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.

The Wonders of Workshops: The Electronic Village Online

I joined TESOL in 2003.  I didn’t learn about the Electronic Village Online (EVO) until 2009. I’m truly sorry it took me  that long to make this discovery, but thinking optimistically, I did make it and now I want to spread the word to others so that they can benefit professionally and personally as I have.

EVO is an ongoing project of TESOL’s CALL-IS (Computer Assisted Language Learning Interest Section). First off, educators in the field of ESL/EFL should know that TESOL membership isn’t required for participation in EVO. These academic sessions are free for all interested people (teachers still in training, maintream teachers working with ESL students, administrators, and more).

At the start of every year, EVO offers 5-week sessions that take the format of a workshop and/ or discussion. The length of the sessions contrasts with the shorter period of the annual TESOL convention.  EVO participants have the opportunity to explore topics in depth and engage in lengthy discussions.

Last year I was fortunate to be a co-moderator for My Video Classroom 2.0. I enjoyed volunteering my time from November through March, and by doing so I gained a new network of professionals, experience with new tools (from wikis to video group conferencing sites), and plenty of ideas for the use of video in language instruction.

This year I won’t be a moderator, but I am toying with the idea of being a participant. My schedule is already quite full, but it’s hard to resist choosing from the amazing list of topics EVO is offering in 2011: Digital Storytelling, Second Life for Language Learning and Community Building, Re-Playing Process Drama, and more.

Registration is this week. Don’t miss out. See the list of EVO 2011 Sessions and register today! Sesions run from January 10 to February 13.

TESOL 2010 – Boston – Day 1

Well, it’s Day 1 and the sun is shining here in Boston. I’m always filled with pride in my profession at the annual TESOL convention. It thrills me to see so many teachers all gathered in one place for the purpose of professional development. I stood in line for an hour yesterday to receive my ID badge (despite registering in advance!), and I passed the time by chatting with an American who flew all the way from Saudi Arabia to represent her school. We discussed cultural issues in the classroom and the experience of being in EFL (a trip down memory lane for me).

It’s only 9:00 a.m. today, and I’ve already made the acquaintance of three other teachers, one of whom traveled from Peru. These chance meetings along with the pre-arranged ones make TESOL so special. I feel connected to something larger than myself. We’re all in this together to achieve a common goal: delivering quality English instruction. The opportunity to attend academic sessions and workshops is without question another benefit. At 7:30 this morning, I wisely chose to attend Eli Hinkel’s session, Grammar to Teach (or Not to Teach) for Writing. Eli is such a humorous and engaging presenter. I first heard her speak back in Denver, and she was just as funny and insightful this year in Boston. If you’d like to know more about her thoughts on “dead” grammar structures that shouldn’t be taught, you can visit her website. She promised to post her material upon her return to Seattle.

More to come! For those of you at TESOL, please note that I’ll be in the Electronic Village today at 2:00 p.m. to represent the Electronic Village Online (EVO) and in room 208 at 5:00 p.m. to discuss online opportunities to blend teaching and materials writing.

Last Chance for Live Interaction with EVO

The Electronic Village Online, an annual six-week event organized by TESOL’s CALL Interest Section, will end this week. My own session, My Video Classroom 2.0, will be holding its wrap-up event on Friday, February 19 at 9:00pm U.S. Eastern Standard Time. (Click here for time zone converter.) This is one last chance to learn about some truly valuable online resources for English language instruction:

• Ryan Detwiler’s ESLVideo.com
• Mike Marzio’s Real-English.com
• USALearns.org as presented by Branka Marceta
• (And materials created by yours truly)

 

My team (which includes Cora Chen) will briefly review the information and tools we shared with our Yahoo Group members, and all attendees will be invited to pose any final questions and offer final comments. Our platform will be Adobe Connect, so there will be video in addition to audio. If you have a headset with a microphone, you will be able to take an active part in our real-time discussion. Instructions for use of Adobe Connect are posted here.

It’s not too late to RSVP! Just click here.

Combining Cool Resources

If you follow my YouTube videos, you’ll know that a cool car was the topic of my last lesson on American Slang. (Secret: I based the dialog on my knowledge of the Acura MDX.) The video lends itself to work with vocabulary (Part 1) and pronunciation (Part 2). I offer a follow-up a vocabulary exercise and a listening activity with fast speech on EnglishCafe.com to supplement the videos. If the lesson is shared in the classroom, I think the next logical step would be group discussion. In the video there are two proposed discussion questions that directly relate to the dialog, and they could easily lead into a more academic talk about the future of cars and the debate over whether the world can sustain the growing number of cars on the roads.

Check out the talk by Larry Burns of General Motors on TED.com. (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.) I learned about this site from my EVO session’s database. TED has many videos on thought-provoking topics. Though some are rather lengthy for classroom use, you could always select an excerpt and reserve the entire video for independent study. The site offers a transcript and subtitles in different languages for each talk, giving additional options for viewing.

Getting back to the Larry Burn’s talk on the future of cars, here are some questions to pose to your advanced learners. Have them read the questions and then watch the first 1:30 of the talk.

1. According to Larry, what does a car represent to people? Why do people want to own cars?
2. According to Larry, how many people in the world own cars? Is that number high or low in relation to the world population?
3. According to Larry, how do cars today differ from cars 100 years ago?

If you choose to make more use of the video, students will listen to discussion on the use of hydrogen as car fuel. I’d recommend leaving that subtopic for another time, and focus instead on eliciting students’ opinions on Larry’s opening remarks. End your use of the video after 1:30 (approx.) and direct conversation toward expressing personal views on the use, ownership, and design of cars.

Discovering Creative Ways to Motivate and Support Students

Last week in my team’s EVO session Branka Marceta took the lead and shared a valuable online resource for independent learners, U.S.A. Learns. The U.S. Department of Education funded this collection of professionally-designed presentations and exercises on basic and intermediate topics. The three programs on the site aim to support immigrants in the U.S., but many of the skills covered are those that all learners need to master.

What’s great about the context in which such resources are being shared is the discussion threads that develop among EVO participants. For example, by just reading one exchange between Branka and a participant, I was prompted to think of all the ways we can encourage our students in their studies, especially when some or all of their studies are done online. The more responsibility a learner has to study independently, the more important motivation becomes.

Much has been written about setting personal learning goals to build intrinsic motivation. What else can be done? Branka gave a list of recommended practices to motivate and support students, and the one I found to be very original was the use of e-cards. I’ve actually received some e-cards from students who wanted either to thank me or send holiday greetings, but I never thought about using e-cards as a way to motivate them as learners. Indeed, most e-card sites have a whole category for encouragement and support. Why didn’t I think of this earlier? The occasional personalized e-card could be very effective, especially if timed right after a noticeable improvement or commendable effort. “I love teaching conversation class, and this week I especially enjoyed your contributions. Thank you and great job!” – or – “I just corrected your make-up test. Your score jumped up by 15%. Awesome effort!”

Have you discovered creative ways to inspire your students? Please share them.

The Power of Sharing: Sharing online resources with colleagues

I love to emphasize the importance of viewing colleagues as a resource. Two heads are almost always better than one. In past postings I promoted Yahoo Groups, Wikis, and social bookmarking as ways to interact and exchange information with other teachers. With so many resources online and off, it can certainly be a time-saver to know the most useful discoveries other teachers have made. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve witness the power of sharing as a member of an EVO session.

Have you joined the Electronic Village Online (EVO)? Although the sessions are in Week 4, it’s still not too late to join. Three full weeks of supportive and fruitful exchanges remain. My EVO team created a database for our 100+ participants. The database is called Video Website to Share, and so far 31 files have been added. Each address is accompanied by a short description of the site. Take for example the site ESLnotes.com. Its creator, Raymond Weschler, has compiled a convenient resource for teachers who wish to use film in their lessons. A long list of recommended movies suitable for ELLs includes plot summaries, character lists, and teacher’s notes (glossary and discussion questions).  What a find!

New Year’s Resolutions of an English Language Teacher

Typical end-of-the-year promises have to do with exercising more, staying in touch with your parents, and the like. I’m one of those people who make one or two New Year’s resolutions every year, and I actually have a pretty good track record of keeping those promises. (However, I will admit that I wasn’t very consistent about exercising in 2009.)

In this posting, I’m going to focus only on my goals as a teacher. What do I promise to do in 2010?

1) Update my library.  Good books will always be good books, but if authors and publishers have come out with new editions, the most current materials are ideal to have. To the extent I’m able to, I want to expand and update my personal ESL/EFL library.

If you’re not certain about buying a book, you might do some browsing at the local library. I recall a time I was visiting the Boston Public Library on a weekly basis to examine resources for teaching. I became acquainted with certain authors, and if I found myself renewing or checking out an item more than once, I then considered buying my own copy.

2) Learn more technology for instructional purposes. I’m already trying to do this, but I want to reaffirm my commitment to being more tech-savvy. This includes taking the time to read the owner’s manual for my new digital camera so I can make better videos. It also means seeking out opportunities to learn from others.

I was approached by a wonderful group of teachers/ materials writers to co-moderate a session for the annual Electronic Village Online, a virtual extension of the TESOL convention. Just by interacting with my new colleagues over the past two months, I’ve already learned more about wikis, virtual offices, online quiz builders, and other tools. I can’t wait for the actual sessions to begin. Perhaps you’ll consider participating in one of the free sessions, too.

3) Organize/ toss old lesson plans. Are lesson plans like tax records? Should we hold on to them for at least seven years? Probably not. I think I need to tag some plans as priority and start tossing the rest. I have quite a clutter of lesson plans in digital and paper form.

As an online instructor, I have all my lesson plans in electronic form. For each student I teach there is a folder in My Documents, and as long as my lessons with a certain student continue, I won’t delete any files in the respective folder. At the end of our agreed period of study, I only delete that particular set of lesson plans if the student doesn’t indicate any intention of resuming private study. I share my lesson plans with private students via e-mail, so I think I can always find copies of the documents in my Sent Messages folder if I wanted to.

As for my old lesson plans on paper, there are quite a lot of them filed away in a storage unit in a bedroom closet. I really need to downsize that collection. Often I saved a plan not because the lesson itself was so good, but because a particular activity or the use of a new resource was effective. I need to look through past lesson plans and identify good ideas worth saving for future use. Perhaps I can share some of those ideas here on my blog and then toss the paper copies into the recycling bin.

Do you have a great idea to share? Please consider sharing it online either on your own site or here as a reply to this posting or one more closely related to your content.

4) Build my website. Let’s face it, in this day and age the standard for technical know-how gets higher each year. At one point, it was enough to know how to print a word document and reply to e-mail. Rather quickly, having more computer skills became the norm for the modern teacher. Can you do a PowerPoint presentation? Do you know how to scan photos? Can you make your own audio recordings via a headset and mic? More and more teachers have blogs, wikis, and websites as part of their professional persona. I think I’d like to build a website to broaden the resources I can offer ELLs. The very process of creating the site will inspire new ideas for teaching.

Well, now that I’ve stated my resolutions, you can hold me accountable for keeping them. Ask me this time next year if I was faithful to my promises.

Happy New Year to you all! May success, discovery, and joy be yours both in your professional and personal lives.

All the best,

Jennifer

Tools at Your Fingertips: Interesting Online Resources

I love a successful session of browsing on the Internet. Let me share two discoveries. Both of the following online resources would be useful during lesson preparation.

• My search began at a colleague’s site. Ryan Detwiler’s eslvideo.com  offers authentic videos coupled with ESL quizzes. The sources include commercials, news reports, movie clips, and more.  The level of the quizzes range from beginner to high intermediate. The existing quizzes are ready-made materials to be included or expanded upon within a lesson. You can even design your own quiz based on a source of your choosing, all of which gives you the flexibility to target any number of skills, from listening to grammar. Ryan Detwiler will be presenting and illustrating the uses of his site in during TESOL’s Electronic Village Online 6-week session to be held in January and February 2010. (See the TESOL site for further details. Session title My Video Classroom 2.0.)

• Following a series of links from eslvideo.com, I ended up familiarizing myself with a tool designed by the University of Hong Kong. Vocabulary Profiler  is a simple but useful tool for vocabulary-centered lessons. If you enter a text, the program indicates high frequency words, giving special attention to words appearing on Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL). Although it’s possible to work on instinct and highlight vocabulary we think our students should know, it’s also good to have confirmation that our selection will be of value to the students. A set of lyrics, an excerpt from a novel, or a complete online article could be copied and pasted into this program, and we’d be guided in our decision regarding what vocabulary to study.

Our Colleagues: Establishing and maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship

I wrote once before about viewing our colleagues as a resource. As part of our professional development, I suggested tapping into an online teaching community to read about issues common to all classrooms, conducting peer observations to make us reflective teachers, and keeping a communication board in the staff room on which teachers could post tricky language questions for consideration and discussion. What else can our colleagues do for us? What can we do for them? Here are a few ideas.

• Share lesson plans. As an experienced teacher, your lesson plans may be so abbreviated that they may look something like a cross between a secret code and chicken scratch, but consider the benefits of rewriting a particularly successful lesson plan in a readable format and sharing it with your peers. Aren’t you curious to know what practices others are using in their classrooms? The exercise of reviewing someone else’s lesson plan makes you reflect on choices she or he made. You think about how you might have done things differently, but realize that this particular sequence of steps led to successful learning. If you’re part of a school staff, you can consider different platforms for sharing. For example, this can be done on a rotating basis at your monthly staff meeting. The presenter of the month can distribute hard copies for review. Online options for exchanging lesson plans include file sharing via a Yahoo Group, a wiki, or a virtual office at Tapped In. (Digital documents are great because they save paper and can be archived.)

• Share links. There are so many ESL/EFL-related sites out there. How can we find them? When you discover a good one, do you share it with your colleagues? The folks at TESOL’s Electronic Village taught me about social bookmarking. What a great concept!

• Exchange the favor of reviewing/ editing materials. Despite the fact that there are great printed resources out there, you still might find yourself (or choose to place yourself) in the position of writing original lesson or test material. Rule #1 about materials writing: proofread. Rule #2: Have someone else proofread when possible. It really helps to have a second set of eyes, and if that set of eyes belongs to a fellow teacher, she or he can also provide feedback regarding the overall quality of your work.

• Share your knowledge. There’s so much we can learn from one another. Sometimes it’s a small piece of information, such as some insight into pronouncing foreign names because you know a language that a colleague doesn’t. Other times it could be a set of skills. For example, I mentioned in another posting that colleagues may be able teach you how to use the technology you want to bring into your teaching. Perhaps you want to share links with colleagues and students. You’ve heard of social bookmarking, but never tried it. Try asking another teacher. Maybe she or he has an account on Delicious and can show you how it works.

So much of our time is spent in the company of our students or alone as we prepare our lessons and correct assignments. The time we spend with our peers may not amount to much in comparison, but it’s important. Whether it’s a staff room at a school or a virtual office, we need a place to interact with one another. Through our exchanges we can offer support and even promote one another’s professional development. Of course, realistically, not every shared moment is going to be work-related…and that’s fine. Enjoying one another’s company through a recap of a fun weekend or a discussion of recent news has a purpose, too. It creates comfort and familiarity. Our relationships grow, and we then feel more secure in taking and offering support. Besides, conversation and shared laughter add a warmth that every work environment needs.