media both selected and created by the students. This one sample will help you consider your options if you would like to design a similar project.

Re-Animating Pronunciation Using PowerPoint. After hearing about the Google My Maps project, I headed over to another station being run by June Rose of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. June was demonstrating an effective use of PowerPoint to improve both vocabulary and pronunciation. She explained how her activities were designed to apply MI (multiple intelligences) theory and allow for a greater variety of ways for students to learn and demonstrate their learning.

Basically, June’s project had students create customized slide presentations to practice problematic sounds at the word and sentence level. The files served as an electronic progress record, which the teacher could use to assess individual student performance and which the learner could use for future reference and practice. June reported the high gains in confidence she observed in her learners.

The project begins with an assessment of the learner’s pronunciation problems. Two individual sounds per students are identified, and the students confirm the choices for targeted instruction. Students are directed to resources, like Rhymer.com, and they are asked to create a set of PPT slides for each sound. Each sound should be practiced via 30 words (three charts with 10 words for initial, medial, and final positions). Students must also create 30 sentences with those words. The word lists and learner-generated sentences are recorded. Both the learner and the teacher assess the recordings and follow-up instruction is offered. That includes attention to suprasegmentals. The teacher encourages self-monitoring through additional recordings. It was truly wonderful to hear the progression and the increase in accuracy in the samples June played for us.

A heartfelt thank you to Marcos and June for sharing their creative ideas!

I look forward to TESOL 2014 and all that we can learn.

TESOL 2013 Highlights – Day 3 – Part 3

Smart Use of Smart Phones. Michael Jones packed the room with teachers eager to learn more about using technology in the classroom. Michael is currently teaching at Woosong University in Korea, and he has had much success in using smart phones to deliver content to his students. His presentation introduced practical and engaging uses of QR codes.

We got a 30-second history lesson when Michael explained how quick reaction codes were originally invented by Toyota back in 1994 to control inventory. These matrix barcodes proved to have faster readability and larger storage capacity than UPC barcodes. Today many outside the automotive industry are using QR codes as a content delivery method.

Michael demonstrated how to generate a QR code on QR Stuff, a free online code generator.  The website offers a clear 4-step process, and the output choices include downloading, printing, and emailing the code. Michael pointed out that all TESOL attendees had QR codes on their badges, and indeed it seemed the in thing was to have a QR code on a business card or even in place of a business card.

Those participants who had yet to install a QR reader app did so quickly, and Michael then demonstrated possibilities. He warned that there were limitations, of course, as there are with any piece of technology. Do all your students have smart phones and know how to use QR codes? Will some pre-teaching be necessary? How is the Internet connection? (I mentally added, “What if batteries are running low?”) Once everything is in place, however, QR codes can be used for:

• administrative uses = Save paper. Post a single-sheet printout at the door and let students scan and download the homework assignment as they leave.
• paperless tasks = A website URL or Dropbox link can easily be converted into a code. Michael asked us to do a poll, complete a quiz, and submit ideas on a Google Docs all via QR codes.
• content delivery in the classroom = Delivering content to students’ phones can replace the use of slides on a projector.
• class projects = Michael has had his students exchange movie reviews and surveys via QR codes.

One of my favorite activities in this session was Michael’s use of two similar pictures. Working in pairs, one partner scanned code A and the other scanned code B. We each had a line drawing on our smart phones and were instructed to try to identify the differences without showing our partners our versions of the picture. A lot of language was produced. For example, I said, “In my picture there are three birds in the sky.” My partner replied, “There are no birds in my picture.” You may have done something similar on paper, but why waste paper if you don’t have to? Also, as Michael pointed out in his session description, why not leverage your students’ interest in mobile technology to increase their motivation?

Great job, Michael! Many thanks!

Electronic Village Highlights to come! (The last of my TESOL summaries!)

TESOL 2013 Highlights – Day 2 – Part 1

Mobile Learning for the 21st Century. At 7:30 bright and early on Friday morning, Susan Gaer of Santa Ana College gave an informative session on how to integrate mobile technology into language learning. She had participants begin with the same activity she uses with students early on in a course. We partnered up and used her guided questions to discover the features on our phones. As Susan noted, this paired talk saves the teacher the challenging task of trying to explain features on different types of smart phones. In our session, partners sometimes helped owners discover features they didn’t even realize they had. Susan’s questions also teach basic vocabulary: video, vibrate, text message, audio recorder, and more. The questions also help basic students review yes-no questions in the simple present. Does your cell phone have a camera? – Yes, it does. / No, it doesn’t. Another great tip was to use a photo as an ice breaker/ warm-up. Have students choose one photo (from their vast collections) and share it with a partner. Comments and questions naturally follow.

Susan wisely addresses cell phone etiquette with a set of questions about appropriate use in various settings. She uses these questions both at the beginning and ending of a course. She aims to teach students that in addition to being an instrument of communication, the cell phone is a learning device. One suggested activity has students write about a time they saw a cell phone being used inappropriately. (Susan has offered samples of student writings on her website.  Her students have signed releases, so you are free to use the texts in your own classes as models.)

Susan also recommended the use of mass text messaging through programs like Remind101. This free site allows teachers to stay in touch with students via daily messages, homework reminders, and other notifications. Susan has sent questions to students over the weekend and used their short replies to prepare a customized lesson for Monday’s class.

The use of photos was also discussed, and Susan used the clever term “instant photo gratification,” which is possible through sites like Photobucket, Flickr, and Google+. Her favorite lesson plan with photos is based on an activity about favorite clothes. Students use photos of favorite items in their closets and activate related vocabulary through presentations.

Making the most of her 45 minutes, Susan fit in a demonstration of online polling with Poll Everywhere. Instant audience feedback keeps votes anonymous but shows results as the votes are counted. Susan has had success using instant polls as warm-ups. As students enter the classroom, the key question and voting instructions are already on the board/ screen. The results lead into the start of the lesson.

Kudos to Susan for sharing so much in such a little time! She has also generously posted her handout and her presentation slides online (in PowerPoint and in Keynote).

More highlights to come!

Developing an Appetite for Apps

I can’t say that my own use of apps is on par with many others. I rely heavily on my iPhone, but mostly for email, appointments, photographs, Internet searches, and alarms. My children, however, love the iPad and all that it offers.  I try to limit screen time, but it’s hard to deny their rather frequent request to play educational games which develop their math and reading skills. (It’s much easier to inform them that that Angry Birds will not be on the iPad ever again.) The other day it was my children’s interest in apps that made me take another look at the App Store with a teacher’s eyes rather than a parent’s.

My student Natasha and I were studying in one room of her home while our children were playing in another.  At one point we allowed the kids to take out the iPads. It was interesting to see what apps Natasha’s children were using. A number of their favorites involved everyday activities, such as cooking and shopping. I grew excited just thinking of the kind of language practice those apps prompted for beginner ESL students like Natasha. Here are just a few possibilities:

• Taco Hair Salon ($1.99) – It’s not included in the Educational category, but I think it’s a contender for “Edutainment.” I’ve had students ask me in the past to help them learn what to say when they go to a hair salon. It’s a difficult request to meet without visual aids. This app can help teach related vocabulary: cut, trim, style, etc.
• Taco Kitchen ($1.99) – This app by Toca Boca is even better. Not only can you teach everyday vocabulary related to cooking (slice, boil, fry, etc.), you can choose to focus on imperatives or verb tenses (simple present – “We fry meat.” / present progressive – “I am frying vegetables.” / simple past – “I made juice.”) In pairs, students can take turns giving instructions, making requests, or describing actions being performed.
• MyPlay Chef Lite (Free) – This app is actually marked as Educational. Since it’s free, you have nothing to lose by checking it out. I see possibilities with giving instructions and describing a sequence. Personally, I had some fun building a sandwich: First, I chose two slices of wheat bread. Then I chose turkey and Swiss cheese. Next, I added lettuce and tomato. Finally, I put on some mayo. 
• Dr. Panda’s Restaurant (Free) – Also from the Educational category, this app from TribePlay combines cooking with serving food and cleaning up. Because it’s free, this version is rather limited, but you’ll get a nice visual aid for actions like washing, rinsing, melting butter, and chopping.

Naturally, as with any resource, you must consider how appropriate an app is for a given student or set of students. Because Natasha is a mother of a preschooler and kindergartner, apps designed for kids are familiar to her in terms of visuals and sound effects. In contrast, going to Dr. Panda’s restaurant may have little appeal for a young professional learning English.

Do you know of other apps that can be repurposed for ELLs? Please feel free to share.

Friday Fun with Apps: Using voice recognition technology

Yesterday I became frustrated with the voice recognition feature of Google Translate app because it failed to accurately record my Russian. I wanted to experiment with this tool from the perspective of a language learner. I tried saying some very basic sentences in Russian, and several times the software didn’t recognize my words. I’m confident, though, that native Russian speakers would have understood me just fine.

As excitement grows over voice recognition software and the mobile apps that make use of this technology, we should be careful when promoting such an app to our students. Advise them to speak slowly, clearly, and loud enough to be heard well. Even following that advice they might still end up inputting words by typing, whether it’s on Google Tranlate or a dictionary app with voice searching capability. (In the case of Google Tranlaste, I’d also remind them of the limitations of online translators.)

A more enjoyable app for everyone is Talking Tom, an animated alley cat, (or Talking Gina, if you prefer a female giraffe). Talking Tom is an entertaining version of Voice Memo with animation. The idea is that you can record your voice, play it back, and then share the video via e-mail or upload it to YouTube or Facebook. The fun begins with morphing your voice. Playback is immediate, and Tom repeats your words in a high-pitched voice. You can also poke Tom, pet him and make him purr, and give him milk to drink. (Gina drinks water from a barrel or a cocktail through a straw. You can offer her different snacks, too.)

What applications could these apps have?

• Students can simply have fun speaking out loud in English. They can apply some of the “mind games” I’ve suggested in the past and record actual thoughts. This is nice for shy speakers who might be willing to talk to Tom  in quiet, private settings.

 

• Students can use Talking Tom for pronunciation practice. Have them review drills or passages you practiced in class with Tom’s help. The immediate playback allows them to evaluate how clear their own speech is. If you want actual samples in their normal speaking voices, they can make their submissions with Voice Memo. Talking Tom can be used as preparation for the final recording.

 

• Students can create short videos to share with a partner. The video can include some animation and spoken words. Partners can then watch the video and write down a description of what they see. This activity can focus on verb tenses (action verbs in the present progressive or a series of actions in the simple past, for instance) or reported speech. Be sure to cover relevant vocabulary, such as purr and poke.

 

• Students can submit a brief recording on an assigned topic. Since the morphing disguises the voices, playback in a classroom setting would easily allow the game of  listening and identifying the speaker. Topics can be your birthplace, origin of your first name, your personality, your worst habit, how you usually dress for class, or your general physical appearance.

TESOL – Day 1 Observations (continued)

One can be certain that a visit to the Electronic Village at TESOL will always result in a learning experience. With multiple mini workshops to attend within a single hour, the only challenge is deciding where to start. Yesterday I first sat down at Randall Davis’s computer station. Randall, who teaches at the University of Utah and maintains the well-known site Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab, presented several applications to support listening and speaking practice. In his session “Online Listening: Tricks, Tools, and New Directions” he demonstrated possibilities with free resources, such as Download Helper, Google Voice, and CinchCast. (To download his presentation slides, click here.)

DownloadHelper is a tool for downloading videos from the Internet. Randall demonstrated how a teacher can combine that tool with VLC Media Player as a portable app. This combination allows teachers to make use of VLC Media Player’s wonderful feature of variable speed during playback of a video AND the selected video doesn’t have to be downloaded onto the computer. Instead, one can keep the portable version of VLC Media Player on a flash drive. This solves any problems a computer administrator might have with users downloading content onto school computers.

Randall also explained how his staff at the University of Utah has made use of Google Voice to collect student audio files in mp3 format. While keeping your actual phone number hidden, you can invite students to call your Google Voice number and submit audio recordings. Imagine the possibilities. You can use this application to collect speech samples for assessment, oral answers to questions, and more. The main convenience is that all the files are sent to and kept on your Google Voice account. The process of collecting and organizing such files becomes far less cumbersome, and it’s entirely free save for the minutes students use to place their calls. Randall passed along the tip to collect students’ cell phone numbers to aid in the identification of submitted files.

With the time we had left, Randall shared his knowledge of CinchCast, an application that allows users to make audio posts on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The beauty is that this free app allows one to create audio podcasts on the go. Also, the audio posts have no time limit. Whereas Google is recommended for student submissions to the teacher, CinchCast was presented as a tool for the teacher to send audio messages to the students. Randall suggested using this medium for sending homework assignments and discussion questions. There are other possibilities, of course.

Indeed, mobile apps were a hot topic yesterday. If time allows, I’ll share more ideas from other presenters. From making flashcards to holding group brainstorming sessions with movable sticky notes, the apps being discussed this year at TESOL are showing how much technology is reshaping and facilitating language study and instruction.

Little Steps, Useful Lessons: Braving the learning curve of a new online resource

It’s Week 1 of the Electronic Village Online 2011, an annual online even sponsored by the CALL-Interest Section of TESOL, Inc. Latecomers are often allowed to join, so I wouldn’t hesitate to request membership in a group if a particular session catches your interest. I signed up for VILLAGE: Language Learning and Community Building in Second Life. I don’t know how active a role I’ll be able to take in the coming weeks, but even if I increase my familiarity and comfort with Second Life just a little, I’ll be happy. I’m already pleased that I managed to teleport to EduNation, the moderators’ headquarters, without getting too lost (I did somehow make a sidetrip into a land called Korea).

While it’s too early for me to jump on the bandwagon and tell all teachers to get an avatar on SL and regularly hold virtual classes with students, I do see some possibilities for everyone, including those who are hesitant to delve into virtual worlds. The reportedly steep learning curve on SL might falsely create the impression that no language lessons are possible until one masters everything. Not true.

If you and your students have Internet access at school, you can learn some of the basics in SL and turn these early experiments into language lessons:

• Infinitives of purpose. Go through the tutorial on Orientation Island and learn how to sit, stand, walk, fly, and perhaps teleport. After the orientation is completed, have students answer “how to” questions with infinitives of purpose to recall what they’ve learned. Example: (Q) How do you sit? (A) To sit, you right click on an object. / To sit, right click on an object. / You right click on an object in order to sit.
• Present simple and present progressive. Learn to change the appearance of your avatar. Even if only the teacher has an avatar and the class is observing, students can describe the appearance of the given “resident”, using present simple for permanent features (she has long dark hair) and present progressive for clothing and accessories (she‘s wearing a jacket and skirt).

In my experience, learning how to use a new tool is easier and more fun when you’re not left alone. Frustrations are reduced and successes are celebrated together. Mistakes become amusing, and having shared goals can increase confidence. Good luck if you decide to try out SL. Perhaps our avatars will one day cross paths.

A New Year’s Resolution: Let’s get savvy with online tools!

It’s that time again. Have you made any New Year’s resolutions? One promise I’ve made to myself is to learn more about online tools that can help me in teaching or materials writing. I’d like to discover at least three new tools and learn to apply them in 2011. I’m on my way to knocking that number down by one or even two.

A recent comment on my post about trusting dictionaries prompted me to give some attention to corpus research. Daniel, a reader of this blog, informed me that Google has a new tool called Books Ngram Viewer. The resource can help users understand trends in the usage of particular words or terms. The demo shows a graph for “Atlantis” and “El Dorado”. I plugged in words and phrases that I’ve been asked about in the past, for example, “toward” versus “towards” and “accepted to” and “accepted at”.  For fun, you can give it a try, too.

The tool is rather user-friendly. I like the ease of switching between American and British English as well as the simplicity of setting the years you want to focus on. I’m learning that a smoothing of “0″ isn’t too helpful. It gives raw data that’s not easy on the eyes. The default setting is a smoothing of 3 (the average of three years before and after plus the target year, if I’m not mistaken), and this setting makes trends more readily visible. Be sure to take the time to understand the differences among the corpora: English, English Fiction, and English One Million.

Because I began experimenting with Google Ngram, I decided I should also devote some playtime to another resource recommended by a reader. Phil Bird told me about the corpora offered by Brigham Young University. So far, I’ve only used the Corpus of Contemporary American English, but I began to see how this tool combined with Google Ngram and an online dictionary can truly help me answer questions about collocations. I did searches for “was/ got accepted to” and “was/ got accepted at”, and the results helped me understand the trends.

Got any other tools to recommend? I think if we periodically devote some online time to these kinds of experiments, we won’t be overwhelmed by all that’s available but only inclined to learn more.

On that note, I’ll end and wish you all a healthy, happy, productive year in 2011.  Thank you for visiting my blog today. Happy New Year!

Going Green the Smart Way: How Teachers Can Protect Their Digital Information

We can learn from others’ misery. Please learn from mine. My desktop computer recently crashed. The hard drive was corrupted, and no files were accessible. Luckily, I wasn’t left in the Dark Ages because I happen to have a laptop, which I mostly use for webcam meetings and lessons. The sad news is that I hadn’t been good about keeping current back-up files on either the laptop or my portable hard drive. That meant that work done in late April and early May were sent into the Black Hole of lost data.

Ironically, upstairs in a bedroom closet I still have many paper files from my earlier days of teaching and materials writing, in other words, information that is not as valuable as the information I recently lost. Short of a house fire, nothing threatens these files, so they remain safe and in tact (though a little dusty). I wish I could say the same of my digital information. However, I have no regrets about going digital and significantly reducing my professional paper trail. I can’t imagine the volume of paper needed to print out everything work-related that I wrote over the past 5 or so years.

Nevertheless, I’m forced to remember that there is a smart way to go green. Teachers produce large quantities of writing, from lesson plans to weekly reports. How should we stay green, stay digital, but ensure we won’t suffer even if our main computer does? My advice:

• Consider multiple storage places: a second computer, an external hard drive, or an online storage site, such as Carbonite. Portable hard drives are small and convenient to carry from home to work, but some larger ones are designed to sync files, that is, save files automatically on your computer and the external hard drive. Portable hard drives can also work this way, but you need to install software to make it happen. (Thank you to the Best Buy sales rep for explaining this to me!)
• Consider composing drafts of e-mail messages if in the end that’s the form a document will take. The drafts are saved online and then are accessible from any computer. This is advisable for weekly reports, monthly reports, or any message that’s composed in stages. The same is true of blog posts.
• Consider forms of file sharing. If some files are not private and can be of use to others, they may have a place on a wiki or virtual office. You may experience chaos in your real office if your computer crashes, but your information will not disappear from your virtual workspace.
• Remember that videos can be uploaded and kept private. Video hosting sites, such as Vimeo and YouTube can store videos you’re not ready to make public. Use the privacy settings to keep files from public view, but use your account to store videos that will eventually be shared.
• Consider keeping and using a flash drive. *Sigh.* I have one on my key chain. Have I used it the past two months? No. I’ll start using it again. This mini storage device is good for the most important documents you’re working on at the moment.

  Know any good tech tips? Please share.