Week 3: New Materials, New Ideas

It’s Friday, and I’m finally home. I got back to my classroom this week, and I couldn’t wait to try out some of the ideas I got after doing a part of my assignments for the Week 3.

The focus was on aural/oral skill building. I read two articles posted on the class wiki page from which I learned in what ways computer-based environment can enable learners to be exposed to a real audience. One article was about CALL for listening skills by Lindsey Miller, while the other was about CALL for speaking skills by Julia Gong.

As before, there was a list of websites to check out and possibly use in an EFL classroom. I discovered a couple of quite useful ones. 

First I'd like to mention is  ListeningRealEnglish which provides lessons with real-life videos about certain topics. I decided to use Lesson 47for learning USED TO + verb form with my intermediate class this week. I thought it might be a refreshing lesson, since the students would be able to hear and see a variety of English speakers using the same form in a street survey. 

I used it with a group of 20 intermediate students and they responded really well. It was very easy for them to catch the form, and I also adjusted the lesson plan a bit so that it could suit more this particular group. Unlike in the lesson plan on the page, one of the objectives was for the group (Audience) to write down (Condition) 2-3 original sentences that the people in the video say using the form USED TO (Degree). They thought the video was funny and some of them could have relate to the things said. The sentences were not very long and it was fairly easy to note them down.

Apart from this website I'll most probably use some of the materials from Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab, but also from NPR, which  is a great place for finding a number of different topics discussed in real radio shows recorded for the general audience, and not those specifically created for EFL learners.

I liked two radio shows:

1)      a photo story about a father and son from Northern Ireland http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/06/14/191059207/like-father-like-son-creating-art-in-a-time-of-troubles; and

2)      an interview with two female award-winning photo journalists http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/10/16/234929633/behind-the-lens-with-prize-winning-women-of-vision.

I'm planning to use both in my upper-intermediate class to enhance their listening skills. 

Week 3 Assignments also included introduction to another rather useful website - Delicious.com. It is such a fabulous bookmarks manager that provides a clear and simple way of  storing favorite links in one place. The links that you store can be public or private, and there are options for creating tags and a short description for each link. Moreover, there is a possibility of networking with other users, which I find quite useful as well.

  A NEW CHALLENGE 

Being in a webskills class has made me think more and more about how I could apply computers for language learning in my classroom. A month ago, out of sheer curiosity, while browsing through education apps offered in the App Store, I downloaded an application called Edmodo. I had completely forgotten about it, but today, it just somehow came to my mind.  Edmodo is a social learning platform for teachers, students, and parents. It looks quite similar to Facebook (which most of my students cannot live without), and I decided to try to use it with my upper-intermediate students. The initial idea is to use it for collaborating and submitting discursive essays. The students will have to write such an essay for their mid-term exams, so using Edmodo can turn out to be quite useful. Nobody has done anything similar in my school and I fear I might get some criticism from my colleagues and/or parents. I’ll introduce Edmodo to my students next week. I already created an account for myself, signed up my school in the register and created three groups for students. 

The challenge is on!

Week 2 - Summary

This week has passed so quickly, with so many things to experience and learn. Due to my trip, I had to manage to read the materials for the class on-the-go, often while having a cup of coffee at the train station somewhere between Aachen and Cologne.

What matters is that I did it. Or at least I hope I did.

First, there was a Noodletools website that provided a list of search engines, most of which, I must admit, I had never heard of before. I went through a number of these, realizing how narrow and limited my cyber-world-search has been so far.

I chose

1.  http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/  - Newsnow.com,  
2. http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx - Pressdisplay.com and
3.  http://www.newseum.com/  - Newsuem.com.

In order to show their strengths and/or weaknesses, I used as the keyword  “cloning”. 

To my great surprise, the site which provided no information was Newseum.com. The second I used was Newsnow.co.uk, which gives you a list of newspaper articles from all over the world that deal with the searched topic, starting from the latest published one. At Pressdisplay.com site you can filter your search by narrowing your search to particular country, language in which it was published, author of the article, the relevance, etc.

After I had explored these, I wanted to try some other websites. I found http://www.academicinfo.net/ - Academicinfo.net quite useful, giving a variety of relevant links.

Next to learn this week was writing  learning objectives using ABCD framework. The most useful when doing the task of writing my own class objective was the slide show that relates to using ABCD model with achieving an IT goal. http://www.slideshare.net/ashleytan/writing-specific-instructionallearning-objectives-presentation .

According to  ABCD method this is an excellent starting point for writing objectives. In this system, "A" is for audience, "B" is for behavior, "C" for conditions and "D" for degree of mastery needed.

1.     Audience (A) – Who? Who are your learners?

2.    Behavior (B) – What? What do you expect them to be able to do? This should be an overt,    observable behavior, even if the actual behavior is covert or mental in nature. If you can't see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it, you can't be sure your audience really learned it.

3.    Condition (C) – How? Under what circumstances or context will the learning occur? What will the student be given or already be expected to know to accomplish the learning?

4.     Degree (D) – How much? How much will be accomplished, how well will the behavior need to be performed, and to what level? Do you want total mastery (100%), do you want them to respond correctly 80% of the time, etc. A common (and totally non-scientific) setting is 80% of the time.

Week 2: On the Road but Still in the Class

It’s Sunday night, 10 pm and I am typing this from my hotel room in Duren, Germany, but I will probably not be able to post this before some time tomorrow. I arrived at Duren late today, with a group of 14 students and a colleague for a one-week return visit to our German partners in the International Student Exchange Project. 

The project started in fall 2009, and resulted  in a successful partnership between Gimnazija "Mustafa Novalić", Gradačac and Gymnasium am Wirteltor, Duren. The aim is to bring together groups of students from both schools to learn about other culture and every-day life, practice using English and German, and above all make long-lasting friendships. The team of two teacher-coordinators from Germany -Michaela Berard and Haris Zahirović and the Bosnian team - my colleague, Raif Omeragić and I,  have put a great effort to keep the Project and the partnership going. In 2014, the project will be officially funded by the German Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

                     Monday Morning - The Bosnian Team in front of the famous Kölner Dom

I haven’t slept at all last night, since the trip from Bosnia to Germany was quite long.  First, we had to start off at 2 am local time and then take a 4-hour bus ride to the International Airport in the Croatian capital, Zagreb. We got there around 6 am, and boarded the plane at 8:30 am. The fog at the Cologne International Airport made us hover in the air for some time, before finally arriving safely to the arms of our German hosts. We’ll be staying here until Friday with a quite busy schedule – we’ll be attending classes in the school, have a meeting with the principal, then the official reception at the Office of the Mayor of the City of Duren, and in between these activities, we’ll go sightseeing in Duren, Cologne and Aachen. However, the aim is also for the students to have fun and enjoy their stay at the host families.

I am quite worried that this tight schedule will affect my assignments for the Webskills Course Week 2. I have encountered some problems so far, although I thought that I could manage pretty well.

The first bad thing is that I do not have an internet connection in my room. It seems strange, but this is some kind of old-people’s home and I still haven’t figured out the way where to get online while staying here. I’ll try to look for a place in the morning and probably go online in the school, hoping that this will not disturb the schedule my colleagues already made.

To reflect on the Week 1 I must admit that it was rather demanding for me. I have no experience in e-learning, and getting familiar with the use of the proposed tools was interesting and yet at times stressful.

I like the idea of using Nicenet where all the participants in the course can interact and discuss the topics we’re introduced by our webskills instructor Sean McCelland. It was nice to learn who are the people behind the names in the class by visiting their newly created blogs and introductions they posted in our class Nicenet conferencing. 

The only issue I couldn’t deal with, and in a way still can't, is posting my name and a blog link to the class wiki page. I have tried contacting the instructor and doing the suggestions that other class participants recommended (i.e. to sign out completely from the wiki page and gmail account and log back in again) but nothing seemed to work. 

Can it be that difficult? 

Week 1: In an Untrodden Path

Life is full of adventures and sometimes it gives you an opportunity for one when you least expect it. Here is mine – this blog.

Since Monday, October 7 I am officially a participant of a 10-week online training course for English Language Teachers offered through the American English Institute at the University of Oregon, Department of Linguistics.

The aim of this blog will be to reflect on the various readings, discussions and experience I’ll be sharing with my colleagues from all over the world, but also on my own effort to cope with using new teaching tools and methods.

Creating this blog is one of the first challenges I have taken up. I’ve never even thought about having a blog, let alone creating it for academic purposes. However, after reading more about using a blog in language teaching, I am quite curious about the whole concept of having mine. 

The only problem I’ve encountered so far is that I feel quite nervous about it. We’ll see what happens next week.