Teaching a teacher...new tools, tips, and techniques.

Overall, I would say that the last couple months have helped me become more aware of the tools and resources available for use in online and blended classrooms.  My favorite new tool is definitely VoiceThread, because as a Spanish teacher, the need for my students to practice listening followed by verbal response is essential.  Prior to the course, I knew that putting up a video or podcast was easy enough, but these tools don’t allow the student to respond verbally, so I was really excited to find out about VoiceThread.  VoiceThread can deliver a lesson, and require students to give verbal responses to multiple prompts, all in an asynchronous, online format.

Another tool that I really like for responding to a video is TED-Ed.  This curation resource lets you check for student comprehension of a video by using simple multiple-choice questions.  The user interface is easy to use both for the instructor and the students, and the instructor can even add links to multiple types of additional resources.  I’ve used videos in the past, but even after hosting a discussion about them, I haven’t been certain if the majority of my students had really been paying attention during the viewing.  I think that not only will the quick comprehension check help me determine if watching the video is a productive use of time, but just knowing that it is there will help some students to stay focused.

This class also got me to think about some sites that I had already known about in new ways.  For example, I had never thought of Pinterest as a learning tool before.  Honestly, I had only thought of it as a site used mainly to show off cutesy crafts projects.  Now, another teacher and myself have an idea for using it to teach an entire segment of our curriculum, and, when we brought it up to some other members of the department (informally), they really seemed interested.

In the future, I intend to use these tools, as well as several others, in my classroom.  Although my district does not yet have a timeline established for making the 1:1 transition, I know that this change will come.  When it does, in order for the transition to be successful, we need to be ready to embrace these new tools and ideas.  Now, I not only feel better prepared, I actually feel excited!

Social Media and the Classroom

          I think that blended and online coursework is wonderful, and I think that even in a digital forum, student-teacher and student-student interaction is a vital component of learning, but I don’t see any reason that those types of interactions shouldn’t be reserved for the learning platforms.  Online class sites can provide discussion boards, message boards, text chats, voice chats, and many additional forms of media sharing and online collaboration, and I have yet to hear of any reason that one of those options wouldn’t be equally as effective at disseminating information or facilitating interactions between students as non-educational social media.  Maybe someday someone will change my mind, but for now, I don’t want to be my students’ friend, Facebook or otherwise, I want to be their mentor.  Yes, I want my students to approach me with questions, but I don’t want them to rely on my constant virtual presence.  If I do my job, then they can use their knowledge and skills without me.

Furthermore, when students are completing my coursework, I want them to be focused on it.  I understand that distractions are inevitable and that most of my students consider themselves to be effective multitaskers, but I don’t see any reason to exacerbate this behavior by encouraging, or even requiring, students to use social media to stay abreast of coursework or to complete class activities.   I think that combining social media with classwork is at least as likely to provide a distraction from the classwork as it is to keep students engaged during out-of-class hours.

Speaking of out-of-class hours, I feel that the boundary between home and school is beneficial, and should be respected.  Students should not be constantly on-call.  This is stressful enough for a doctor, so how could it be appropriate for a teenager?  Students have a right to know when they are off-duty.  If they have participated in class and then completed their homework, then they should have the opportunity not to think about me or my class for a while.  I don’t need to be popping up in their feed all evening or all weekend.

I expect my students to take the class as seriously as I do.  Although at times some students do not meet that expectation, I respect the members of my class enough to assume they are responsible, capable students and then adapt my strategies for particular individuals that need more hand-holding.  My students are in high school, so even the youngest are only a few years from voting age and leaving home, and they have all been doing the education thing for a while now.  Because I take my class seriously, I keep my professional life and my personal life separate, and I want my students to do the same.  Yes, I am all for making a personal connection and connecting my content material to their personal interests, but I don’t feel like I have to become an active component of their private lives in order to do it.  

Curation Tools

           Until this week, I had never really thought about using Pinterest as a classroom resource.  However, now that I have seen some examples, like this one on Tapas http://pinterest.com/leticiaclen/tapas/  by Leticia Clendenen, I am starting to see some the potential.  Pinterest allows a presenter to present information in a wide variety of formats about a collection of related, but varied topics, and the resources can vary in depth and detail of explanation.  Allowing students to explore a set of pre-selected resources and allowing them to choose which ones to investigate is a great way to present differentiated information without singling out students as remedial and advanced. 

          In particular, I like the idea of using Pinterest when the goal is to expose students to a broader theme.  Sometimes, it is important to give students a general idea of what there is to know, but it is not essential that they all recall a particular set of facts.  Next year, I would like to try using Pinterest to curate information about Hispanic cities.  I really don’t like the way we teach culture now, because we just teach it by the book.  The book has decided what is important for everyone, but if each of us were to plan trips to visit any particular city, I am certain that few of us would plan identical itineraries.  I would love to take a harbor tour in Valparaiso and stop at a seafood restaurant, but someone else might be fascinated by Bernardo O’Higgins and want to spend more time at the history museum.  We could approximate this freedom of choice by using Pinterest to curate resources that will allow students to virtually explore the city. Students could click through it to get an idea of some of the features and attractions in the city, but then spend their time learning about the particular aspects that are interesting to them.  Not only that, but they can select the presentation methods that are best for them.  If they like videos, they can watch videos, if they want to see stills of well-known locations, murals, paintings, etc., they can do that.  If they want to read, they can read about what interests them.

          The assessment would have to reflect this variability. Students could be asked to recall a few essential facts, such as the geographic location of the city or type of currency, but then other prompts would have to be open-ended.  For example, students could be asked to describe three tourist attractions they would choose to visit if they went to this city, or describe three cultural experiences (food, festivals, dance) that they would choose to take part in.  For the open-ended responses, a basic rubric should be provided so that students can determine the level of detail expected in their responses.  Rather than asking students to recall specific facts like the name of a particular museum, or even what is on display, it is much more important to me that they know about the many opportunities that these places have to offer.

The Best Online Tools for Language Learning

Online learning is an exciting development in the field of education.  Online learning tools can be used to make lessons more engaging, meaningful, and individualized than traditional teaching methods.  These tools can also be used to conduct classes that never meet in one location, and possibly, never all meet at one time.  This has worried some educators, because student-teacher interaction and collaborative learning activities are not only strongly correlated with student success, but, perhaps just as importantly, communication skills and teamwork are important job skills that employers expect students to develop throughout the course of their education.  For these reasons, the technological tools that use the Internet to facilitate interaction have been of particular interest to me.

                As a foreign language teacher, I consider the need for verbal communication to be of particular importance.  For this reason, the tool that most interested me so far has been VoiceThread.com.  I can use this platform to facilitate speaking activities that the students can complete asynchronously.    I particularly like the idea of creating a screencast that can be accessed through VoiceThread.com, so that students can actively participate in a pre-planned lesson at their convenience.  Writing and performing short skits has also traditionally played a significant role in world language classrooms.   In an exclusively online format, the students are never together at the same location, and it is not reasonable to expect them to edit together files recorded remotely for what is intended to be a brief practice activity or formative assessment.   Fortunately, these types of activities can also be adapted to an online format.  Students can write the dialogue either independently or collaboratively via a shared file, such as a Google Doc, and then create the skit using an animation tool, such as www.XtraNormal.com.  I was very happy to learn that XtraNormal is equipped to handle a variety of languages, including Spanish.  Unfortunately, I think students would have to pay to use XtraNormal, since when I tried it myself, I couldn’t save the video using a guest account, and our district doesn’t have a paid account.  Once I receive the skits, I can post them for the entire class to view and require the students to give each other feedback, either verbally through a platform such as VoiceThread.com or written on a discussion board. 

                Language acquisition teachers often use graphic organizers to work with vocabulary, and there are many potentially useful online tools that allow users to digitally create a huge variety of graphic organizers, but, personally, I am less likely to use these, because in most cases, I think it is just as effective for students to write out titles and lists.  I feel similarly about Prezi.  It’s like a slideshow, but with no sequence.  When I work through information, both as a presenter and as a learner, I want the progression of information to be well planned out, not haphazard or random, so this really doesn’t appeal to me.  Even in those rare cases where there is no advantage to planning out the sequence of the presentation, at least if I go through a sequence from a clearly identified beginning to end, I know that I haven’t missed anything.  There are various other services that I would probably make more use of if either my district had a paid license or if the systems were integrated with our grading system.  Quizlet comes to mind.  Quizlet has some good tools available free of charge, but any good practice activity takes time to make.  Because I currently have no way to track which of my students complete Quizlet activities, I cannot make them mandatory, and I don’t feel as though I have enough students that would be motivated to do these activities purely of their own initiative to justify the time that creating them would take away from something else I could to for my class. 

                Even though at this moment, I don’t plan on using every tool that I’ve learned about, I’m really glad to have learned about so many different options and ideas.  The tools that are less appealing to me right now might be exactly what I need in the future, and, if nothing else, I now have a better idea of the vast variety of tools and activities available for the blended or online classroom.

Face-to-Face Learning versus Exclusively Online Learning

Often times, people don't realize just how many types of traditional classroom activities and interactions can be adapted to the online environment. However, there are still some significant differences, which you can see in the Venn diagram that I have created which compares the two.  Fortunately, the possibility of using the best aspects from both learning environments exists in the blended classroom, in which a variety of technological learning tools are used both within a brick-and-mortar classroom and at home as a supplement the classroom activities.

Session 2 Section 4 Cool Tools Blog: Cool Tools

      VoiceThread is a cloud-based application that allows an online instructor to upload media such as a presentation, word document, image, video, or audio recording and then facilitate an asynchronous discussion about the contents.  This is an excellent tool for a foreign language class, because for us, listening and comprehension and verbal responses are not just ways to reach a wider variety of learning styles, rather, they are essential skills in and of themselves.  One way that it could be used in my Spanish II class is to facilitate practice dialogues. 

     Traditionally, I assign each student a partner and have the partners go through a scripted dialogue while I walk around the room attempting to keep fifteen pairs of students on-task while simultaneously monitoring the grammar and pronunciation of up to thirty individuals.  The practice is vital, but even if I could split my attention that many ways (which I can’t), I’m not able to offer corrections to all of the students that would benefit from instructor feedback, either because I didn’t notice the problem in the first place or because I simply run out of time before the activity is over.  Until now, having all students practice at once was the only way I could think of to give all the students the practice opportunities that they need to develop their skills.

     VoiceThread allows for asynchronous discussion, so now all students can still get the practice, but they don’t all have to be talking at once.  Not only will this allow me as a teacher to more effectively monitor student engagement and performance, I feel that the format allows students to get more out of the same practice activity. Many adolescents are self-conscious about possibly making a mistake, so they often just rush through the exercise, because they know that their peers often won’t notice their mistakes if they just rush through the activity quickly enough.  Then, other students end up feeling pressured to keep up, so they rush through as well.  Allowing students to respond at their own pace would eliminate these problems and possibly make the practice even more beneficial, and yet, because it is a spoken rather than written discussion, students are still required to perform in real time, so they won’t be able to slow the activity down to the point at which the conversational applications would be entirely lost.

     Let me provide a specific example.  My Spanish II students learn to use indirect objects and indirect object pronouns.  Then, they are given prompts such as 1) to write an email, 2) to borrow money, 3) to tell secrets, etc., and they are expected to form a question using the prompt and an indirect object. The partner then responds to the questions using a complete sentence. In order to facilitate these practice dialogues asynchronously, I could use VoiceThread.

     To use VoiceThread, first I would create a presentation that defined indirect objects and indirect object pronouns and explained how to use them.  The presentation is displayed like a slideshow from within VoiceThread. After the explanation, I can post the activity instructions and example.  On the first slide, students are asked to use the prompts to create the questions following the model.  The students can then post audio comments containing the questions that they have formed.  Using the above example, the questions might be 1) To whom did you write an email?, 2) From whom did you borrow money?, 3) To whom do you tell a secret?.  If a student still has trouble forming the questions after going through the explanation and viewing the model, he or she could listen to other students forming the questions and emulate the sentence structure.  Rather than being cheating, learning to reproduce sentence structure is the goal of this activity, so there’s no problem there.

     On the next slide, I could ask the students to respond to the questions they just asked.  Using the same examples, these answers might be 1) I wrote an email to my grandma, 2) I borrowed money from my dad, 3) I told a secret to my friend, Sara.  Again, the students respond by posting audio comments. 

     I am also excited about this Web 2.0 tool, because I think it could be applied at more advanced levels to facilitate less scripted discussions in which students actually listen and respond to one another.  An advantage for the instructor is that this would allow for a more objective method of monitoring of participation.  An advantage for the students is that less outgoing students might find it easier to participate if they have all the time they need to process the information and formulate a response, especially if they don’t have to worry about forcing their way into a discussion that is being commandeered by a handful of talented or outgoing students, as always seems to happen in a physical class discussion.  There is a danger that rather than learn to respond in real time, students will simply type their responses into a translator and then read them into the discussion board, but since most students are not going to take extra steps if its not necessary, I think that simply making the expectations clear might be enough to largely avoid this problem.  The instructor should make it known in advance that the (non-scripted) voice discussion posts are graded for expression, and that perfection isn’t expected.  Then, if (when) we notice it happening anyway, we can raise the issue with the particular student.  Overall, I think we stand to gain more than we stand to lose by using this excited new tool.

The Technology Integreation Matrix

rating: Active - adoption, Collaborative - adaptation (sometimes infusion), Constructive - adoption to adaptation, Authentic - adaptation, Goal Directed - adaptation

For me, it’s really hard to perform well on the Technology Integration Matrix, because my students and I only have access to a computer lab twice a month.  Once we do get in there, we have access to some pretty powerful proprietary software (Sony Soloist and Sony Virtuoso), but because students don’t have access to this software outside of the Language Lab, any work that we do on lab days has to be concluded during the period and can’t be continued outside of class.  If I want to assign something that students can continue to work on outside of class, then I have to forfeit the time that we have to work with the language software for those two weeks.  Our students don’t have personal electronic devices, so on a day-to-day basis, the only use of technology I have access to is a projector connected to my computer, which is the same computer I use to make my lesson plans, check my email, enter attendance, and input grades.  Because of the sensitive information available under my log-in and the time that it takes to switch users, it’s pretty difficult to encourage or even allow student-led, technology-based learning.

There is always the option of emphasizing online classwork and requiring students to complete those assignments outside of class.  Most students have Internet access at home, and those that don’t can technically access it after school in a lab or library.  However, this becomes very difficult for students that travel for athletics, attend internships, or participate in other after-school activities.  Also, I am not very comfortable assigning students work that they haven’t been able to get started in class, because I feel that most questions don’t arise until a student really gets going on his/her own.  I don’t feel comfortable holding students accountable for completing something if I wasn’t available to answer questions when they were trying to get started.  I am hoping that this course will help me learn methods of overcoming these difficulties and learn to design online course components that I can feel comfortable assigning during time periods that I won’t be available to oversee them.

When I do rate myself, I see a lot of variability.  Some assignments lie mainly on the adaptation level, but I do tend to give myself higher marks for collaboration.  Collaboration, at least to me, seems a natural fit for learning a new language, because communication and interaction is pretty much the point of the whole class.  In my lower level classes, I honestly don’t exceed the adaptation level very much in terms of technology use by students.  However, I do slightly better in the higher level classes, at least for the capstone project.  For this project, students can create any type of audiovisual presentation they want, and they can use any tools they want to do so.  Pretty much the only restriction is that they have to be able to share the final product with the rest of their class during the period.  It’s a lot of work for the students, but they seem to have fun with it.  I wouldn’t want to demand that much from students all year, because it seems pretty unrealistic to expect that level of commitment from them constantly when they all have other classes that they also need to focus on, but I may be able to adapt some of those principles into other projects, both for use in the upper level classes through the year, and also for use in the lower level classes. 

I like the idea of offering a menu of possible activities.  Many students enjoy using technology and get a lot out of using it, whereas other students do learn while using more traditional methods.  Giving students well-thought out and guided options that they can select from may go a long way towards making the learning more engaging and individualized.   It’s a little too late to make those changes this year, because there are so many standardized tests in the month of May that our administrators put a pretty firm limit on what we can do with and require of our students this month.  The school and our district are judged by the outcome of this high-stakes testing, and the administrators want the students to concentrate on preparing for these tests without being distracted by classwork that could have been done earlier in the year.  Although I don’t agree with the emphasis on high-stakes testing, I can’t help but understand the administrative point-of-view, because this is the current reality, and we need to deal with it, like it or not.  Additionally, there is talk of bringing in personal electronic devices into the daily classroom.  When that happens (notice that I say when, not if) I will definitely have a lot of changes to make.  I don’t know exactly how I will make those changes just yet.  I will have to figure it out as I go along, but I am hoping that this course will prepare me to make meaningful adaptive changes rather than simple substitutions.

Advantages of Online Teaching and Learning

     We all know someone that we respect as being of above-average intelligence that seems to have a good ethic and probably even comes off as being quite educated…and we all remember being surprised that this person had performed rather poorly in a brick-and-mortar school.  For me, that person is my husband.  I didn’t know him in high school, but all his friends say that he was just as smart and logical then as he is now.  They affirm that he was an avid reader then, as he is now.  His parents, both biologists, taught him anatomy growing up the same way that most parents teach their kids how to understand a ball game or plant a garden.  So, why did he barely scrape through high school?  Was it an attitude problem?  By all accounts, he had even more attitude than your typical adolescent, but then you have to wonder:  did he develop an attitude because he wasn’t getting what he needed, or did he not get what he needed because of his attitude?  Or maybe you don’t have to wonder about it.  Maybe you can just decide:  you know what?  It doesn’t matter if he had a bad attitude or not, it was the responsibility of the adults to get past the fact that this kid had an attitude and figure out why he wasn’t succeeding.  If the educators at his schools had bothered to get to know him (few did), they would have realized he was highly capable.  So, how could this situation be improved for the students out there that share that story today?

     Back when my husband was in high school, traditional brick-and-mortar schools were the only readily available form of education.  A learning or health disability had to be pretty severe before any other possibilities were considered.  Today, however, we have the option of employing Online Learning.  Online learning can be conducted completely through electronic contact, or select activities can be utilized in a blended course that also meets face-to-face.  Either would have helped my husband.  In college, he eventually identified his problem.  He’s dyslexic, but it was never diagnosed, because it didn’t manifest as backwards letter writing.  It means that he reads very slowly.  He didn’t do the work, because he literally could not keep up.  His teachers knew he was intelligent, so they assumed he was lazy and not trying.  So they gave him attitude, and he gave that attitude back double, and soon, he didn’t even want to try any more.  Instead, he just studied what he felt like studying.

Wait, you are saying.  Dyslexic?  What does that have to do with online learning?  Online learning isn’t a treatment for dyslexia.  But maybe it should be.  An online learning environment ties together a lot of different types of activities.  Sure, there are word documents and text files, but there are also audio clips, videos, games, and other interactive programs.  In the brick-and-mortar schools of two decades ago, teachers couldn’t handout a video and tell students to watch it at home.  They certainly couldn’t expect students to create their own video.  Homework was pretty much reading and writing.  But in a blended or exclusively online classroom, those types of assignments are commonplace.

     Another problem is focus.  He can work on a problem he is fascinated by literally all night long without pause.  He can get frustrated and become completely useless by a problem he has only thought about for five minutes.  Tomorrow, the problem that frustrated him might be the one that fascinates him.  Asynchronous online courses allow students to work, within a particular timeframe (of usually a week or two), at times that suit them.  My husband has clinical insomnia, and it had been diagnosed when he was in high school.  There were days he made it to school in body only, having been awake for days.  When he would lie down at night, his mind would turn back on to high gear, but by morning he would be exhausted and barely able to function.  I can only imagine how successful he would have been if he had been able to do his schooling when his brain took off, and rest when he needed to.

     Here’s a few more considerations:  My husband is 6’4” and built to match.  He reached that size early in high school.  He’s also left-handed.  He prefers cool temperatures.  Well, he’s mentioned many times that he almost never had access to a left-handed desk, and even when he wasn’t at an off-handed desk, he was squashed into a seat that was never comfortable in a room that was usually overheated.  Here again is a situation in which online learning could have benefited him.  In online learning, students have more control over their environment.  If he could have sat at a comfortable desk with a window open while working in a self-paced environment with the aid of audio and visual resources in which he could pause as needed to type out questions, comments, and concerns onto a discussion board or in a chatroom, I can only imagine what he might have achieved!  

     I've only outlined some of the challenges that affected one person known to me.  There are countless other barriers out there that online learning can help to overcome, just as there are countless individuals out there that are looking for the opportunity to break down those barriers.  Every year, online learning becomes more accessible.  Although this can't change the experience that my husband had in high school, I can look ahead to his future.  Our daughter isn't in school yet, but she is like her father in every way.  It will be very interesting to see what her high school experience is like.  I expect that it will be very different from ours, but I am hopeful that the changes will be for the better!

About Me

About me:  I am a high school Spanish teacher in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Currently, I have a Moodle website that I use to support my classroom teaching. It contains copies of notes and practice activities, audio and video files, links to other online resources, and project templates. However, due to the limited access that my students have to the internet during class time, my class page is largely supplementary. I also have some experience with online classes from the student perspective, as I did take several of my Master’s classes in an online format. I found the online classes to be at least as beneficial as the classes that met in person. 
     I was selected to take this course because I did my research thesis on on-line learning with respect to language acquisition. I have been asking about the ways that on-line learning will affect the World Language program within my district. I am concerned about whether or not the on-line language classes currently available develop the conversational skills that are critical to functioning in a second language. Speaking involves more than just pronunciation. Students must be able to listen and respond in real time without first pausing to draft and revise a response. I also am concerned about how well the vocabulary and grammar sequences from on-line courses offered outside the district will integrate with our program. Many of our more motivated students turn to on-line classes to resolve scheduling difficulties. With more and more students turning to on-line courses for high school credit, I feel that we need to prepare an on-line program that is aligned with our classroom program. 
     I hope that this class will help me to locate some tools and resources that can be used to help students develop oral and aural skills, and I also hope to get ideas about ways to assess those skills via the internet. I also would like to develop some practice activities for students that provide immediate (pre-programmed) individualized feedback that could be used in either a blended or exclusively on-line class format.