Week 6:Project Step # 5: Taking off towards Target (Post 2)

Last Friday, i.e. on 29th, I launched my project even though I am still struggling to get the learning material ready. All along my mind was set on working on prosodic features but never before had such clarity emerged. I think it is so on account of all the recommnded reading I have done, the tools of technology I have  tried out and the interaction I have had with Robert that I now know exactly what I want to do and how. And sure I am most excited about it. In fact I have already taken the first step towards it. 

My subjects of study, the teacher trainees arrived on the 26th. A batch of 52 Sec./Sr. Sec postgraduate teachers reflecting significant mother tongue influence in their speech. Their mother tongues quite varied. 

On 29th I initiated them into phonetics and phonology through our Sky pronunciation suite. Prosodic Features will have to wait for a while as they need to understand sounds and syllables first.

In the meantime I have begun to assemble a few more equipment like the camera in our 31 computer multimedia Lang Lab to be able to record their speech. Additionally, the questionnaire for the written survey is getting ready to help me profile them individually and as a group. If I can manage to get some software Maria Garcia Busa's article talks about or the one(s) Robert has suggested, the profiling will get fine-tuned further. I have started to put together the reference list of all the resources which have set me thinking in this direction and also those I intend using as resources in the classroom. 

I plan to use some video clips from youtube to serve as the model speech and also as practice mateiral for them. My trainees are taking a keen part in helping me transcribe video recordings. Listening for discriminatory purposes, ear training, repeating, marking stress and intonation on scripts, watching the model speech in action intently, etc will be part of the activities planned for the project. I intend to make them refer to a few resources on the websites from the point of view of practising speech on their own and reading in the field to understand Spoken English better. Needless to say the references and resources of the previous weeks of the course will prove to be very useful.

This is something I have never done before--teaching with so much technology. This is something my trainees have never seen--learning with so many resources; helping the teacher assemble learning material. Lack of motivation was an issue of concern to begin with. I can hardly wait to see technology bring about desired changes.

More on this next Sunday.

Sharda          

Week 6: Marking Midpoint of Journey (Post 1)

Marking Midpoint of Journey

The voyage of discoveries continued this week, too. Less technological, more academic, as it felt at one point. But when the PPT assignment began, technology stepped forward to occupy the seat of command. The interactive activities joined in to meet the needs of large classes.  Teaching large classes, the topic of the week, just had to arouse keen interest. Jesse, the guest faculty, had everybody giving close, intense reading to the articles by Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw. Jesse highlighted the importance of engaging Ss in self assessment activities and in using rubrics we had experimented with the previous week. I liked her recommendation about making individual feedback more global than local. Some of the participants, as I see in their posts, said they were overwhelmed by the numerous activities they learnt of to tackle large classes. Truly so. Think-Pair-Share will stimulate Ss to think and speak and contribute just as collaborative learning will hone their problem solving skills. The demonstration of Think-Pair-Share on /www.youtube.com/ really helped. Concept tests, Quick-thinks, Concept Maps  involves multi-sensory learning which will suit Ss with different learning styles. I liked the Minute paper activity. On C-SPAN channel in the US I used to watch senators make One Minute speech in the House… capturing the essence of the problems the public faced in their areas. I was amazed by their brevity, and modified and adopted it as an activity in my classroom situation. There were more inputs on large classes from another article which stressed on the relevance of technology in large classes and gave ideas like making use of video clips, podcasts, wikis, animations, simulations, etc. The best part was that I got to read in detail about all these tools of technology, in one of the links, we are using in this course. Jigsaw variation is another activity which works well in large classes comprising of small groups although in one of the articles it has been prescribed for only small classes. To summarize briefly: we have to create small classes amidst a single large class where Ss learn from participation with the peer group. And for this we have to have interactive activities. technology aids this. It comes packed with several and with tools to make or modify more. Even the brighter Ss who know the answers well can develop clarity and skills of organizing and expressing their thoughts with the help of such activities. I liked Jesse’s Cheat Sheet idea and got clarification on clickers. The former, useful for me as I can be bad with names when the class has 60 trainees, the latter worth acquiring for trainees. Imagine getting feedback from all of them can become so easy; just a click away.

There were sessions on PPT as well. This is one tool, I feel proud to acknowledge, I have been using for 12 years now. But I used to always call my Technical staff to make insertions of audio/video clips when I needed them. Here I did it myself. Tried various interactive techniques like blank slides, etc. for which I found the microsoft.com session the most useful.  A number of doubts I had like inserting hyperlinks, etc got clarified. In fact I even used the PPT I have posted on wiki page with my teacher trainees on Friday morning class. It worked very well. The session became a setting clearly marked with class participation.

Needless to say I will continue creating interactive PPTs with ideas picked up during the week for my teacher education programs which invariably have large classes.

Looking forward to the journey next week 

Sharda

Week 5:Discoveries Galore

This week turned out to be equally eventful if not more. There were two significant digital discoveries. Rubrics and WebQuests. WebQuests can dvelop students' critical thinking skills if they help the teacher to evolve them and also if they keep referring to them as they progress in their projects. These tools will make learners surf the net resources purposefully. I managed my way well with Rubrics through Rubistar.com. Rubrics meant something else earlier. They were instructions written in great detail in tests for students. It is all about scoring guidelines, as discussed in the article from NCLRC, and it can be interactive. It is defined as an "an interactive assessment tool". It serves as a checklist, in a way of guidelienes, covering all aspects of activities/projects and has a vertical scale too. Learners can participate in its development. Such an attitude to its preparation can produce great results. Project-based learning becomes an Alternative Assessment as it is very different from traditional teaching and testing which used to benefit fewer learners. It is closely connected with the real world and projects have a fabulous application value. Since such projects are of such value to people around, feedback can come from different quarters which can be very useful as  learning inputs for learners.  The article by Susan Gaer captures the issues discussed earlier and elaborates on the importance of meaning value in her article. She elaborates on the issue with illustrations of projects which are closely linked with life and therefore carries relevance. If students can develop the feeling of ownership for the projects, the learning will be more effective.

I can use all these tools in my teacher education programs with no difficulty. The Govt. of India is very keen that teachers use such tools to develop materials for websites for easy access for learners. The Project outline for us is evolving well; I plan to take up prosodic features with the help of interviews from various weblinks. Since I will actually develop the project through workshops for my trainees, a lot of learning should take place in class. 

I particularly enjoyed the class interaction on feedback on students' strengths and weaknesses and also on technology supported  project outlines of other class members. I learnt a lot from them. 

I had a very busy week at work as well but now I am satisfied with my involvement and contribution to my course. I managed to find my 20 hours.  

As always, Robert has been supportive of the difficulties I face. I do face difficulties with new technology. Nicenet is perfect but half the blogs I try sending don't go for some reason. I succeeded only in my second attempt of rubrics on Rubistar. I need to go back to WebQuest now. I just have to crack it.

Best of Luck to me.

Sharda

     

Week 4 Linking the Present- with the Past- for the Future

Week 4

Linking the Present- with the Past- for the Future

That is how it felt, off and on. The reference to key pals reminded me of our school days when we made pen pals. One’s pals were different from one’s friends because the former lived in distant lands. From exotic lands those pals sent us pictures of emus and kangaroos we had never seen, descriptions of tsetse flies we had never read about. With times the modus operandi has changed, but not the concept. Key pals promote language learning through culture and environment.

Then the article on Extensive Reading reminded me of our MA Part II syllabus where under a section we had to read the summaries of 75 literary works from encyclopedias and discuss them in groups. In the exams, we had to write about some of the works. It is nice to see its modern avatar. Also, I feel enriched by the web resources quoted.

Riding on email, the fourth week has served as the junction for the course; the language skills, the relevant technology. As we use our web pages to post adaptations and information from various web links, focusing on the lessons to teach Vocabulary, Reading and Writing, we invariably incorporate the skills of Listening and Speaking.  

This week has also made me draw certain conclusions based on firsthand experience:

An online course assumes its participants to be proficient in writing skills and computer skills. The lessons learnt are: If we, in India, plan to take courses in ELT to our thousands of teachers and students, we have to ensure they have adequate proficiency in the two.

As I coursed through the article on teaching writing using the internet by Krajka, I found myself capturing the essence of numerous things I had learnt over the past three to four weeks:

• web pages emails and class websites were the three basic techniques online courses rested on
• each classroom lesson had two parallel components, i.e. online and offline activities
• high time we designed courses which used ICT as their skeletal framework rather than just inject an occasional technology-based activity
• course in charge (here, it is Robert) must possess basic functional knowledge of HTML to create websites or class web pages (I would need to do that too?)
• LISTSERV or similar technology is a must for course administration  (I’d need a technical hand for that?) 
• ICT can be a very powerful agent of motivation. Though it is very public, it can be very private too. It connects us with the whole world yet while tapping on the keyboard it makes us drop our defences (psychological barriers), i.e. shyness, diffidence, facilitating better learning because we are ourselves.
• the lists of very useful websites are truly, truly useful. I need to select them as per my needs and drag them to my delicious page.

Pertaining to lesson planning: Not many college teachers of English undergraduate courses in India understand the challenges of planning a lesson as they emphasize only on the importance of delivering lessons. Amazingly they ignore the policies and the objectives, and consequently lesson planning. The standardized lesson plan template, the tenesse.edu lesson plan descriptions have standardized the model for me and fleshed out a few missing details in my lesson planning like the ‘student products as the artifacts’ reference. I used to not give it such importance.

This week again had a huge amount of information to share regarding websites, particularly on teaching vocabulary, reading and writing. But many of the activities in those Labs involved oral skills preceding reading and writing skills.  I enjoyed exploring Lauri's ESL Website http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/   and the ESL Independent Study Lab - Michael Krauss
http://www.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html . I have yet to explore http://a4esl.org/ and
http://www.manythings.org/ and also http://iteslj.org/Articles/Liao-Emailing.html  and
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Constantinescu-Vocabulary.html. Besides the articles I read carry dozens of websites. I need to read up a lot, may be a little later.

The posts on the dashboard were as varied as the nations they flowed in from. I could relate to some of them and did give my comments. But Blogging again played mischief with me.  Occasionally, it wouldn’t show the postings in people’s Follower columns, then I would stumble upon some blogs which carried instructions in languages I don’t understand. I would still try to fumble through them, often successfully. And the most tricky part was when on a certain blog, my post wouldn’t get ‘sent’. I think some of these things are due to the internet connection getting very slow.

End of another fulfilling week. Thank you, Robert, for all your efforts. I am all smiles. Hope this continues.

Sharda         

Week 3-Immersion-into-Course

Immersion-into-the-CourseThat's how the week felt. The excitement of creating one's own pages on WWW during the first two weeks had begun to settle. I expected Week 3 to be similar though. But like each of the first two weeks, the third one sprang up surprises. There was heavy workload. I started  the session with the Reading assignment. Busa was loaded with information on what experts were doing with pronunciation and technology. It was enough to give me a complex. I had been so proud of having set up the Multimedia Lang Lab in our Institute with some modern software. And now to think of it, the Lab had not been aware of all these Applications available. And I didn't even know they existed. I followed this reading by going through Julia Gong's article. The two complemented each other. I felt so sure of myself, so proud of the awareness I had come to possess in the field. Only during the last week I had expressed interest in 'Prosodic Features' and now I had so much knowledge about taking up its teaching through weblinks. I could actually join some Research team in this area. I must bring these Applications to my Institute.

Creating delicious.com web page to bookmark my special links was very easy and equally easy was diverting all my recently acquired weblinks to my page. In fact it was a fun task. But posting my delicious URL on the class wiki earmarked for it was a bit of a nightmare. As usual, it kept playing tricks and then much to my embarrassment, I could succeed only in my third attempt leaving imprints of my failed attempts behind... never mind, as long as I learnt to do it. Robert I am sure will delete the redundant traces from the page. I plan to take up the task of getting on my page all the links I keep discovering from the Readings, from Robert, from the class members, from assignments. I plan to give a demonstration of all this in the next staff meeting. I hope to inspire the faculty to use these resources in their classes. Teacher trainees from remote araes will benefit so much from this.

Reading sample Project Reports, I read four of them, was a pleasure. Each one structured so well. Each so informative. It was a delight. I use these adjectives because after the Busa article, they made easy reading and were very relaxing. I got to know about the research happening in different parts of the world in the field. The problems everywhere are the same. Deprived sections of society, large classes, poor proficiency levels despite years of teaching/learning, inadequate teaching resources, teachers with fixed mind-sets. And almost like the proverbial silver lining, the ELT teachers, always experimenting with new ideas to succeed. Modern, well-informed, motivated.

The task on exploring websites was truly demanding, equally demanding was the task of bringing: the articles, the websites on resources, the websites on lesson plans together. But it was a great learning experience. I have found solutions to my local problems in Randall's Lab. I can use it with my trainees.

And now about the forums of communication: Nicenet, Blog and also Delicious; I intend to take them to all of my classes. It's a pity I don't teach students directly much as such. I intend taking it to my staff and the teacher trainees who in turn will take it to the students. I am often invited to institutions to talk about the latest in the field. This will help. I must tell them these tools can prove to be revolutionary if used effectively.

Great. I am more or less done with Week 3. Better informed thanks to the class members on Nicenet as well. Tomorrow, I intend going through everyone's blog.

Sharda

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Week 2:Minor Glitches not hurdles

Minor Glitches not hurdles

What I thought were hurdles turned out to be just minor glitches. I think I had over-reacted.

The course is evolving well. Familiarization with web resources is happening the right way. I just have to grapple a little with them till I get them right. There is no escape, no short cut, no leaning on anyone to physically help me out. And that is how it should be. And yet help is available just an email away.  One message to the Tutor and instructions follow to make me solve my problems myself. Learner autonomy, self-reliance, and the teacher as a facilitator, a guide is truly the order of the day.

I am impressed by the web tool ‘Nicenet.com’. It indeed creates a virtual classroom with the Tutor, the peer group, all the resources of knowledge and the many tools at my disposal to make learning happen. All I need is to be fairly competent in using language (because the course is part of higher education program) and possess basic computer skills to be able to learn the more advance level skills. I need plenty of time as well and the motivation to want to learn new things and to use them. I am glad all that is in place in my case.

This course is opening the windows of my mind stimulating me to throw open training opportunities to thousands of teachers in India. Blogging can be a nice way of providing tremendous amount of language inputs to trainees. Yes, they must have internet resources in place.

I am overwhelmed at the moment by the number of websites, so very specialized, and the amount of data they can supply. Gonzalo says he uses /delicious/ to organize data for quick retrieval. I am happy to see it is part of our syllabus. I can’t wait to use all these websites. One lifetime is too short to make use of the resources available to us.

I need to still ask Robert about one particular problem I am facing:

(i)              why can’t I see the messages I post on people’s blogs? Similarly, I can see followers on my blog but I can’t find any messages there. Is it that no one has posted comments there so far? The Dash Board says I still don't have a 'public google profile'. Doesn’t look like.

Well it can wait until next week... tomorrow.