Input and Output and Content Based instruction

This is my reaction to Input – What it is and why you need it by Tomasz P. Szynalski and to Fredricka Stoller’s piece on Content-Based-Instruction

I agree that providing lots of input is essential in second language acquisition. However, I do not think that output is less important or that we can completely rule out grammar.

It is true that we become fluent in L1 without knowing the grammar rules. However, learning a second language seldom replicates the conditions in which we learn our mother tongue. Even in total immersion situations, there’s always the factor of L1 interference, which becomes more prevalent the older the learner.

Anyway, let’s suppose we can learn a second language in the same conditions we acquire our mother tongue. According to the Inputs and Outputs piece, a child would begin to speak only when it can produce accurate output, when, in fact, we know that we all start by uttering barely recognisable sounds that evolve into fluent speech by the feedback from the listeners, who constantly model, reinforce and correct. I believe that the process of acquiring a language always presupposes the presence of an interlanguage, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the internalisation of mistakes but, rather, the attempts at reaching competence in the target language.

What can we do to make our students’ outputs effective instead of damaging (as the author indicates is possible)?

• Providing scaffolding appropriate to the level so that learners can develop learning strategies that will eventually enable them to become autonomous learners.
• Encouraging students to take risks. You can’t learn anything without leaving your comfort zone and risking making mistakes.
• Working on weak areas by modelling, giving feedback (teacher and peer), providing plenty of opportunities to revisit problem areas and tackling them from different angles.
• Exposing students to lots of relevant, meaningful, appropriate input, the sort that is neither too easy as to lead to boredom nor too difficult as to result in frustration.

And I think that this is where Fredricka Stoller’s piece on Content-Based-Instruction comes into play. I totally agree that content should be the meat and not just simply the shell.

In the last few years, we have been carrying out cross cultural projects with our students. They connect with peers in other countries who are learning Spanish as a second language. Working together, they choose a topic of interest to them (F.S.’s meaningful content). For example, last year, the topic of one of these exchanges was bullying. Prior to their live communication via Skype, the students in both countries researched the topic in relevant web pages and through feedback from peers in different schools (information gathering) Then they processed the information collected to share it with their partners (information processing and reporting) The grammar they needed emerged naturally through the completion of the task at hand (grammar in context). Meaningful output took the form of written texts and visual artifacts (for example, using Glogster) which were posted in their wiki. Oral output occurred during the video conference. Skype conferences can be recorded, so after the live meeting, students had the opportunity to watch the recordings and listen to how native speakers were using the target language.

I am convinced that the fact that students were learning the vocabulary and grammar they needed for a clear, meaningful purpose made it the more memorable. And, of course, much of this wouldn't have been possible without the presence of technology, which gives us access to lots of authentic native content and the chance of connecting with native speakers of the target language.

LTMOOC: My Introduction

Hi there! My name is Maria Rosario Di Mónaco. I’m an EFL teacher from Rosario, Argentina, so my native language is Spanish. I’ve lived in this town all my life though I’ve had the chance to travel abroad a couple of times (wish I could do more of that!) 

For over 25 years now, I’ve run an EFL private institute in my hometown. We teach all ages and levels, from beginner to upper intermediate. Basically, we cater for those students who want to reach a high level of English and cannot afford to attend bilingual schools. 

Ever since I graduated as an English Teacher, I’ve been committed to my professional development. I sometimes feel that I’m a bit of a “course-a-holic”. It was face-to-face back in the years when the internet was not around. These days, it is mostly online. Every summer holiday, I make a point of joining at least one of the EVO sessions and, on one occasion, I co-moderated one of them - Enhancing Lessons. I’ve also taken several courses on CALL, Instructional Design and Moodle. 

It was in one of the groups I belong to, Multiliteracies, that I first heard about this course. I had once intended to join a MOOC but couldn’t find the time to pursue it. The topic of this MOOC sounds particularly appealing plus I’m curious to see how the platform works. Above all, I value the opportunity to connect with like-minded people from different corners of the world. That’s why I’m here, though I’m not sure I will be able to do much - no “course-time” now, with classes having started just a month ago and still so much to organise and sort out. 

About my interests, I love music, books, swimming and travelling. On a professional note, I’d like to connect to people who are interested in cross cultural projects so that I can offer my students the possibility of connecting to peers in different parts of the world and developing their cultural awareness.

My Professional Development Project

Along the many online courses I have taken, I have noticed that effective and efficient communication seems to be one of the key factors in the success of a course. In face-to-face interaction, we have the aid of body language and intonation to perceive if and how we are getting our message across, and to make the necessary adjustments to ensure that our course is inclusive and engaging. In online environments we do not have these cues so it becomes crucial to make the best possible use of the tools at our disposal as well as to look for other ways to hone communication so that we can prevent the learner from feeling isolated and lost, and from eventually dropping out as a result.

I find this topic fascinating so I decided to choose it for my PD. I carried out my project directly on the Moodle sandbox (no links therefore), which helped me put into practice the skills I have acquired during these workshops.

Course Description

This is more or less what I had in mind, though I have been able to cover only 2 weeks of the three I had initially planned.

Week 1
The idea was to have participants reflect on the nature and requirements of effective communication and think of ways of making this possible in online learning.

Readings:

1. Success in Online Learning: Communication 
2. Online vs Face-to-Face Communication  
3. Promoting Efficient Communication with Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System

Activities and Resources:

1. Wordle image to trigger reflection and discussion
2. Forum to share views asynchronously
3. WiZiQ session to discuss the readings and the participants' reflections synchronously. Tutorials are provided for those not familiar with this virtual classroom.

Week 2  
The focus of this week was the different types of communication available in online environments, the features and affordances of synchronous and asynchronous tools,  and the importance of including synchronous tools in a medium that relies heavily on text-mediated communication.


Readings:

1. How to Enhance Online Student Engagement and Satisfaction 
2. Opinion: The Importance of Being Synchronous

Activities and Resources:

1. Participants are invited to watch this video:       
2. A forum is created for participants to share their views on the readings and the video. 
3. Participants are invited to take part in a Webquest to explore different tools that can be used to provide online live meetings for the school where they work.

Week 3
In this week, the aim is to have participants explore other tools that can help enhance communication both synchronously (Skype, voice boards, instant messaging, mobile devices, chat) and asynchronously (email, forums, news groups, blogs, wikis, podcasts, text messaging)

M4T-A: Book Review

For our book review, Sandra, Jose and I had chosen "Moodle 1.9: English Teacher's Cookbook" by Silvina P. Hillar. An English Teacher and a Certified Legal Translator, the author has done a lot of research on writing and composing techniques and describes herself as passionate about educational technology, qualities that can easily be noticed in her construction of the book.

Here, Hillar focuses on activities and resources for developing reading and writing skills with the Moodle environment in mind. Along its 10 chapters, the book moves gradually from simple activities designed to improve writing at sentence level, to reach more sophisticated levels of written discourse like poem, description, composition, essay and article writing.

She uses a wide variety of resources and tools, including Hot Potatoes, Twitter, Facebook, cubing techniques, Venn Diagrams, Mind Maps, Tree Diagrams and Discussion Clocks. Most of them call for collaborative and creative work, and are clearly presented and illustrated by means of abundant screenshots. The latter feature could be seen as a bit redundant for those who are already familiar with Moodle, though it will be of great help for the Moodle newbie.

All in all, this is a good book for those teachers looking at honing reading and writing skills within Moodle.

Here's our presentation:

Moodle Book Club: Review of "Moodle 1.9"

View more presentations from Mary Di Monaco

M4T-A: Week 4 Group Challenge Project

For our group challenge project, we chose a voiceboard tool that Sandra came up with. All of us immediately fell for Gong since we think it would make an invaluable addition to any course. It would be particularly useful in the EFL field as it would provide listening and speaking practice in an invironment where there is normally not much opportunity for the development of these skills. Among other features, it offers the possibility of listening to and responding to text and voice messages. It also allows the participation in group discussions using synchronous and asynchronous chat.

Here's the presentation we put together:

Nanogong or gong

View more presentations from Mary Di Monaco.

And here's our advertisement for the tool:

M4T-A: Week 4 Readings

I've been going through two of the suggested readings in Week 4: Success factors in online teaching and Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching

Not surprisingly, they both emphasise the need to engage learners by using materials that are relevant to their needs and to the learning objectives. Both of them also stress the importance of creating a supportive and safe environment for learners to achieve their goals. 

• Success factors in online teaching  

This presentation states that, as online learning entails isolation and a need for time management skills, technical skills and computer access, it is essential to provide a collaborative and supportive environment and to ensure the accessibility of the course materials. In this medium, the role of the mentor becomes crucial for engaging and supporting learners. Success depends on learning resources that are relevant, challenging, but achievable, and easy to navigate. 

Providing support and feedback by means of regular meetings becomes central in this context. The presentation illustrates the point by referring to an experience in which several tools were used to this effect:
Gmail: to profit from a wide variety of Google apps by creating a Google account.
Google Calendar: one of the many Google apps, useful to schedule and view events.
YouCanBook.me: for mentors to add events to calendars, and check preferred meeting times. Good tool for selecting event times convenient to the majority of the students.
FlashMeeting: to hold group meetings as a way to foster collaboration and a sense of belonging, as well as to provide opportunities to clarify doubts
my.TAFE: for students to receive announcements and see them in the Google calendar.
redcoal: to send meeting reminders by sms text with the link to the meeting, and feedback on marked assignments.

• Nine principles of online education

This article elaborates a bit more on the subject, outlining nine principles that are essential for online education to become a successful experience.

1. The online world is a medium unto itself: materials need to be designed with the web dynamics in mind, providing clear guidelines to navigate them.
2. In the online world content is a verb: learners need to be actively involved with the content in order to master it. Rather than merely providing content, the instructor needs to design tasks and assignments that learners can engage with in order to meet the course objectives.
3. Technology is a vehicle, not a destination: tools must be chosen taken into account how they can help to meet the learning objectives, and they need to be constantly evaluated to make pedagogically informed decisions for their implementation.
4. Great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology: a successful online course presupposes clearly stated objectives and goals, regular and individual contact and feedback.
5. Sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence: it is crucial to develop a sense of community to make up for the lack of face to face contact and so that the learner can be percieved as real person.
6. Excellence requires multiple areas of expertise: excellent instruction must be accompanied by technical expertise to ensure that the contents can be properly delivered and accessed.
7. A great web interface will not save a poor course; but a poor web interface will destroy a potentially great course: it is necessary to articulate a clear guide to lead students through the course.
8. Excellence comes from ongoing assessment and refinement: course effectiveness and efficiency should be regularly and systematically reviewed so as to obtain diagnostic feedback.
9. Sometimes the little extras go a long way:  additions such as exemplars, rubrics, guides, tutorials, personal email messages, calendar reminders, audio clips and video segme

M4T-A: An Open Letter to Educators

The young man in the video “An Open Letter to Educators” claims that he left university not because he was no longer interested in learning, but because he felt institutional education was interfering with his education.

He points out that information is no longer in the hands of a few. It is now accessible to everyone and, therefore, education can no longer be centered on simply imparting facts (which are now just a click away), and expecting students to memorize and then regurgitate them when testing time comes.

I believe he is right. This information era calls for new literacies. With the information overload we are exposed to, it is essential that students be taught how to look for, filter, analyse, evaluate, organise and apply information.  This involves higher order thinking skills that go beyond just storing, remembering and recalling facts.

So what’s the role of educators in view of this paradigm shift? Incorporating technology in our classrooms is not enough if it does not serve a meaningful purpose and is supported by a sound pedagogy. Rather than spoon-feeding our students, we should seek to empower them to make the most of the tools and resources at their disposal. As Albin Toffler puts it, we must prepare them “to learn, unlearn and relearn”, to think creatively so that they can keep abreast in a fast changing world. But how can we prepare them for that if we are not ready to embrace change ourselves?

M4T-A: reflections on the first chapter of "Using Moodle"

In the first chapter of their book “Using Moodle”, Jason Colen and Helen Foster clearly outline the factors that make Moodle special:

• It’s open source, thus allowing for peer review and knowledge sharing.

• It’s free, and as such, free from market pressures, which can sometimes result in detriment to quality.

• It’s based on the educational philosophy of social constructionism which views learning as a reconstruction rather than a transmission of knowledge, emphasizing the role of creative experimentation and meaning negotiation. While CMSs are tool centered, Moodle is learning centered and aims at the construction of knowledge through exploration, discovery, sharing and collaboration rather than at the mere delivery of information.

• It’s nurtured by a large and active community of users and developers who, through their feedback and suggestions, ensure quality and constant development.

M4T-A: my Moodling so far

I started this series of Moodle workshops with Integrating Technology back in December last year and it's been a most enriching experience.

Right from the Orientation Workshop, I started exploring the philosophy underpinning Moodle, one with which I feel completely identified. And then were the practical aspects of using Moodle. The hands-on work in the sandboxes has helped me learn the ropes - well, sort of... I feel quite confident now using many of the activities and resources, though there are still a few that I need to continue working on.

Along the Beginners' workshop, team work became central, providing first-hand experience of the constructivist and social constructionist approach of this learning environment. I can truly say I've learned a lot from my partners all along.

Now I'm getting ready for the Advanced workshop. I hope I can manage to meet the course objectives but, in any event, I'm sure I'll continue learning a lot from my facilitators and partners.

Facebook in the classroom?

Quite a controversial topic these days. I had my qualms about using Facebook with my EFL students, mainly because of the privacy issues the network has been involved in. However, since one of my main objectives is to have my students use the language in a way that is meaningful to them so that they can continue learning outside the classroom walls, I had to give the issue a second thought. After all, is there such a thing as "online privacy"? I don't think so. The moment you click "send" anywhere on the web, the information is no longer yours alone and can, in most cases, be easily retrieved by any search engine. Try googling your name and you'll see what I mean.

So why am I using Facebook with my students?

• Most of my students already have a Facebook account and use it on a daily basis as the main means of communication with their friends.
• I've found that, while I have to coax them to interact in their blogs, wikis and other social platforms, they seem to feel at home on Facebook and communicate there naturally and spontaneously.   
• Since they are already there, this is a good opportunity to model approriate and safe internet behaviour. Although in my opinion "online privacy" is a contradiction in terms, I do believe "internet safety" is quite a different matter, and something we must endeavour to train our students in.

How am I using it?

• I created a Facebook Group instead of a Page since that gives you greater control over who joins the group and what others can see.
• Parents were consulted and the topic was discussed in a meeting (most of them gave us a dismissive nod - here in Argentina the use of Facebook is incredibly pervasive)
• We post discussions on different platforms so those students who do not have a Facebook account do not feel left out or under pressure to create one, and are still able to communicate and interact with their peers.

What am I using it for?
All the activities mentioned below are optional. Students are not forced to do them or marked on them. I somehow feel this would take away much of the fun.

• Writing: students post short reviews of the songs they would like to work with in their f2f video classes.
• Deciding what material they want to work with: polls are created with the students' suggestions and they have the opportunity to vote and have their say.
• Extra practice: I post links to external sites which provide practice for listening, reading, writing, speaking, grammar, vocabulary, international exams.
• Crosscultural experiences: again, I post links to safe pages that foster interaction with peers from all over the globe.
• Responding to visual and oral stimuli: I post what I consider interesting articles and videos to trigger discussion. Sometimes I get lucky and can see exchanges like the one below (these are screen captures since it is not possible to see them in the group if you are not a member)

 

These are just a few of the uses you can put Facebook to. And another good thing is that I don't even do half of the work. Most of what happens there is geared by the students themselves. They upload material and interact of their own accord most of the time.

Note: this group is promoted only among teens and adults. In the case of kids, we work with blogs and wikis.

Flickr's Advanced Search Feature

I have become quite aware of the importance of not infringing copyright laws. For example, when looking for images, I browse for those whose owners have chosen to share under a Creative Commons license, and try to return the favour when I upload images of my own.

I knew about Google's advanced search feature, which allows you to filter images by license. What I didn't know is that Flickr lets you carry out this type of search too. This came as quite a big surprise. Has it been there all along and I didn't pay attention to the small print?

For my previous post, I was looking for an image of a berry bush. I was painstakingly going through the properties of each image when it dawned on me that there must be an easier way. And there it was, Flickr's advanced search (Yes!)

I scrolled the Advanced Search page all the way down and ticked the box for Creative Commons:

So easy to be a law-abiding cyber citizen!

Back to the Berry Bush

Here’s my long overdue first post for evomlit11 - Multiliteracies. In fact, I’d told myself that I wouldn’t join this session this year. Not that I didn’t feel attracted to it (quite the opposite!) but, being in the middle of a Moodle workshop, I  have quite a full plate at the moment. Besides, I’m going away on holiday the day after tomorrow and do not expect to have internet access during that time.

Anyway, here I am. Having joined last year’s session, I’ve been following the pursuits and findings of this community through the different environments multiliterates move around. Little by little, members’ introductions started to make it to my email inbox from the Yahoo Group: new people, new questions, new paths to tread. It was getting more and more difficult to just lurk. And then enters Vance’s post reminding members that this is not your normal course but more like a berry bush of choices, thus triggering associations of something rich and untamed, something that invites you to delve into, disentangle, pick, share, taste and  savour as you choose. Impossible to resist! 

Video recorders in the classroom

This is an interesting article I've just come across with in a digital newsletter. Lots of ideas worth coming back to during the summer holidays.
Video recorders in the classroom

Tagging in Action at ITValley10: Reflections after today’s Elluminate session

I could only join today’s live session at Elluminate for the last half hour. Little as I heard (I haven't listened to the recording yet), it has prompted me to reflect on why, how, where - and perhaps, also for whom - I tag. Also, on how and why I could use this with my students.

I started tagging as a way to keep track of all the interesting information, pages, blogs, tools, etc that I encountered as I started my online journey. My very first experience with tagging goes back to my acquaintance with Delicious. As many others have said, those early tags were perhaps not very appropriate but, thanks to Rita Zeinstejer’s advice, I learned early on that, as far as tagging is concerned, “the more the merrier”, meaning that when you use a wide variety of tags, it’s much easier to find what you need later on. As I became more familiar with Delicious, I learned that it offers the possibility of creating groups. This is a great feature to work collaboratively with colleagues or simply to see what the people in your network, those whose judgement you trust, consider worth bookmarking. More recently, I joined Diigo, which, I must confess, I do not use as frequently as Delicious. However, I find it particularly useful in that, apart from all the features it shares with Delicious, it sends you updates of what the people in your network are bookmarking. I’m not sure Delicious offers this feature (I have to revise the settings, I guess)

Presently, I’m fascinated with a couple of applications, Twibes and TweetDeck, which have given me a new perspective on the power of tagging. Twibes has helped me sort out in groups the myriad of tweets that pop up on my Twitter homepage. Among other interesting features, it includes RSS for the tweets and for the members, as well as groups and people search. TweetDeck allows you to manage your Twitter lists, sort your information into columns and also search for lists. All of these of course require tagging. Another of my recent finds, is how to tag pictures in Flickr, though I’m not so sure I’ve mastered it yet - I tagged a picture in Flickr but I still can’t see it on Spezify (search engine that displays the results in the form of images and newspaper headlines) or Taggalaxy (which does the same with pictures)

So, how and why could I use tagging with my students? Basically, in the same way and for the same reasons I am using it: to search, bookmark, organize and get back to content, to network and connect, to work collaboratively. As Vance pointed out in the Elluminate session, it can be used to direct students to specific content. With the information overload on the web, it is necessary, especially when working with young learners, to provide some kind of guidance and selection. Apart from looking for content utilizing certain tags, students can tag any content they create and work collaboratively in this way. This could be accompanied with the creation of a backchannel for communication on Twibes.

Comment on David Weinberger and Andrew Keen's debate

In truth, these are just notes taken while listening to David Weinberger and Andrew Keen debating Weinberger's thesis in "All Things Miscellaneous"

D. Weinberger’s argument:
The fundamental web challenge is how to organize information, how to find what matters to us.
He contrasts physical order with digital order:


Andrew Keen’s criticism
The main issue at stake: the value of authority in a connected world.
He views digital change as a threat:
Modernity provided mass society with mass access to culture, information, education, literacy.
The digital revolution might return us to the Middle Ages: increasing hierarchy, increasing division between rich and poor, between media literates and those who are not. He foresees the emergence of a digital aristocracy - the elite of the Middle Ages who lost touch of their physical community- resulting in more boundaries, more fragmentation and less conversation, in oligarchy rather than democracy.
He worries about scarceness of talent, information and education on the grounds that when you do away with the gatekeepers of mainstream media, you’re doing away with the access to information and education for the masses.

My impression:
I don’t see much point in Keen’s arguments:
He talks about declining standards of content in the web as if this were not also a problem in mainstream media, denying the presence of talent among the multiplicity of voices emerging in the web. Maybe is this what he fears? These days, as never before, ordinary people as well as experts can find a channel of expression. Whether what they say is valuable or not, is for people themselves to decide. And this seems to be another issue with Keen: the undermining of authority and power. His position strikes me as paternalistic and authoritarian: only those in power can decide what and how much people should have access to. Or could it be that he's just playing the devil's advocate, as Hanna Khamis, one of my partners at EVO multiliteracies, has suggested?

e-Portfolios, aggregation, tagging and RSS

So far, these have been quite elusive concepts to me. I had a vague idea of what they were and how they worked, but could definitely not put that into words. Vance's post on this topic on the Multiliteracies YG has clarified this and I would like to quote him here (hope this is OK)

Vance says:

In our course on Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning environments, we intend to get into the concept of e-Portfolios, the idea being that anyone undertaking a learning journey can record and document the stages of that journey at a central hub with links to the associated documents.It's a portfolio in the sense that it can be viewed as a collection of documents in one container, but in fact what appears to be the container is a page linking to documents that could in fact be anywhere. The central page is where you send people if you want them to see what you have learned or accomplished. This could also be seen as a kind of CV professionally, or as an assessment tool at the end of a course of study for students.

Regarding aggregation, you can think of RSS and tagging on one side and aggregation as being the other side of the same coin. RSS is code that announces when a content on a site has been updated. Tags are keywords millions of users give to that content when they either produce or see it (because of it's grass roots nature, a tagging system is called a folksonomy).

Aggregators are tools that do two things. They read RSS code (when they have been given the URL of that code, or subscribed to it). And they search places where tags are likely to be found and they return links to content having the tags requested.

So aggregation is a kind of search that works off METAdata; that is code or tags or script associated with content, not the content itself. Google on the other hand searches actual content.

ESL Video

This is a great tool that I read about in Nik Peachey's blog, Nik's Quick Shout

It allows you to embed a video and create a quiz based on it. Once you are done, you can grab the code to embed in a blog, wiki, etc. As my students love working with video clips, I find this tool of enormous pedagogical value since students are developing vocabulary and listening skills through a highly motivating activity. This has also proved a valuable resourse to entice students to visit their wiki, where, alongside their working spaces, they now have a video page.

The only weak points I have encountered so far are that ESL caters solely for multiple choice questions. Besides, if you want to embed the code on Ning, you'll find that you can only do so on the pages that have a text box (Main, Members, Groups) Apparently, "iframes" can only be added to text boxes in Ning.

Open & Networked Teaching: A Transformative Journey

Alec Couros gave a fantastic talk today on the benefits of open and networked teaching. In his one-hour passionate and inspiring presentation, he made attendees reflect on the nature of knowledge, the change of learning paradigms from individual to social, the benefits of sharing instead of hoarding.

Open & Networked Teaching: A Transformative Journey

View more PDF documents from Alec Couros.

WordSift: Tool for visualizing text

Wordle taken a step beyond?

Apart from showing the most frequent words in a text in the form of tag clouds, this tool integrates visualization of word relationships and Google searches of images and videos. You can see images of the words, word webs, definitions, sentences where those words appear, etc.
Some of the applications suggested in the tutorial below include:

• pre- reading activities, e.g. making predictions about a text, introducing unfamiliar vocabulary

• post- reading activities, e.g. creating word webs to explore connections between words, writing a paragraph including some of the most frequent words

Bookmarking and annotating

Today I came across this post by Robert which I definitely want to remember. I had no idea that there were tools like the ones he mentions below, which let you bookmark, annotate and share web pages.

"...I wonder if others have experience of these:

http://trailfire.com/

http://stickis.com

http://fleck.com/

http://sharedcopy.com/

http://info.jkn.com/

http://www.mystickies.com/

http://drawhere.com/"

I have had a quick look at some of them and they look really interesting. I'd like to explore this some more to see how they compare with del.icio.us, Diigo and SimplyBox.