Learning Technologies (2011): some insights; my turn

British Council.
 Learning Technologies for the Classroom Course. Venezuela

In February 2011, I started moderating the Learning Technologies (LTs) for the Classroom online course. It is offered by the British Council as part of its teacher training development programs for EFL teachers in Venezuela. This course was one of two more offered during this year. The first one, the one delivered from February to March, became a pilot course offered mostly to public university teachers. The next two were offered to any EFL teacher interested in learning about integrating technology in the language classroom.

This course aims at:

1.    introducing participants to basic notions related to Learning Technologies (LTs).
2.    becoming familiar with LTs lessons and basic digital skills
3.    becoming aware of LTs issues like cyber-bullying
4.    reflecting about LTs and their potential application in the language classroom

The LTs course is delivered in Moodle and it is divided into 5 topics (Preparation, Using the Web,  Using Office Software, Projects, The Interactive Web). Each topic has got several subtopics called modules (17 in total) having a variable number of sections (from 7 to 12). In each section participants must do certain tasks or activities. The content was selected and added to the course by British Council people in London. It includes understanding what LTs are, basic web skills (searching, evaluating and selecting websites), becoming familiar with web-based lessons, Internet issues (copyright and cyber safety), Office software (Word and PowerPoint) the web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos social networks) the future (broad mention on mobile learning and virtual worlds). This online course lasts 8 weeks including a break to catch up between weeks 4 and 5.

The e-moderator is responsible for:

A.    providing close support to participants especially during the first three weeks (helping them to have access to the platform, becoming familiar with topic sections, sorting out technical problems, making them feel “at home”)
B.    Sending weekly announcements/reminders about: 1. The start of a new week and content to work with; 2. synchronous sessions
C.    keeping track of “lost souls”.
D.    encouraging people to participate in forums.
E.    choosing external web tools that can be accessed even after the course have finished (e.g. blogs, tutorials in BliptTV , Slideshare)
F.    sending cell reminders to participants on activities to be done during the week.
G.    planning synchronous sessions every two weeks.
H.    recording tutorials (e.g. show how to use web tools or resize images)
I.    planning a last live session for participants to talk about a topic they liked form the course and how they would use it in their teaching context.
J.    sending reports/results to British Council people in Venezuela.

Even though participants are from Venezuela there are no F2F sessions at all. In previous online courses I moderated for the British Council at least the induction session was F2F. This time it was not the case. The induction session is online. During this session, participants are welcome and receive a Moodle walkthrough in Wiziq.

I will briefly write about three things I care about during the delivery of this course: teacher immediacy, number of activities per week, external web tools.

A.    Teacher immediacy:  I was concerned participants would feel they were only going to able to interact with me in forums, or instant messaging from Moodle. Chatting would be one way to communicate, but there’s no chat available in the module sections and the e-moderator is not allowed to add Moodle resources or activities at all. So I planned a one-hour Wiziq session every two weeks on Sunday mornings. This allows participants to ask questions or clarify doubts while the moderator reviews content in the virtual classroom.  Also I started to use the mobile phone to text weekly messages (e.g. reminders) and Mailvu to send video emails during the first weeks of the course.
B.    Quantity of activities: Participants are busy teachers. I believe too many activities in an online teaching development course could overwhelm participants or put them off a bit leading them to drop out; some of them may end up lurking or have an on and off participation. Also, this may encourage participants to request for (frequent) extensions to finish their tasks. In the LTs course, participants were supposed to do about 12 to 16 activities per week (two modules).  Fortunately, after getting the go ahead from a British council representative in Venezuela, I created a PDF document showing participants activities they MUST do, Optional activities and the ones they could skip. In some cases, some activities  checked as MUST were edited a bit. So, for example, in some MUST activities participants were asked to skip forums or wikis especially when there were too many in a module. (See sample content distribution)

C.    External web tools: I think it is important to try to keep external resources that allow participants to go back to them anytime they want especially when the course is over and there’s no longer access to it (mostly paid courses). These external resources (ERs) can be created by participants or the e-moderator himself/herself to: 1. review (websites, audio files, videos, Wiziq recorded sessions); 2. reflect (blogs); 3. showcase their work (blogs).  These ERs can be blogs or wikis (to reflect or as eportfolios), video tutorials uploaded to sites like BliptTV or Youtube,  recorded synchronous Wiziq sessions. Some others that may not be stored for long but can be accessed directly from participants own resources (personal email) along the session could be Mailvu (messages sent to the participants mail inbox) and mobile phones ( texting participants instantly). Next course I am planning to add Diigo so they can  bookmark websites easily and check them out every time they want.

Now I will describe how this was considered for each of the three courses delivered during 2011. It varied somewhat especially for the first two courses.

Pilot group (cohort February-April 2011)

In this first course:

1.     Reducing the number of activities depended on topic and type of task. This allowed participants to see tasks attainable and enjoyable, not a race against time to accomplish them before the deadline. A PDF document was created and also uploaded to the Plenary Forum showing participants MUST , OPTIONAL and SKIP activities.
2.    Mobile phone was introduced as an instant way to keep in touch with participants during the week.
3.    Blogs created in Blogger were used to reflect on learning process. The e-moderator created a blog himself to collect and showcase participants’ blogs.
4.    Tutorials were recorded to: a) show participants how to have access to Moodle; b. use certain webtools, c. show how to solve technical problems.
5.    Three Wiziq sessions were delivered during this course: the first one to welcome participants; another one during week 4; the last one during week 8.

Second group (Cohort June-August 2011)

1.     Content distribution (PDF document with modules and activities per week) was updated.
2.     Mailvu was introduced as a tool to show them who their tutor was, to make announcements or clarify doubts during the first two weeks of the course.
3.    Synchronous sessions in Wiziq were offered every two weeks. 4 sessions in total not including the welcome session delivered in Wiziq as well. This time, for the last Wiziq session, participants were asked to choose a topic from the modules and tell why it was important / interesting for him/her and how it was related to his/her teaching context. 

 

4.    The cell phone was used to send reminders and announcements along the course.
5.    Participants wrote heir reflections in Blogger (Here's a sample: Miguel Galea).
6.    More tutorials were recorded to: 1. show how a web tool was used; 2, how to deal with certain technical issues. A compilation of tutorials were made available at the end of the course.

Their group (Cohort October –December 2011)

Remains the same as cohort June-August 2011. Mailvu was not used due to technical problems with audio. 

Here are sample presentations made by Ronny Piñero and Marisela Ferrer during the last wiziq session in December 2011. 


Marisela Ferrer: Podcasting

Here's the lesson plan for this presentation.

Ronny Piñero: Twitter

Here's the lesson plan for this presentation.


Note: The reference about "external tools" is based on a webinar given by Henry Chero in CLED2011.

Screencasting & interactive videos for teacher development

Using screencasting software or services to record what you do on your computer has become, in my humble opinion, one of the most useful tools for teacher development and potentially useful for teaching and learning in the EFL-ESL classroom.

There are free services like Screenr, CamStudio, Jing, Screen-O-matic, Tildee and paid software like Camtasia to make these recordings. Screencasting can be used to:

1. show how to use a web tool (How-to videos)
2. give feedback to participants (eg. writing or online projects)
3. video lectures (eg. showing how certain skill works; giving short explanations on language aspects)
4. make presentations

Screencasting is not only a great web tool for teachers, but students can also use it to showcase a project; to describe their online portfolios; for making presentations; to describe a picture among other things.

I have been using screencasting for some teacher development courses I have participated as moderator or comoderator this year. One of them is the English Village Online. I used it as co-moderator in a podcasting course to show participants how to record and publish podcasts  and to provide feedback to them on their final projects (inspired on Russell Stunnard’s work about screencasting & feedback). Also I have used screencasting to record tutorials for The Learning Technologies for the Classroom course offered by the BritishCouncil (Venezuela) to show participants how to:

1, have access to the course in Moodle and give them a walkthrough on the course content.

2. use Wiziq as our virtual classroom

3. create a blog for participants’ reflections

4. use certain web tools introduced in the course modules.

For this course, I recorded 11 tutorials in total using Camtasia. If you are going to use a free screencasting service you have to make sure you can download or save the video to your computer and that it is in one of the format accepted by Youtube (.AVI, .3GP, .WMV, .MOV, .MP4, .MPEG, .FLV, .MKV). Making this interactive video compilation would make it easier for participants to have access to tutorials from one single place. This would keep participants from having to bookmark and watch the tutorials from separated links. 

Now how did I come up with this idea? I remembered having bookmarked this article in Diigo called How to make an interactive lesson in Youtube. And it suddenly hit me I could sort of do more or less the same thing making a video compilation instead of a lesson.

How did I create this interactive video?

I carefully read the article and watch the videos from Knewton about preparing for the GMAT. Next I had to "migrate" (so to speak) the tutorials I had uploaded from BlipTV to Youtube. Once I had done that I started planning out the video compilation. From this plan, I realized I had to record some screencasts to take participants to the tutorials in an orderly fashion. To record this videos I used my webcam, Powerpoint and Camtasia. I recorded 5 screencasts:

1. The first one called "Home" was recorded to greet and invite participants to start watching the videos by clicking on "Tutorials".

3. The second one called the "Main Menu" grouped tutorials into "Access", "Blogger" and "Modules".

  4. The last three are "submenus" for Access, Blogger and Modules. These menus provide access to the tutorials. 

Next I started adding spotlights to the menu button images. These buttons were created in Photoshop and saved as JPEG. I created some other buttons to make navigation smooth from one video to another or to go back to "Home" or "Main Menu". I created these buttons from Youtube using "Notes" in "Annotation".

To learn about adding spotlights go to How to make an interactive lesson in Youtube.

Here’s my interactive video tutorial compilation for the Learning Technologies for the Classroom course. 

Just to close this post, I recently learned from the fantastic Richard Byrne that there's a service called Viewbix for making interactive videos. Check it out and let me know what you think about it.

Mantweet, Womantweet

Yesterday I came accross this study on daily patterns of life in Twitter messages when reading Michael Rundell's post (You say "lovely", I say "great" - How "Beatlish" can that be). It shows according to gender how frequent a word is used. This study was carried out by the Language, Interaction an Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento, Italy.

The website Tweetolife has got a "lovely", "cute" webpage to experiment a bit with word or phrase queries and learn, for example, how frequently men say "fabulous" and when they use it or how frequently women say "dude" and when they use it as well.

To try this out, go to: Tweetolife and click on "Gender Differences" and submit a word.

You will get a graphic showing how frequent men and women use this word:

If you hover the cursor over the blue bar for men, you will read 24%. Now if you do the same over the pink bar for women, you will get 76% (mmm...blue and pink; how stereotypical that is). If you click on "Detailed Query" you will find when men and women use this word.  Apparently men use it when talking about sports  while women when talking about food!!!.

Queries are based on thousands of tweets from Twitter collected by the university of Edinburgh. This gives an interesting use to Twitter to research about vocabulary or grammar use for example. Would this king of web tools would be useful for teachers? learners? Would this be useful when writing dialogues? or any other type of writing task? Do you think it has got any application in the language classroom or it is just an interesting tool to explore about, say, gender stereotypes in class?