Just say no.

A presentation with an interesting title which reminds me of my younger days. I think it was used for drug awareness or something similar! It was presented by Helen Waldron and was about negotiation, especially for teachers.

She is a very experienced teacher of Business English, great chunks of which involve negotiation. She has discovered that there is a difference between negotiation as taught and negotiation in business practice.

After a few warm up questions she asked the participants for their definitions of negotiation before presenting us with her first information slide.

She talked about the 'Getting to Yes' book which I have actually got and have read. It is orientated in the 80s and looks at trying to get equitable solutions for all parties involved in negotiation. Business classes often require English for use in negotiations.

She went through the different things that we may need to teach clients about negotiating in the slide above. Mainly language in negotiations. She felt that there was more to this than meets the eye so some of her colleagues went to a conference about negotiation and came back with the things listed at the bottom of the slide under what else.

Following on we looked at the theory of negotiation, a lot based on the 'Getting to yes' book. First of all there are two types of negotiation. Distributive negotiation means winning at the expense of the other party. It is a win-lose situation which often results in the losing party having negative feelings. If this is a customer, this may be the last time you see this customer. The second time is called Integrative negotiation. Each side tries to meet the needs of the other. This is a win-win situation where each party feels more or less satisfied. In business this would mean that you are more likely to keep that customer.

Then she went on to talk about negotiating styles

She pointed out that each style has advantages and disadvantages, so none of them are perfect in every situation.

Then she asked about the differences between EFL teachers negotiations. She pointed out that we are often negotiating from a personal point of view, we personally win or lose and it is asymmetrical as we are often not in a power of strength. And finally it's not what we do best! Most of us have never been taught how to negotiate.

Then she looked at the qualities of business people and teachers, by asking people she knew what their qualities they would ascribe to each field and the results were maybe surprising, maybe unsurprising.

Then she looked at the future of the workforce and it seems that a few powerful people get more and more and the rest of the workforce become increasingly more fragmented. We, as teachers, can establish support networks and build up information in order to present a united front to those we negotiate with. (Personally it appears that often these days, people and companies just want the cheapest option regardless of the quality, this means that 'pirates' will often take work from proper teachers by undercutting prices!)

Finally she looked at some other negotiating positions, the first one was BATNA and the second ZOPRA.

For teachers if we understand BATNA it puts us in a stronger negotiating position and ZOPRA means that we can move into a stronger BATNA position.

She finished off with a list of her references including this video about a guy who goes around asking people to do things on spec. (A bit like some schools with teachers!) I must admit that this has become my modus now. If you don't like my price, go somewhere else!





A very useful session to hopefully help us achieve our desires in life.

PS I found this pdf from Harvard on negotiating styles https://hms.harvard.edu/

Making Pronunciation Visual

This presentation was given by Thelma Marques and this is one are I wanted to know more about because generally my regular students don't have problems with pronunciation but my newer students do!

 First of all she pointed out that nearly half the letters on the phonemic chart are common alphabet letters and 25% of the chart is diphthongs which are combinations of symbols.

She talked about introducing new language by showing the phonetic words rather than the alphabet words to help to improve students pronunciation before they see the spelling.

I think that this is a really good idea, you could present this slide and ask students what they are, then ask them to match them to the symbols (assuming that they know the Zodiac system) and then finally the words maybe embedded in a text. (Just my thoughts at this point - don't know what Thelma was going to suggest.)

Thelma then showed us the following image to help with learning/teaching vowel sounds

She gave us a website for vocabulary which I had never seen before http://www.languageguide.org/english/vocabulary/ (This looks like a brilliant resource, thank you Thelma.) She told us that she would use the slides from the site in the classroom and ask the students to match the symbols to the picture. In this example she used a slide about body parts. She then used the idea of gapped lyrics with phonetic prompts which is a really good idea. I have used gapped lyrics many times in the classroom but never thought about this. She gapped body part  in lyrics from an Adele song.

Next she used a video clip from Friends and asked the sts to write down all the words with a particular sound in it. To focus the students on the sound. She also showed us how to make word stress visual (using dots) and used the same clip for students to find the sound(s).

Next we were shown a word cloud showing different words with the same spelling but different pronunciation so students could work on different sounds.

She suggested giving students simpler words grouped into the sounds phonetically and then ask the students to look up the words in a dictionary paying special attention to the phonetics, students could then ask them to add the words to the original groups. Again this is a nice activity especially if it is made into a race which would reduce the chance of the students becoming bored/distracted.

Next she showed us how she uses http://www.thisismarvelous.com/national-flags-made-from-each-countrys-traditional-foods/ to work with sounds.

Again all the language is presented without the students seeing a single word. Thelma is obviously a very creative lady! I would have loved to see some more of her activities.

Kahoot and Socrative as online tools for testing

This presentation was given by Marijana Smolcec who I feel certain is another webhead that I met online a few years ago. First of all she pointed out the most important thing for people like me and that is that both of these tools are free. Then she told us that she was inspired to try Kahoot by a blog article written by Arjana Blazic.

The wordle above gives many of the reasons to use these types of tools, the main ones are that feedback is immediate and students find the tools engaging. They are also very easy to use.

Kahoot is a tool which you can use for quizzes, discussions and surveys. You need to open an account on getkahoot.com. Then the students need to go to kahoot.it in order to enter the quizzes/activities.

With Kahoot you can add pictures and videos, specifying start and end times, as well as ordinary text. You can edit your quiz whenever you like and you can also share it on social network sites. Needless to say you have to be connected to the internet and at the moment only multiple choice is available.

The tool seems quite easy to use and enables you to download or upload to google the students results. It can be used on many different types of device and you can use quizzes that have been prepared by others and made public.

When making questions there is a limit of 96 characters, from the screenshot that Marijana showed us it seems very intuitive to use. One feature worth mentioning is that you can set a time limit for each question. The only drawback is that you can only create multiple choice questions.

Then we looked at Socrative, Marijana thinks that this is more sophisticated in some ways as it has two settings, student paced and teacher paced. Teacher paced is similar to Kahoot but student paced allows the students to jump around withing the quiz as long as it is completed within a time pre-set by the teacher.

There are several advantages that Socrative has over Kahoot, first of all you can use different types of question - multiple choice (as with Kahoot), True/False, Yes /No and short answer questions too. You can also download your quizzes as a PDF that you can use as a traditional quiz/test. There is also a race that students can play thus adding gamification to the mix.

The first thing to do when you go to Socrative and change the name of your room to something that you can remember. You can either create your quiz online as with Kahoot or you can actually upload quizzes as an excel spreadsheet but apparently care is needed to make sure that the correct answer is chosen. Again preparing a quiz online seems very intuitive. You can add pictures but not video.

Looking at a comparison between the two tools it seems that Socrative has the edge, the only disadvantage that I could see is that it doesn't allow you to add video (yet?). Kahoot seems to be more fun based than study based.

She then allowed the participants to take part in one of the Socrative quizzes that she had created about Lord of the Rings.

This was a very energetic presentation, Marijana is a very enthusiastic presenter and I certainly do intend to have a look at the tools at a later stage. Thank you Marijana.

Teaching to different learner types.

This session was presented by Majorie Rosenberg, all teachers know that different learners have different preferences for learning, think VAKOG.

Teaching to Different Learner Types from Dr. Nellie Deutsch (Ed.D)

She spoke from her experiences as a language learner and found that she had problems learning foreign languages, then she started research to find out whether other students had similar problems.

She then talked about learning types, she for example, is a visual learner which is why she had problems with auditory learning. She explained that classrooms have a variety of different learner preferences but many teachers teach in the way that they prefer to learn. Using a mix of teaching styles allow us to reach more of the learners. Halina pointed out that many learners have different learning preferences in different situations and one may be more dominant at any given time.

Preferences are just people's style nothing to do with good or bad, just different. In this meeting she talked about three different learning models, shown in the slide underneath.

She started off by talking about the VAK model, and first of all I discovered something new. That there are two forms of kinaesthetic preference, kinaesthetic motoric and kinaesthetic emotional. She said that younger people are mainly kinaesthetic motoric but once they start to go through puberty they tend to become more kinaesthetic emotional. She pointed out that when students are under stress they tend to revert to their preferred style, in exams, when asked to speak ....

She then showed us how we can work out a person's learning preferences from their handwriting! A visual learner has a well-organised page with key words carefully underlined - not cutting through letters that drop below the line.

Auditory students don't very often take notes, but she did have some that she could show us. It wasn't as neatly laid out as the visual learner and the writing also wasn't as clear.

The kinaesthetic learner writes in a very scrappy manner and makes boxes around things to give them solidity, they will also cross things out when they have been achieved so they can physically see.

Slides 14,16,18 & 20 in the slideshow above give us the characteristics of each of the 4 different types of learner with some advice. The odd number slides give characteristics of teachers with those preferences.

For the visual learner she suggested making notes into flashcards so that they can be learned in different orders to assist with recall. Auditory learners need to write things down that they have learned auditorily. K. Emotional learners need to like the people they are working with and the material they are working with. They respond well to rewards like badges which make them feel good. K. Motoric students need to write while moving and love to use their sense of touch.

Next she told us about the Global/Analytic model. Global people use their emotions and like to get the whole picture whereas Analytic people prefer to get the detail.

Global people need to learn to take criticism without attaching emotion to it but they can work well in a group.  Analytic people need to work on getting an overview and not get too bogged down in detail but they don't get so upset about criticism.

Finally she talked about the Mind Organisation model in which there are four different styles.

This was developed by a colleague of hers after observing learners in the classroom. The Power Planner is a person who likes to know exactly what is happening and when, they need to accept change and other people's point of view. Expert Investigators are more analytical/logical but they may need to learn to work with others as they can prefer to work alone. Radical reformers are the gamblers who like to take chances. They may need to learn to fit in whilst maintaining their individuality. The last type of learner in this model is the flexible friend. (Which I thought was my Visa card!) these are people people, they are very creative and imaginative but may need to concentrate less on personal relationships when learning.

Responding to a question, she confirmed that, like other models, people may find themselves between different quadrants.

To create a complete profile we need to look at all of the models.

Nobody is one type, we are all individuals, and to be good teachers we need to try and cater for many different sensory channels.

Having looked at the different kinds of learners (and teachers) Marjorie then went on to talk about different types of activities. First of all we looked at VAK activities. The first one was 'What have I changed.' to practice present perfect. The next was 'The Statue' where students make a statue by working one at a time. When they have completed they have to go back and talk about what changed, to practice past simple. Following on we did 'Describe and draw' this practices present simple and present continuous as well as there is/there are. 

 

Now we looked at Global/ Analytic activities.  The first one was 'What would you do if ..',  Which is aimed at global thinkers.

The next one was 'The yes/no hot seat.' which I seem to think I have seen a version of before. Apparently it is a more analytical game.

This is good training for making sure students can find different ways of saying things.  She then went on to 'The Envelope Game'.

 

 which is both Global and Analytical. This gives lots of vocabulary and lots of other language skills.

The next activity was 'Can you sell it.' This is a game for the Power Planner student.

The last activity was the personal mindmap, students will ask questions to the teacher to find out what the information relates to.

The students then do the same for their lives but as they choose their own areas they can avoid talking about things that they want but talk about the things they do.

Marjorie finished off by asking the participants to reflect on the activities they have seen, which they have used and which they liked. I think over the years I have seen and used all of these except the first one.

This was a useful session because I learned some more about different learning styles and also the rationale for using different activities with different types of learner. If her book is half as interesting as her session it is a definite buy for teachers - Spotlight on Learning Styles published by DELTA.

Thank you Marjorie.

Introducing Trello

This session was presented by Mbarak Akaddar, who I have previously come across on webheads (See EVO - Electronic Village Online) Trello is a collaboration and management tool.

This looks like a useful tool for teachers to organise materials as well as having to do lists as well. Unfortunately the sound on both the WizIQ platform and the downloaded recording were very quiet so I was unable to hear the details. Youtube was the same so I found this video on youtube.

It looks like a good way to organise bookmarks for teachers. And Mbarak uses it to keep track of all the work he needs to do for EVO! You can prioritise tasks and colourise the cards to which means that it can be easier to keep track of things. You can also add attachments and links to the cards. You can also add checklists which  certainly is a useful extra. It is also available for mobile phones too.

I wish I could have heard more about Trello from Mbarak but as I said the sound was very difficult for me to listen to on this one. It is, however, definitely a tool worth checking out.

Motivating Students.

I thought the title of this session was going to be the longest, but fortunately I found the shorter version. This session fully titled 'Motivating Students: Teaching with unplugged fine tuning to incentivise autonomous learning, maximising results' was given by Susan Brodar.

She started off by giving us an overview of her teaching and the lessons she teaches. She shared a course that she has taught with us where the students do as much work at home (shared via Dropbox)  as possible so the class time is spent on speaking, feedback and introducing new materials. Nellie commented that it is important for students to take responsibility for  their learning.

Like me, she likes to give an overview of some grammar points which are often spread out over many units in a book or even more than one book. Sometimes it helps students to get an overview of some grammar and see the connections.

She gives links to students for websites which help with autonomous learning, these include podcasts, TEDtalks and audio books and a new one for me voscreen. (I had a look at it and it is a brilliant tool for listening comprehension!) and Elemental for pronunciation work. She also gives students other advice such as using sticky notes placed strategically to help with vocabulary.

She also shared some other sites that she uses.

She showed us how she personalises collections of links for students depending on their needs.

She then went on to talk about teaching unplugged which she had been using for a long time before she realised what it was called!

She talked about different tools that she uses and then reviewed the way that children learn by immersion and play. She tries to incorporate this in her lessons too in a way she calls living the language.

Elisa was a special needs student who she involved in her daily routine and used the activities to teach her the language connected with the tasks. This was another brilliant presentation and I have taken many screenshots of her slides so that I can look more closely at all the tools and ideas that she showed us. For me this was the most practical presentation so far because of all of Susan's wonderful ideas. Thank you very much!

I am adding her website as she has a list of links for students there. bilingual-communications

Moodle : Continuous Online Assessment

This presentation was given by Mignon Smit 'a stay at home mum' who set up a website to help school children to test themselves. She joined MM7 and now she runs several websites.

First of all most people do a pre-assessment to find out where students are before they start, then they do a continuous assessment to help students understanding and reduce the risk of drop out and finally they do a summative assessment to see how the students have improved.

She is only concerned with continuous assessment as the teachers use the other two. Where she lives parents are given a copy of the syllabus and she wanted to know how her children were progressing. She worked creating the course at the same pace as her children at school and she also doesn't charge to avoid copyright problems.

She then went on to talk about the different types of question and then into her way of creating the course. First of all you need the topic, then the questions, you create the course and finally create the quiz for each topic. She told us about gamification of the quizzes by adding badges to the quiz.

Some tips for writing questions is not to repeat things in the answers, better to put it  in the question. Avoid double negatives always use positives whenever possible and finally to use except' rather than 'not' questions. (all of these are ... except..) She also talked about some does and don'ts of distractors

In addition to the above points she talked about making the options about the same length. It is quite common for the correct answer to be longer than the others and I have personally taken courses where it was possible to predict most of the answers just by selecting the longest!

She also gave us a list of things to avoid.

When the students take her tests they have the option to give feedback to her if they think there is a problem with a question. She showed us a list of question types which are available in Moodle.

As the children were getting bored with multiple choice questions she introduced Hot Potatoes activities including crosswords and other tools which reengaged them again

She finished up by showing some feedback from her young learners and their parents and the results were generally positive. Unfortunately the schools where her children go to school do not allow the use of tech so she will be homeschooling her children using tech.

This was a brilliant session with lots of useful ideas and practical advice. Thank you Mignon.

A course with Moodle

This presentation was given by Prof. Ludmila Smirnova who appears to be very well qualified to inform us about online teaching and she told us that she was going to tell us about creating courses online. She showed us the following graphic and confirmed that all these activities are interlinked.

She advised us that the best way to create a course is to immerse yourself, to get your hands dirty by trying it out yourself. She has worked on a number of learning management systems (LMS) and has been using Moodle since 2008 and finds that it is the most user and teacher friendly.

She gave us another slide to illustrate the process of creating a course on the work of Gilly Salmon. The process is broken down into 5 stages - the slide is shown below.

First of all students need to be supported and encouraged, they need a map of the course so they know the direction the course will take and what they are expected to do. It is best to personalise this as much as possible so the students know that they are dealing with a real person. Pre course communication is also important. There is also a zero page for students to learn about the technology and what the course entails. She gave us a run through of her zero page which seemed to be specific to a teacher training course.

Having the students relaxed we can now move onto stage 2 - online socialisation. Personalising the course makes it more motivating for students and having the opportunity to socialise with other students also helps to motivate them and engage them. You can use polls, differentiated questionnaires, Students can create their own goals within the course and then at the end of the course they can look back at how they progressed. They can choose the groups in which they will work and Ludmila creates tasks which require the students to work together. The prime objective is to create a community of learners.

Stage three is information exchange.There are a number of tools within Moodle which enable the exchange of information, the ones that Ludmila recommended are summarised in the picture below.

And needless to say there are a myriad of tools available for sharing information outside Moodle including youtube, livebinders and  webquests to name but a few. I hope to have a look at a few of these later when I have some time. Some I have heard of and used but some are completely new to me.

By using a variety of tools learners engage with the material, interact with fellow learners and the professor and identify useful sources of information.

We then moved on to learning construction, so now learners are active and independent but learning in a social context. New knowledge is constructed based on their interactions with other students and finally they reflect on their learning to create a deeper understanding of their knowledge.  Ludmila talked about synchronous and asynchronous learning and then when through some of the asynchronous tools available on Moodle including glossary, database, lesson module (this sounds like it is very useful for differentiated learning) and workshops which allows for self and peer evaluation.

She then went on to look at some asynchronous tools which are available outside Moodle and presented the following slide.

By using these to explain the work which they have done they will actually improve their learning! Then she went on to talk about synchronous tools including WizIQ, the platform that we are having our sessions on. Google Hangouts which is free and Adobe Connect which isn't! It is important that students are encouraged to contribute and refine their contributions and their learning.

Finally we moved onto the fifth part, development. Development of critical thing skills, creative skills so students have to show what they have learned.  She showed us a Bloom's Taxonomy of technology tools that can be used by students to show their progress.

Tools that she likes to use include padlet, glogster, voicethread, knowmia and a new one for me, jognog. the students use the tools autonomously and take responsibility for their own learning. They develop the skills of critical thinking and reflection.

This was s useful session as it gave us a good insight into the way that Ludmila, a seasoned professional, prepares her courses and the tools and logic in selecting the tools she uses. Thank you
Ludmila.

Preparing for exams - twist and flip to succeed.

This presentation was given by Christina Chorianopoulou and I was interested to see it as I often teach exam students.

She started off by canvassing people's experiences of teaching exam classes. The ideas varied from reteaching and practice to alternative teaching by not using exam materials but by boosting students language skills. We were given a quote from Erin Gruwell that we should teach the students not  the exam.Christina likes to use what the students bring into the classroom.

She often uses students surveys, short video presentations and comic strips all of which, but especially the last 2, can be created by students. She showed us some really good presentations introducing students which had been made by students. Again people in the chatbox suggested Voki and build your wild self  as other tools which can and have been used.

Next we talked about which exams people take, the majority of people are told by the school which exams they have to take. Christina said that students should be involved in the decision making process and therefore need to know what is involved in the exam. This boosts their confidence and thus improves their motivation.

And by creating and using relevant content we can create which will cater to their interest and hopefully help them to become stronger students.

She shared a slide presentation with us that we can use too the-book-beyond

Next she started talking about twisting and flipping, changing the formats of tasks to keep students engaged. She took a students written work and then turned it into a comprehension exercise for other students. The other students made the comprehension questions!

She said that mobile apps are always used in her classes, dictionaries, games and polls to name just a few and rounded off by talking about collaborative learning. The benefits of collaborative learning are peer input, peer assessment and sharing of good practices.

This was another practical session with some useful ideas that we can take into the class and use ourselves. I got quite a lot out of this one as well as seeing some new tools. Thank you Christina.

Looking at the slide presentation I also discovered coggle which I had never come across before. This is a simple word mapping website which can be used to create vocabulary maps.

This is a very quick coggle that I made about this webinar! NB Click to enlarge.

Teaching and learning along the way

This presentation was given by Nives Torres and she wanted to tell us about her experiences as an online teacher and her learning curve.

First of all she told us that it is very important to create interactive learning materials for use in the digital classroom in order to maintain student attention and motivation.  Secondly she told us that technology means everything is fast and immediate. So materials have to be inviting, enticing and rewarding.

She then asked us to complete a google form and almost immediately we received a certificate in our email. This shows that we can use google docs to communicate things with our students almost immediately if the students complete a certain amount of a form which you can specify, they can receive feedback.

She then showed us some animated presentations she made using https://plotagon.com/ These were clever and would definitely engage students. I personally have made several videos using moovly and powtoons.While watching my only thought was how long it takes to make these. I will have to play later and see.

She then talk about using screencast tools (in her case youcam) to create videos which she can embed in emails as well as courses. I am lucky that I seem to have quite a good and simple screen casting tool. Here Nellie pointed out that some students don't like too much technology or creating lots of new accounts and Nives concurred with this. She hopes to see the ability to embed videos in google docs introduced in the future like you can with google slides.

We then looked at some videos on using various tools.

First of all we looked at a video about audacity which is a good free audio tool which I already use. At the end of a lesson, especially with students with pronunciation problems, I make an audio of the relevant vocabulary which I  then upload for them to download and they can then practise at home.

She and Nellie mentioned that you can use audacity to make the audio and then upload it to soundcloud .

Then we looked at a slide presentation by Nives, she told us that the title of her presentation was because amongst other things teaching goes hand in hand with learning, teachers do learn as they progress and with each year of teaching and teachers can learn form social networks. She told us that learning by watching is exciting, learning by making your own videos is better and learning by helping others to make the videos is the best way to learn.

Doctor Nellie seems to be her hero, mentoring and leading the way for us all. Collaborating is also a valuable way of learning and she shared a list of people that she has collaborated with including some members of the audience! For people that complain that they can't collaborate in their country, technology allows us to communicate with people from all over the world. We can create our own PLN by using technology including (among others) Twitter and Facebook.

She then went on to talk about google forms and blogging.

There are links to all the tools mentioned on the slideshow available here. This was a very interesting and practical session with lots of ideas and tools to experiment with - several of which I had not tried before. Thank you Nives, for this presentation.

Moodle Blocks

This was one of the presentations specifically about Moodle, presented by Nellie Deutsch - the Moodle expert.

First of all she ran through the levels which denote the rights that you have, the lowest level is a guest who has no rights, then a student, a teacher with no rights, a teacher with rights and the highest level is a manager.

Then she went on to recap previous sessions she had given about learning and learning by teaching and highlighted some tools that students prefer to use because they are available on their smartphones.

From the list that Nellie gave us earlier the tools that students are likely to prefer are movenote, presentme, plotagon and slidespeech.

We talked about the tinymce editor in the moodle which is a rich editor because it has the ability to include multimedia. You need to click on the symbol at the left of the task bar to see the other 2 task bars. The multimedia sections are called PoodLL.

The next part of our assignments were then given to us and we were told that we now have manager rights to be able to carry out these assignments.

As a manager we get to create tabs, hide tabs and label our tabs. Then we can turn on editing and add blocks. Blocks are apps and plugins you can add and work on, these facilitate the use of general tools. She showed us how to insert plugins and there is a complete list here  These are listed on moodle and administrators can add blocks for other people to use.

I had trouble following the video to see exactly what Nellie was doing so I found this video by Moodle on youtube. (Problem solved later - son hogging bandwidth!)

There are actually a whole series of bites-size videos on this channel. There is also a complete rundown of how to use moodle here by Russell Stannard of teachertrainingvideos. (I haven't had a chance to watch it yet but Russell's videos are usually very thorough.

Nellie talked about one of the blocks for badges and then showed us how to gain our badges in this MOOC. (I think this would have been nice to see earlier in the course - maybe day 1 or 2)

Thank you for this informative video.

Value Added - The Barrier Free Campus.

This presentation was given by Drs Fahriye and Zehra Altinay, twin professors from Cyprus. They were talking from their experiences in this field.

They started off by highlighting the situation by showing a picture of various fish on the Barrier Reef. The idea is that all of these fish irrespective of their size or habits are interdependent in order for their survival and the university campus should seek to provide a similar environment, where all students irrespective of their abilities and disabilities should be able to thrive together.

Dr Fahriye said that Universities should strive to provide equal access and opportunities for all students. They want to increase the potential of everyone and consider the construction of knowledge and the transferable skills and human life skills in a digital society.

They pointed out that the signs of an educated person are knowledge and thinking skills along with technological and leadership skills. They used a quote from Helen Keller "The best educated person is the person who understands life best."

Effectiveness was the next theme. Effectiveness means the adaptability to change, the flexibility in ourselves, how we approach problem solving and improve our self esteem and finally questioning skills. The learning environment needs to foster these skills too and include them in the creation of courses. Both the person and the system needs to be adaptable to change.

The learning environment needs to address the multiple themes of imparting knowledge and having a transparency in learning and teaching as well as trust in the management and encouraging creativity.

They use a fish bone diagram to solve the problem so they can see what effect each action has on the process. They talked about the tools which are available to set the quality standards these include human, methodology, machines, equipment and finally environment. To achieve quality they need to use infrastructure and technology, student voice (What are their expectations and demands.), accessibility and usability of facilities and lastly campus activities which promote the needs of all students.

All of the points in the last paragraph combine together if used correctly to create a barrier free campus.

Following on they looked at the indicators of a barrier free campus. They talked about awareness of disability and support of various forms that are available for disabled students. If we meet all of the requirements in the slide then we are operating a barrier free campus and we are operating a win-win policy.

They summarised that quality requires appropriate conditions, student expectations, program implementations and measurable outcomes and actions.

They rounded up by telling us a little of their experiences and work. This was a very interesting talk but unfortunately there were some problems with the audio which distorted voices from time to time. I apologise for any errors or omissions which may occurred in this report.

Digital storytelling in the classroom.

This session was given by the CEO and founder of 'Storyboard That' Aaron Sherman. He started off by giving us a little of his background which is not what we would expect. his background is in commerce and business.

He also gave us the names of two additional websites which he started

quickrubric.com and photosforclass.com

which are both fantastic resources for teachers and well worth investigating. (I have already used photosforclass to find photos for my course.)

He pointed out that storyboards are highly flexible graphic organisers which can be adapted to any lesson, it makes learning fun and his site makes producing them really easy. His team includes not only technical people but also teachers who have a direct feed into the team.

Aaron showed us a typical goals and objectives list for a lesson and then different forms of writing formats for class. Then he showed us how StoryboardThat meets these objectives by using storyboards. They bring the topic to life and engage the students. He then showed us a video of how to use StoryboardThat which I include here as it was not visible to all participants





This seems a very simple product to use which is a definite advantage to teachers and students as the storyboard can be produced rapidly so that the focus can be on the language/topic.

Following on he went on to show us that it can be produced as a live slideshow, as pdfs and many printing options which is a definite advantage. The default security settings  are high to protect student identity.

He talked about ways of teaching vocabulary by visually presenting meanings, how to follow characters in a story and what types of character they are. By students producing their own storyboard they can develop and show their knowledge attainment.

He then went on to show us the different type of storyboard, I liked the idea of the timeline as it could be used to show similarities between tenses and conditionals, the only problem for me is that this is in the paid section but you can just register for a month at a time when you need it so it is really flexible and not too expensive.

He then went on to show us the uses of StoryboardThat in order to teach maths, science, history  and foreign language teaching, He told us that for the paid version of StoryboardThat you can automatically import photos from his photosforclass website which are automatically cited. This is obviously a great boon to educators.

He then went on to show us the admin side of the site which enables the teacher to monitor student activity. This has been produced after consultation with teachers. He finished off by advising us of the pricing structure.

This looks like a very comprehensive and valuable tool for teachers, it can initially engage students in topics and then continue the engagement by allowing them to produce their own storyboards using their own ideas and language. The expression 'learning by the backdoor' was used and it seems very appropriate for this context as students do not realise how much they are learning when they produce their own storyboards. Another really useful webinar!

Using TED talks in ELL lessons.

Judy Wong gave us some ideas for using TED talks in the classroom. First of all she gave us a little background and pointed out that using a TEDtalk is actually very similar to using reading books to students in the classroom, which later developed into showing videos on topics in the classroom. We need to consider the same things. Who our students are, what the subject/theme is and what the object of the lesson is.

She told us that we can use TED talks with any age of students (kids and up) and any level and for any skill.

After that she showed us an excerpt from a  TEDtalk which was given by a young lady in America on kids thinking.

and then she gave us the above list of tasks which could be given to students from a listening perspective. Unfortunately the sound got extremely distorted at that point so I was unable to hear everything she said.

She then went on to speaking and talked us through the 4 points above which could be used to help students with their speaking using a non-native speaker. this shows them that it doesn't have to be perfect to be understood.

http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_lanting_photos_that_give_voice_to_the_animal_kingdom

Better students can comment and correct the speaker. And as Guadalupe pointed out in the chat it exposes students to different accents which is also useful for them in real life.

Using the same video she showed us the value of reading using the transcript. Again  in the chat, Rosmery pointed out that this is good for presenting vocabulary in context which the students will then hear the words.

The slide above also shows us some of the other  things that can be done using the transcripts.

After this she showed us a slide of writing activities that can be done using a TEDtalk as a starting point.

She pointed out that some classrooms do not have access to technology so she gave a number of ideas just using the transcripts in addition so some of the ideas given above for using the transcripts to practice reading, listening and speaking skills.

At the end there was a Q&A session and in response to a question from Roshii, Judy told us that she chooses the talk according to the age and interests of the students, she thinks that TEDx talks are better for children and the main talks for adults. Depending on the focus of the lessons she may give the transcript before or after the talk.

I have clipped the original slides from the talk as I think it is better to have them available for quick reference for me (and for others)

I was really interested in this talk as I used a couple of TED talks in my lessons this summer and know I have even more ideas for using them with my online students as well. Thank you for this informative talk Judy

Helping Interns Integrate Technology in Teaching and Development Step by Step

This presentation was given by Maha Hassan the founder of the Maha ESL Community.

She wants to introduce the idea of internships for trainee teachers in schools and in further education.
She told us that many trainee teachers go on internships to do research but then do not apply their findings when they do finally get into the classrooms themselves.

She had a number of questions for us and started with asking us if we evaluate our professional development level. I must admit I had never really thought about it, I take courses to improve myself but had not evaluated where I am now as a teacher. She told us that Cambridge English Teacher have set up a chart for teachers to evaluate  their position. I am a member of CET and had forgotten about this. Here is the link

She also pointed us to the British Council CPD framework.

She asked us what kinds of Personal Development teachers undertake and the majority of answers were courses, and seminars, I would have added reflection too but she gave us the stages of development Awareness, Understanding, Engagement and Integration.  First of all we need to be aware of the need for improvement, then we need to understand where we need to improve to be engaged in our development with courses etc and finally to integrate with other teachers in order to share our experiences and knowledge.

She then told us the difference between teachers as searchers and researchers. As a searcher we look for input and try to use it in the classes but when we become researchers we reflect on how things work in the class.

She then went through the process that they use in their internship in their community. This starts of with an evaluation and then moves into producing a CPD plan, from this they decide which sessions are necessary. They have weekly teacher meetings to help each other with their problems. At the end of each month they have guest speakers who also hold Q&A sessions in the meeting. It is rounded off with a final evaluation and move into producing a plan for future development. The whole internship takes 3 months and seems to me to be a very thorough and effective way of developing teachers. This procedure could obviously be used with people at any stage in their teaching career.

The interns are expected to go through articles, attend/watch webinars and assess apps/websites for the classroom and cpd which are then presented to the course. She expects that the interns learn how to search for topics which are relevant to  their teaching situation and their needs and problems and they also know who and what to listen to, ie they are critical in their analysis of who is presenting and why.

As the interns start to present to each other there is a sense of engagement so even reluctant participants wanted to join in and contribute to each others learning.

From here they take their ideas and assess how they might work in the classroom and think about all the possibilities and at this stage they are becoming researchers and finally they can take their knowledge into the classroom.

She said that they have successfully run 2 of these internship courses and it certainly looks like a very effective program. She gave us the facebook page maha.esltraining and also told use where the program is going and that she hopes to put some of the meetings online.

Thank you Maha for this information.

EFL Talks

This presentation was given by Rob Howard who founded EFLtalks which is an online learning resource for teachers. http://efltalks.com/

He started off by asking if we have Personal Learning Networks (PLNs), if we undertake Continuing Professional Development and Teacher Development. Three things that are key to progressing and not stagnating as a teacher. It seems that many people do not utilise these things and he asked why!

The biggest problem is time, all teachers have a lot of work and not a lot of free time for CPD, the next problem is the number of webinars that are available and again this is a great problem. Also scheduling - CPD is available from many parts of the world and it is difficult to hold webinars that fit in with people's geographic time and their work schedule and many webinars are too long for people to attend. Many are recorded but again you still need time to watch the recording and make notes.

As a result of all these factors Rob started EFLtalks, (think TEDtalks for teachers) a site for CPD which forces presenters to present quickly so he created a single website and a single youtube channel  where teachers could learn.

He suggested that if you can't make your point in 10 minutes, perhaps you shouldn't make it as you will lose yourself and your viewers. So speakers should get straight to the point. We should reduce TTT in webinars as well as in the classroom.

He held a 10 hour webathon with many of the top presenters in the world of EFL. They had 10 slides and 10 minutes for their presentation and then he broke the webathon into searchable 10 minute presentations. These presentations have been viewed by people from over 100 countries.

He is now looking to recruit more speakers with new topics to help teachers in their job, people like accountants and physiotherapists and planning to do a 10 in 10 for 24 webathon. This will need 120 presenters!

I only have one small criticism of the efltalks site, why is there not a sharing button for teachers and visitors to tell the world about it?

The Magic of Iframe.

This presentation was given by Rachel Sale and the first thing she did for all of use was to put our minds at rest that this product has nothing to do with Apple. My first thought when I saw the title was that it was connected with Apple and I was pleased to find that it wasn't.

The 'I' stands for inline so in fact this meeting is about inline framing. First of all Rachel explained a phenomenon that we all know only too well. You go to YouTube to watch a video and there is a lot of links to other interesting videos which take our attention and distract us from the reason we went there.

 It is not just YouTube that provides distraction and Iframe allows us to focus on exactly what we want by embedding only that which we want, be it videos or documents. It appears to support all of the main learning platforms which is a big benefit. The first thing she told us was that we need the embed code and not the regular share code. I am aware of this because it is the same to embed videos on blogger :)

Actually the whole presentation is about using this embed code. You must remember that when you are pasting (embedding) the video in your site you need to switch to html editing. I often have problems with doing this so I type most of the text in the WYSIWIG editor but switch to html to paste the embed code. So I get the best of both worlds. She told us that we can increase the size of the video by playing with the size settings.




If you need to select just a short clip of a video you can do it using the start and end command.  Here is the code for this video from youtube.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kLq7ePSqFu4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

At the end of the actual video code you can see a question mark? followed by rel=0. Delete the rel=0 and add 'start=(number of seconds)&end=(number of seconds)

NOTE no brackets!

The embed code for my clip is as follows

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kLq7ePSqFu4?start=30&end=65" width="420"></iframe>




You may need to do a little research with some videos but I found this page very helpful with the basics.


nimrodflores.com

Thank you for reminding me about this and giving me the impetus to find out how to make clips.

No infringement of copyright intended by using a clip from the video which is freely available on YouTube.

My first attempt with Moodle

As part of the MMOOC7 course we were required to produce a sample course using at least 7 of the tools available on Moodle. This is my first attempt at playing with Moodle and for a first attempt I am reasonably satisfied.



It seems to be a fairly simple procedure and there are a number of tools which can be used with a reasonable degree of success. The learning curve appears to be quite short as a number of the tools are intuitive and hovering over the '?' signs gives some guidance. Definitely more playing to be done!

Higher Education in Virtual Worlds

This presentation was given by Nancy Zingrone, having had some exposure to Virtual Worlds (2nd Life) but never really got to grips with it I was sorry that I missed the live presentation but at least I get to watch the recording.

First of all Nancy talked a little about her (and other members of the MMOOC7 team) connection with Second Life (SL) and then went to tell us a little of the history of SL. She also told us how easy it is to immerse yourself in SL and forget about the real world. It also appears that there is some language that has come out of the virtual world (griefers!) but can also lead to connections in the real world. She told us that there are now 1 million regular users every month even though numbers have declined.

She then went on to talk about the a recent advancement in virtual worlds, the development of oculus rift which is a type of surround glasses that connects with the virtual world so that it feels more realistic - not just pictures on a screen. This obviously makes the experience even more immersive than before.

It also means that you can connect with people from all over the world in real time and collaborate with them as well. Another advantage of SL is that you can build your own environment and add to it, you are not just dependent on the people who create the site. This is opposite to what people can experience in World of Warcraft where the environment is static or pre-created and it is not possible to change the environment from what has been created. It is also relatively low cost compared to the real world.

Next Nancy talked about notecards which she told us was one of the main benefits for teachers in that you can message students with comments and assignments, she also told us about  'intellibooks' which sounds almost like an online learning system where you can know about the course you are taking as well as posting assignments.

You can also buy intellibooks for various purposes!

After this Nancy talked about some of the disadvantages of Second Life. The main problems which people can have is that of timezones and languages. (Which is the same as any live system.) Computers need to be quite powerful to run SL and you also need a good internet connections as I discovered when I first tried to enter SL years ago with a weaker computer. There are a lot of distractions in SL too, people wanting to chat and play.

The next disadvantage works both ways - some people think there are too many rules and some too few. Proof that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Some people just don't feel comfortable in SL and start to avoid it,  they need help and support to engage with the virtual world. The opposite is also true in that some people get addicted so you do need to set yourself strict boundaries! Nancy said that she just switched her life into SL both learning and teaching here.

One major advantage of virtual worlds is that you can create realistic simulations which can help in real life situations. I had come across this before on another webinar and it seems that this really is a major benefit which could be utilised more. Linked to  this but not exactly the same is teamwork - working and collaborating to complete tasks which may be both practical or impractical in the real world. The skills learned may be transferred to the real world and as mentioned earlier, if a student is really engaged in the task they may not realise they are learning.

Several universities actually have a presence on SL, Nancy found nearly a hundred before she got tired of looking! And there are many many subjects which you can find out about on SL. At some stage it is hoped that people will be able to teleport between different worlds.

After that Nancy showed us some of the real uses of SL including links to youtube videos on the projects. She finished off by giving us a list of links to some resources about education in SL.

I did find this interesting and  I can definitely see some benefits of SL and virtual worlds but to be honest the need for a good internet connection and powerful computers would exclude many students, especially in poorer areas of the world. I am also not sure about the efficacy of learning languages in the virtual world compared to the real world. The only possible benefit I can think of at the moment is that students would be able to hide behind their avatar, which may reduce affective barriers to learning.

Thank you Nancy for an enlightening talk on virtual worlds, I personally am still not convinced. Sorry!

Don't feedback, feed forward.

This is a topic which I have met before and it was presented very capably by Angelos Collas.

First of all we looked at feedback in general: What you give feedback for, when you give feedback, how you give feedback and then how long it takes to give feedback. Then he talked about how we know if feedback is effective and how we can measure its effects.

He asked what students do when they get feedback and we talked about ideas for helping students to benefit from feedback.

We then looked at a particular situation - a writing task and he asked us what we mark. The things he suggested were handwriting/neatness, punctuation and spelling, quantity and effort. I personally always respond to the content as I think that this is important, next I mark punctuation/grammar and spelling. Finally, if the writing is poor or illegible I point out to the student that it shouldn't affect the marks but imagine an examiner with a pile of scripts to mark and yours is not first, how will the examiner feel when he sees it. He will have to decipher the writing before he can mark it so he will not feel so happy and this will probably affect his marking and those few marks could make the difference between pass or fail or pass and good pass!

He made us think about what we expect from the students and from this I think that it is important that the students know what is expected from them and the criteria against which they will be marked. In writing, I usually go through the marking scheme with them so they have at least an idea of what is expected. (Angelos later went through this advice in the meeting he added that we could give students past papers and ask them to grade it with the marking scheme and why.)

When correcting Angelos said that we should also highlight the good points as it is more student friendly and less demotivating. He also suggested that we give the students a checklist before they start or before they hand their work in so they can see if they think they have met the criteria.

After the student gets a piece of writing back they need to rewrite it using the teacher's comments in order to gain a better grade. The teacher can also see that the student has learned from the comments and the student is more likely to remember the correct language - Learning through doing.

We next looked at actually giving feedback using a variety of tech including google docs, vocaroo, voicethread, pbworks (and wikis in general) and screencast-o-matic (and screencast in general). I have done a little work with google docs and I do make screencasts (and I use it to record some of the webinars :) )

He left us with a reminder about dealing with students work which is reproduced underneath

I found this a very useful review of things that I do or have done in the past and would recommend it for new teachers, to help them to help their students better.