Week 10: Course wrap up

I truly liked all readings and articles we have discussed because there was always something new in each of them but the articles I most liked and examined were those on how to improve writing and speaking. They even inspired the idea of my final project, not only because my students have to score well in writing in the school final exam but also due to the reality that writing and speaking correct English has become a rudimentay pre-requisite for them to attend well ranked schools after they get their Baccalaureate certificates. So I think I will be using most of the tools we have come across during this program mainly those applicable in a one computer classroom. However, I don't think I will be introducing tools like ANVILL to classroom although it is a rich and highly advanced system. In fact its being rich and advanced are the main reasons why I won't prioritize the use of  it in class. It requires well equipped room, broad-band network and highly qualified students at least digitally.

Week 10 : Sharing

Learning from colleagues is one among many benefits this course has brought about. However, given time constraints and maybe work obligations especially for participants who are currently teaching, I can feel we still didn’t have full chances to read all that everybody wrote. I personally -and many other participants- can’t deny I missed many well thought blogs and posts mainly in the discussion thread. For this I seriously think of gathering in one file all my humble reflections from week 1 up to 10 and send it to mates through their e-mails and I strongly recommend them to consider doing the same because their ideas are invaluable. This way we can investigate the details in our final projects and understand each other’s future teaching visions. This resembles somehow Natalya's proposal to create partnerships among participants in this course, which I see as a professional and committed call for action.

Week 9 : Multiple intelligence and Service learning

The focus on the learners styles and preferences is another manifestation of students centered teaching which is  quite an innovative and venturing choice that goes hand in hand with the requirements of a modern world much in need of students and citizens with highly advanced educational as well as personal skills, ones who are capable of taking initiative, react to the near and far environment  and respond positively to others in  multi-contextual situations .
 In this framework, I would love to share an experience we (teachers of English) supervised in coordination with the Ministry of Health.
 We selected a group of 10 computer smart students and scheduled part time sessions in a local hospital for them to teach the medical staff  word, power point and excel applications needed for administrative archiving, data storage and documentation. Prior to the two weeks schedule we sensitized students to the importance of service learning and how it opens up horizons in front of students to make connections and serve their community. The were also strongly recommended to assume the responsibility with much commitment and dedication. Our students had to visit the hospital thrice a week from 5 to 6 a.m. In return, some of the medical staff organized informative days in our school and gave  presentations about smoking, drugs and sexually  transmissible diseases.
 This experience contributed very much to bringing wide acclamation and praise to our school, expanded the realm of our students’ knowledge and relations and earned them high self esteem and confidence. It also paved way to new partnerships with other institutions like the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Sports and Youth.

Week 8 : ANVILL

  Hectic and tightly scheduled as it is, week 8 has still brought some surprises and too much learning. It was a pleasure to welcome and learn from Jeff. The newly introduced ANVILL system obviously needed much time and team work to be established as it is today. In addition to the information that Jeff included in Monday's post, I  browsed the OU webpage for more and I recommend my mates to do the same.  

http://casls.uoregon.edu/pages/tools/anvill.php

  

  Opposite to many other online course systems (CMS) or learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn, ANVILL tends to cater to teachers in traditional face-to-face contexts and those doing hybrid courses alike. To be more practical I created my ANVILL account and enabled my teacher account so it can be possible for me to add  lessons to my own dashboard. This is an opportunity for me to add audio or portfolio lessons as I am presently not teaching but by the time the next semester begins I will have already stored a handful of useful materials and lessons.

Week 7: My project - Data collection and Treatment

The process of data collection is probably the strongest axis upon which research is based. Finding relevant and valid data paves the way towards a correct outlining of the research and guarrantees the success of it. At this step of the project every team member feels responsible for the success or failure of the project and is consequently assigned a role to assume independently.
All found data is treated and categorized in terms of facts, opinions, staistics and arguments/counter arguments. Each member focuses on one category and organizes the data that falls into it. It's worth noting that at this stage the research is not and should not be a copy-paste version nor should it be based on parroting what is being read in the literature. Students can paraphrase, discuss, agree or disagree with the information they come across but also much of their stance ought to be reflected in the product.

Week 7 : About Padlet

The padlet task has been the entertainment of this week because I felt so amused adding materials to it. Familiarizing students with padlet tasks will certainly set a strong purpose for research and sharing, in addition to encouraging reading through making it more enjoyable.  As I was bringing videos and articles to the padlet wall, I thought it will be a great idea to use it with my students as a class e-magazine where they can publish - on weekly or monthly basis - their reflections about the didactic theme under study. 

Week 7 : Teacher-centred learning phased out

One of my last week's posts was entitled  “Collaboration Vs Individualization” and it seems to me that the discussion this week amounts to the same degree of importance as the previous. Here we will be discussing  ‘teacher controlled learning Vs autonomous learning’. It’s mainly a matter of terminology as I feel individualization is another label for autonomy. In his article “What is Learner Autonomy and How Can It Be Fostered?” Dimitrios Thanasoulas even referred to more synonyms like:
'independence' (Sheerin, 1991), 'language awareness' (Lier, 1996;James & Garrett, 1991), 'self-direction' (Candy, 1991), 'andragogy' (Knowles, 1980; 1983 etc.

My feeling is that autonomy is much bigger than a mere educational theory, it’s a social philosophy fed by the inborn human penchant for independence. By nature humans develop a strange inclination towards autonomy the older they get. Yet, after it was first defined by Holec the concept of autonomy encompassed other areas than being an inborn human capacity. It came to be used as the learners right to direct their own learning and bear full responsibility for its processes …, etc.

The thought that granting learners autonomy means turning teachers  redundant is a big fallacy, because the hardest task is to succeed in clarifying the broad goals and objectives of autonomy for students so they can understand the concept and so the learning takes place as fruitful as expected. As Sheerin (1997, cited in Benson & Voller, 1997: 63) succinctly puts it, '[t]eachers--have a crucial role to play in launching learners into self-access and in lending them a regular helping hand to stay afloat' Many teachers claim that they encourage autonomy in their classes while their students learning conditions float on frail ground lacking  of motivation, learning strategies/needs and language awareness. 

We as teachers all presume that the classroom is an extension of the outside world, which by consequence implies that  an autonomous student is the refection of an autonomous citizen. In other words, if  a student is not trained to assume responsibility in their real life, they will certainly misinterpret the notion of autonomy and responsibility when it comes to learning. This explains why many classes turn to chaos once learners are liberated from complete teacher control. This leads us to question the universality of the concept of learner autonomy and the its usability for all cultures and in all contexts:

“ ... learner training and other approaches which attempt to fit learners into preconceived models of the ‘ideal autonomous learner’ may lend support to the criticism that autonomy is a western concept inappropriate for ‘non-western’ students"  ('learner autonomy’ -  By Richard smith)

Week 6: My interactive PPT

I first used interactive PPT to entertain the presentations I used to give in national conferences held under the supervision of (MATE: Moroccan Association of Teachers of English) and I can say I had the required degree of proficiency to prepare nice and engaging slides. Later on, I introduced PPT into my class but frankly I rarely inserted hyperlinks and never knew how to insert a video before this week.

Because of the new things I learnt from the interactive PPT readings I am sure my next classroom PPTs will certainly be enriched with music and video clips, which guarantees young learners' full engagement because I know how much teenagers like animations be them visual or audio.

P.S: My PPT is there on the course wiki and I hope I did a good job.

Week 6: Collaboration Vs Individualization

I have come across many posts in the discussion thread preaching cooperative work and I do share the same attitude towards collabortaion regardless of the associated students agitation and "disorder". Yet I believe collaboration oughtn’t to overwhelm individualization as it was explained in the article  By Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw “Teaching large classes”Despite the sincere recommendations made by teachers to familiarize their students with collaboration and group work, there still remains a responsibility to assume regarding every single student in the group as an independent individual whose needs, styles, opinions and queries have to be fully taken care of. I liked and found very insightful the couple of suggestions mentioned in the article as to how to individualize one’s classroom :“Professors can make their classes feel more personal by coming to class early enough to talk personally to students, moving around the room while they lecture, staying after class to answer questions, holding office hours, and scheduling informal meetings outside the office where students can ask questions.”

Week 6 : My project refined.

This week I will be refining much of the insight I shared last week in the technology enhanced change because I am actually not teaching this term.
My reflections during step 4 focused on creating online library accounts and using photo shop web sites to motivate students write first and then to improve the quality of their writings. I already shared the following web links  “http://www.my-diary.org”  and  “https://penzu.com/”
This week I will be pushing the project a step further by adding extra materials and thoughts to the subject matter and handling the writing issue from a more challenging perspective namely research and paper writing. I assume that the frequent and well scheduled practice and use of online libraries (for reading) and diaries (for writing personal impressions on studied materials) will result in an incomparable enthusiasm towards writing and in audacious attempts  to express more complicated feelings and ideas. Certainly the more confident students feel, the more engaged they get.

Well written rubrics and clarified objectives together with consistent practice  at this point will make students capable of  paraphrasing sentences and expressing  ideas using their own words. Having achieved a reasonable level of mastery, students will not be confined to writing personal paragraphs or short essays. They will be assigned harder and more controversial topics to conduct research on, instead. At this level I will be providing a couple of  instructive web sites I came across as I was collecting relevant data for my project.
(http://www.questia.com) is, as they put it  “ a collection of academic journals which offers thousands of articles from some of the world’s leading publishers.”
Easy to browse and flexible as it is, ‘questia.com’ provides an entire collection of books, academic journals, magazines and newspaper to search by category.
The first step at this level is to pair up students or make groups of three at most, then suggest  varied areas for them to research and carry out investigations into.

After they made their choices, pairs or groups will be required to go through at least two of the following procedures:

· Create an account on: en.wikisource.org/wiki/Portal:Education
· Get a free virtual card by joining  “https://archive.org/  ”
· Create an account on: http://openlibrary.org/subjects ”

These rich resources with abundant information in various fields constitute a solid base for the data collection phase. I expect a high degree of competitiveness  between groups at this phase . At the next move, every member will be assigned a specific role  while treating the collected data: sifting, organizing then studying the information at hand. It’s worth noting that individualization here does not and should not undermine the essence of collaboration.

Week 5 : Human rights WebQuest

I really enjoyed preparing my human rights webquest where I tried to make students shed light on international and local human rights issues in their research. Appealing and engaging as it is, some teachers can still prefer to avoid using webquests under the pretext that PBL requires a reasonable amount of digital literacy and might result in more distraction and time consumption. For me, PBL embodies the "learning through doing" theory and this is what makes students and teachers grow fond of it.
Link to my webquest  : http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=205955

Week 5 : Rubrics and learners autonomy

According to Heidi Andrade a rubric is by definition “a document that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing the criteria, or what counts, and describing levels of quality from excellent to poor”.  

The thing is, the role of rubrics can’t be cut off the overall context as it is the extension of a teacher’s approach that depends on presenting (pre-stage), guiding/monitoring (while-stage) then evaluating (post-stage) with the teacher’s voice and stance not overwhelming students’  through all these stages.

Autonomy is a key facet in modern teaching because it simply triggers more self-confidence which on its turn leads to more motivation and total student involvement. However, teachers don’t possess  magic wands and can’t by consequence make their  students autonomous only by wishing so. Autonomy comes as a result of an exhaustive preparation and adjustment of the learning environment to fit the students’ prerequisites and expectations. We can’t for example talk about  autonomy of the learner when the latter is not clear enough about the course goals or skeptical about the relevance and/or adequacy of the course book and the tools being used to teach it.

I actually tried in my reading rubric (see course wiki) to cover the reading activity and the tasks related to it  from beginning to end. Not only that , I also provided room for learners out-of class experience and knowledge  (learners stance and voice) and evaluated the way it is successfully invested in the reading task.

To conclude with, I realize now that PBL together with rubrics  and alternative assessment are becoming a MUST because through my humble couple of experience in Drama and Debate projects, I have seen how PBL succeeds where other strategies and teaching methods fail.

Week 4 : Class room Connection

I am sure you have noticed how rich and constructive this week’s readings are, with enormous websites which cater to divers tastes and school levels. I almost got lost amidst the numerous web sites which provide downloadable videos, e-texts and lots of pictures to analyze and interpret to build writing and reading skills.  In fact, all those links are useful if implemented in the right context and in reasonable ‘doses’ . I guess every teacher chooses what suits him/her best and what responds the most to their students curiosity and tastes.

The  paper by Jarek Krajkaen was very interesting as it starts with a valuable summary of previous research which reflect the innovative points of view as to maximizing the presence of the digital dimensions in the classroom daily practices. A very stunning dimension among these is the new  role teachers have to assume in a wired classroom. It’s no longer sufficient for a teacher to be fluent speaker who masters the use of the language structures and functions. According to Jarek, and this I totally agree with, digital proficiency along with language mastery equal a good teacher today.

It goes without saying that the pal connection tool is so amazing and promising not only for being well-recognized among both CALL professionals and wired language teachers but for the peer evaluation culture it promotes as well. You can’t imagine the amount and quality of learning that occurs when students rely on their peers, a thing I came to believe in after the classroom connection experience I witnessed with one of my colleagues connecting through Skype an advanced Science class  with an American class (same age and same interests). Coordination between teachers on both sides takes place before hand, fix a date and a time for students to exchange queries on weather, culture, eating habits, free time activities and so forth.  Being afforded complete autonomy to make their voices heard, students do practice listening and speaking with the teacher interfering the least possible.                                     

Really a non-such experience we look forward to clone over and over and over. 

Week 4 : Computer based testing

Going like six or seven years backwards I remember having a student in my class who was kind of obssessed with listening activities. There were times when she would ask me : "why don't we have listening activities on daily basis ?" which came to me as a surprise because all other mates in her class didn't hesitate to show signs of dissatisfaction everytime I bring the tape recorder to the classroom. She was the only one with that unique zeal for listening tasks.

I came to know later from her that she failed her TOEFL test many times because of the listening section and ever since she was trying to improve that skill by exposing her ears to anything that sounds English, which I advised her to quit doing and to focus on native speaker instead if she were to do better in future listening tests.

Honestly, I didn't have much to help her with apart from a couple of pieces of advice because deep inside me I still believed she needed much time to manage to redress her ears to grasp a full native speaker's talk. I only wish I knew what I know today, then I would have recommended a list of website which help students get ready for computer based tests, for example:
-  http://www.learn4good.com/
-  http://toefl.jumbotests.com/
-  http://www.examenglish.com/TOEFL/index.php

I really believe that the way modern technology has become available and inexpensive will inevitably contribute to fixing the problem of listening especially for students who plan for higher studies abroad. One last thing to mention is that listening is believed to be among the hardest skills to develop because it demands longer period of times and regular exposure to native speakers.

In addition to this, there are language features that are known to native speakers instinctively like stress, tone, vibration, intonation, pitch patterns, accent and prosodic features and which affect the production and perception of much of the spoken discourse and help uderstand even even the mute or neutralized parts of it. As Maria Busa put it in her article :

" Individuals who start acquiring a language after early childhood rarely develop native-like speech patterns even after considerable exposure to a second language. In fact, in many cases second-language learners speak with a foreign accent"

Unfortunately non-native speakers aren't naturally endowed with the gift to distinguish these features instinctively as they are listening. That needs a pretty long way to go and a really intensive practice.

CALL

   Rich and innovative as it is, CALL is not a program meant to substitute face to face speaking activities. This program is designed to address - among other issues -  to  problems related to anxiety and psychological inconveniences which may occur to ‘some’ students during real classroom confrontation. To me, it’s therefore another instructive and constructive  tool that needs to be implemented to improve the quality and the way speaking is integrated in the curriculum.  

  I can’t deny that such applications as SLIM and ‘Conversation’ whose designers have apparently paid careful attention to minute details, do  open up learning horizons which definitely outnumber those created by teachers in classrooms. Nevertheless, people speak to people  not to machines in real life and this leads us to believe that CALL can solve teaching problems but it can be the biggest problem in case we rely solely on it.

Google et al

    Well, the first thing I would love to share with you dear coursemates in the beginning of week 2,  is my infinite enthusiasm attending  the lovely music festival which is held in my country, Morocco. It was really an exciting opportunity to see live performances of lots of Arab and American musicians and artists.

   There is no doubt that searching the net for useful and relevant information is one of the most pressing problems  students and educators have to face sometimes, not because the searching task is time consuming and tiresome – which in fact is true – but rather because they often have to sift for so long through the heaps of useless or vague information before they could find what they really need, which is regarded  as a major inconvenience given the demanding hours they spend at work or the straining moments they devote to homework.

   However, with Noodletools.Com, most if not all that burden is soothed particularly when you use these new engines systematically and purposefully. I have learnt that Google which has been enjoying the lion's share as a searching engine is not the only available tool. There are actually better ones with a more professionally trusted profile and academically powerful reputation like iSeek, and Intute. Maybe due to my laziness  or to Google's availability I little thought of trying something else beofre this week, but this   teaches me a lesson which implies that having something available doesn't mean that it's the only thing out there. Knowledge is just around, yet it doesn't come to us. We'd better look for it.

  Before I say ‘Good Bye’ , please allow me to share the link below which gathers a couple of privileged engines which I couldn’t find at the Noodletools.com list:http://www.rasmussen.edu/student-life/blogs/college-life/15-educational-search-engines/

Blogging

Hi all

True teaching consists of stimulating the students' thinking processes somehow to make them earn the information rather than receive it passively. Blogging is actually one way of getting both teachers and students engaged in and out of the classroom and an invitation to peers and parents to criticize or evaluate the learning process, to support the failures and celebrate the successes, which I see as the most practical quality a blog can have. 

The first time I thought about sharing a blog with my students I was mainly aiming to encourage them to read in English, then later I had them react to what they read by commenting or installing posts of their own on the blogpage and I can say that things went a bit better than with classroom traditional reading assignments.

I personally, learnt that teachers in the present digital era need digital approaches to keep their styles updated and compatible with the preferences of the wired generation they work with.

Best.