Well, I know that pitching Gmail (or Google Mail as it is known in some parts of the world) is a bit like preaching to the converted when it comes to many readers who visit this blog. But for those who don't have/use Gmail, or do but haven't really thought about its potential uses for online teaching), you might find the following to be of some interest to you.
I've been using Gmail since not long after it first came out, and never wanted or needed to use any other mail provider as a result. The unique Gmail approach to threading mails, in addition to the massive storage allowance, made it perfect for me. I then watched as Google Talk applications were added (allowing me to chat and then even voice chat), and then the Google Docs facility (formerly Writely), allowing online document sharing and collaboration. As these developments progressed, I began to use Gmail a lot with online language learning as well as classroom management and even collaboration with other ELT writers.
Now Gmail has video conferencing embedded in the service as well, and it is surprising clear and reliable - and most importantly, really REALLY easy to install and use.
I won't go on about the various Gmail features - if you really want to know about all of them it would be a good idea to visit the list of features here. In the meantime, I thought I'd demonstrate some of these features using my own Gmail account:
There are a few other reasons why Gmail has been ideal for online teaching. For one, it's available in almost every country (where email/Internet is available) in a variety of languages and hence easy for learners to access. It's also beautifully easy to understand and use - something I've always found important for language learning in particular.
Of course, the talk of the town now is focussed on Google Wave, which looks to be basically Gmail pumped up with almost every web application you can think of plugged into one seamless interface:
I'm not really sure myself. Google Wave looks tremendously exciting, but also a lot like entering non-dual citizenship exclusively within the Kingdom of Google. There's also an interesting article that claims Google Wave already has powerful competitors like Tokbox, though I'm not personally convinced yet.
For language learning in particular, the sneak-peek strikes me as being over the top, too cluttered and too confusing for my potential learners. Gmail already does everything I basically need for online teaching and keeps it all relatively simple, so I won't feel any immediate urge to upgrade to Google Wave. There's also the fact that most of my potential learners won't have access to or won't understand Google Wave for at least 6 months or so after launch. That means I'll be sticking to Gmail for quite some time yet!
Do you use Gmail for online teaching and/or classroom management? Have you checked out Google Wave yet? What do you think of its potential for online education?
This follows up from an earlier post I wrote about becoming an ELT materials writer (a little belated, I know!), and it explores some of the ways I recommend you think about making some effective investments related to technology.
Some of these points relate to actually obtaining certain technology tools (to help materials writing/designing processes), while others explore different formats for actually delivering and marketing (or sharing, if you prefer the friendly/helpful collegial approach to things!) your ELT content.
There isn't graphic detail there or lists of specific things to buy or try, but hopefully there are some things for you to consider!
I've been using Lefora, an interesting combination of forum and blog, for a while now as a language teaching and teacher training tool.
The video below shows some of the main features and some examples from my own Lefora forum:
It wasn't possible to cover all the features in a five-minute screencast, but I hope that gives you a quick overview of some of the main ones.
Definitely worth trying out - I've found it extremely useful for not only managing large numbers of students online, but different kinds of courses and even teaching tasks and materials.
I started out teaching English when I was 18 years old, fresh out of high school. With high VCE scores in English and English Literature (and a 99% score for History - still don't know how I pulled that one off), I found it easy to find tutoring gigs with high school students who needed help with their essay writing skills. It was all 1-1 (one-on-one or one-to-one or whatever it's called now), and I really enjoyed it. Later I went on to tutor (again on a 1-1 basis) ESL students from university and business settings, and even tutored a businessman in Swedish.
Once I got into TEFL as a serious occupation, it was pretty much all groups. Again, I really enjoyed it. However, I was sometimes asked to help out kids 1-1 in special circumstances - mostly returnee students who wanted specialised instruction or (in one case) my school owner's daughter. This wasn't as enjoyable. Something was telling me this just wasn't right (or rather, I wasn't right for it).
After years of teaching English to groups, the Korean government finally changed some of its pretty bizarre discriminatory laws regarding spousal working rights, and foreign husbands of Korean nationals were finally allowed to run their own tutoring businesses (prior to this, only foreign wives of Korean men were legally allowed to do this, as they qualified for residence visas when foreign husbands did not). The Korean EFL context has a thriving private tutoring industry going, and I was happy to dip into it to try and earn some valuable extra income to help support a growing family. I also had some vague idea that I would be free and able to provide better-quality instruction given the chance to cater to only one student at a time.
Finally legally entitled to do so, I left the institute I was employed at and started private tutoring. It was definitely lucrative, and being somewhat "renowned" locally as a TOEFL specialist and Pearson Longman author, there was no shortage of willing students (or should I say parents?).
It was also definitely NOT my cup of tea. I still enjoyed certain teaching aspects of it (namely the chance to give one child all of my attention and time), but there was always a voice in the back of my head whispering "this isn't the way it should be - this kid should be interacting with other kids, not me." The few chances to teach adults 1-1 felt much more comfortable, but generally speaking, this tutoring thing wasn't sitting all that well with me.
Within four months I packed up shop and fled to a university job. In front of classes with up to 40 students, I felt much more at ease again. I could facilitate and get the learners working with each other. I was a guide, not the focus. There were still many chances for 1-1 work and discussion with students, but it was much nicer being shared around rather than being the whole focus of an 11-year-old's attention for a full 50 minutes.
I thought perhaps the course of my teaching experience and personal beliefs about language learning (interactivity and communication among peers) had made me much more of a "groups" teacher, but - and this is interesting - I had no such feelings of uneasiness when teaching students 1-1 online. In fact, with online teaching, I much preferred the 1-1 dynamic over groups.
Now back in Australia, I'm looking into ways to do voluntary ESL tutoring and mentoring for adult immigrants. Whether it is groups-based or 1-1 doesn't really concern me - they are both appealing prospects.
I still have a lot of friends in EFL contexts who do a lot of 1-1 tutoring and are really good at it (and make some pretty darned good money out of it, too!). For me personally, the memory makes me shudder with discomfort. Give me groups any day - even really big ones - unless it's online teaching, where I prefer the 1-1 dynamic.
So, using my example, it might be fair to say that teaching groups versus teaching 1-1 is not such a simple distinction to make. It obviously depends a bit on a range of other factors...
What about you? Do you have any particular preferences or experiences you'd like to share when it comes to group-based versus 1-1 teaching? What are the factors that influence your preferences?
I've been using Eyejot video mail for a few years now, and found it to be an excellent fully browser-based tool for not only communicating via video with my students, but also for generating and embedding language learning tasks in any of my various online applications (website, blog, forum, etc).
A similar service is offered over on Tokbox, fully free, with longer recording time allowance and some really nifty online video conferencing tools. It basically does pretty much everything Eyejot does and then some (I'll be demonstrating and reviewing Tokbox as an online language teaching tool later on this blog) - but my main issues with Tokbox at this point are that the embedded videos tend to look pretty tattered and (most importantly) it is a free Beta service.
Free/Beta can often mean periods without access, bugs as new features are built in, and potentially a nasty surprise if/when the makers decide to start charging for things. That's fine if you're just experimenting and doodling with an online video mail application, but if you want something stable and guaranteed (to apply pre-set curriculums or programs that students pay you for), then a moderate pay-for application like Eyejot is probably better (and remember, you can still use it in a limited fashion for free and your students probably won't need anything above the free service).
As I mentioned in the Screenr cast above, you can embed the Eyejot video recorder widget almost anywhere - including blogs - so if you'd like to leave a comment, ask a question, or just say a quick hello, please do so below!
In late December, 2005, I was sitting on the couch with a laptop at my parent's house in Australia, at the end of a short break and due to return to Changwon, Korea, where I was academic coordinator of a fairly major language school. When I returned, I would plunge into the popular "Intensive Winter Session" (10 classes a day for four weeks), and as usual, part of my vacation time had to go towards planning the spring term that would follow.
On that sunny morning, I was looking around the Internet for applications that would allow me to bring online speaking into our school's curriculum. Online applications for education by that time were very common, and Korea in particular was saturated with all sorts of glittery automated listening and grammar programs. But, flush with a fresh infatuation with this new concept of "Web 2.0", I wasn't interested in automated stuff, nor programs that just did more one-sided practice with essentially passive skills. I wanted the Internet to provide me with ways to connect students and teachers across time and space, and to allow the productive skills of speaking and writing to really flourish.
I also thought this could be the makings of a savvy business move for our school. In Korea, you will hear that all the parents really care about is test scores. Well, there is a lot of truth in that, but I think they also crave something very basic and inherent to anyone who enrolls their kids in a pay-for education program: evidence. I had already been proven right on this count by putting more effort into our school's writing program, asking for more compositions to be completed at home (rather than during class time) and adorning the walls of the school's main foyer with new samples of students' written work every week. Writing, and the act of completing it, was very important evidence to parents that the kids could use English in an independent and productive fashion. Many Koreans also have this in-built assumption that they and their kids are completely hopeless at speaking English, irrespective of how much time they have spent studying it. An online speaking program could be another, even more powerful, provision of evidence to parents and learners that said: hey, you can use English communicatively... believe it!
At that time, I couldn't find anything that could help me with speaking applications. They were either live-only or required complicated programming skills with software downloads for all potential users (by that time I was only ever interested in browser-based applications that wouldn't create unnecessary hassles for the learners and their parents), and in almost all cases they were prohibitively expensive.
Four months later, in spring 2006, I stumbled across Odeo, which was essentially a podcasting site at the time. However, and much to my delight, not only was Odeo fully browser-based, it had an application that allowed users to send direct audio messages to each other through a simple pop-up screen. Even better, it allowed users to share this recorder with anyone - Odeo member or not - online and accept recorded audio comments from them. And in an unexpected bonus, Odeo also featured a little application called Hellodeo - the first fully browser-based application I had seen that allowed you to record video directly from your webcam and obtain an html code that allowed you to embed the video directly into your own webpages. No software downloads, no complicated sign-up procedures... suddenly I was in business. Odeo's set up allowed me to set up a program, integrated with my own main website, that would facilitate online recording and sending of messages from learners to their teachers, and there was a nifty video application which would be great for creating task pages.
I experimented for a bit, and then by September 2006 I was ready to lauch a complete online speaking supplementary program for the hundreds of learners we had across ten levels in our program:
The pages and applications featured in that screencast can still be viewed here, with all the level pages still live. It's actually quite interesting to flit through the different levels and see what the learners at different ages were capable of producing, online, through speaking.
As far as I was aware at the time, this was one of the first major school-wide online speaking programs designed for an institute using very basic web skills and embedded web 2.0 applications from external sites. Certainly in our own school and even 'local private institute market' it caused something of a revolution. Teachers needed specific training, regular class scheduling and workloads for teachers had to be reworked to accommodate the extra work required (as teachers recorded and sent feedback to the learners), and learners themselves needed guidelines and help documents.
What continues to surprise me is that, in a country as wired and tech-savvy as South Korea, none of our competition - not even the super famous private institutes in Seoul - had come close to producing anything like this, and didn't really even start to until about 18 months later (even then, they didn't work on or produce these in-house, almost always going with expensive third-party developers and suppliers.
There were other surprises to come, too - some good, some bad.
On the good side, the introduction of this online speaking system may have actually saved the school in question from sinking. TOEFL iBT fever had just hit Korea: not only was there this brand new speaking thing to deal with on the test, but it required online application. At that time, schools that could cater to TOEFL preparation (and now Internet-based TOEFL in particular), became the instant market leaders. In addition to that, the owner of the school, sick to death of the inordinate franchise licensing fees she had to pay to the Ewha ALS chain, had decided to drop the chain brand name and continue the business under a new, private, non-national business name. Koreans are massively addicted to brand names, especially big flashy ones that could claim Seoul (where all the richest and 'brightest' students were) as their head office base. We were now due to become a "ma and pa on the corner" school with no links to any such brand name, and there was every expectation our enrollment could shrivel by half or even two-thirds as a result of a simple name change.
We introduced a big online speaking program to supplement our course at exactly the same time TOEFL iBT speaking fever hit and our school dropped its all-important national brand name link. The learners, for the most part, loved the online speaking applications and really embraced them. The parents went nuts over the online speaking program. The important "evidence" I alluded to above was abundantly clear to them through this program. They thought it was the best thing since sliced cheese. Far from copping a hit, our enrollment actually went up - and up!
Then there was the bad...
The makers of Odeo were two blokes named Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Given we were using this service with paying students and profiting from it (indirectly at this point), I contacted Evan and asked for information about a customized pay-for version, or at least official permission to keep using the Odeo applications under these auspices.
Evan, a very friendly and approachable person, got back to me and explained that no pay-for or customized versions were ready or required, and in fact his direct message to me on October 3, 2006 was:
"Hi, Jason. No problem. Would love to have you use the service, as is, for any and all uses."
Little did I know, at that very time Evan and Biz Stone were playing around with another novel little application they called twttr.In fact, they became so interested in it that they abandoned development and most essential maintenance of Odeo in early November, 2006. The Odeo service went into limbo - dead as a doornail (no recordings possible and not even access to previously recorded messages), and left us and our students stranded with no recourse.
Evan, with his new company Obvious Corp, eventually sold off the derelict Odeo carcass to Sonic Mountain, and concentrated on twttr - eventually putting some vowels back into the word to come up with Twitter, and (as they say) the rest is history. (I mean, what were those fools thinking - abandoning a free podcasting site called Odeo in preference of something that sounds like a bunch of annoying birds perched on your fence early in the morning??? They must be daft!)
I did find an alternative application very quickly for our online speaking programs and avert potential disaster for us as a business, but this was to be a first and very important lesson for me. If you use web 2.0 applications that are free, and put them into a highly organised and structured private school curriculum with hundreds of users who are paying you fees, you are fair game when those applications go pop on you.
There were other problems for online speaking further down the line, too, but I'll leave them for now... Another post, another day. For now, this post reflects on what really did feel like a revolution in our curriculum at the time.
Does it feel strange to you that events and developments for web applications back in 2006 (all of three years ago as I type this) now sound like ancient history?
I've been developing a set of simple readers (called "Little Readers") for my son Jamie which should also be relevant to teachers who want to teach basic reading skills to students aged 4-7. The first of these (The Beach) is now available as an online storybook (feel free to embed the version below, or access the master version at http://screenr.com/8x8):
For best visual effects and delivery, I recommend hitting the zoom icon to the right of the volume setting there. It will give you a high definition full screen version which is perfect for using at home or in a classroom with younger readers.
I'm not exactly a master story-teller, but I've made an effort in the recording and pacing here to make sure learners have time to repeat each line of the story after the narrator (and also in the Sentence Review section at the end).
You can also use the picture grid at the end to get the learners to re-tell the story to the best of their ability just by using the story images in sequence (without text).
I have print versions of these Little Readers ready as well, but still a little unsure about the best way to format and distribute them online. I intend to make these online versions free for all to utilize!
Oh, and my son Jamie has been instrumental in these Little Reader storybooks. He often tells me what to include in them! I really should be acknowledging him as a co-author, shouldn't I?
One of my new site members on English Raven asked me today for some help accessing a Dolch Sight Word Reader I made several years ago, called Why Can't I Fly?
This is a pretty good example of there being so much stuff on my site (I've been adding resources to it since 2002) that even I sometimes forget what's available there! Why Can't I Fly? was my attempt at a simple little story that utilized as many of the basic Dolch Sight Words as possible, with lots of meaningful repetition in a kids-friendly story format
In chasing up Why Can't I Fly? for my new site member, I had some fun reading back over the story and printed it out to add to the collection of stuff I'm making/reading with my son Jamie. It then occured to me that this would be something nice to try out on Screenr - a new screencasting tool I've just started playing around with.
The story was a little too long to read out loud within Screenr's five minute time limit, but I did manage to get the first 6 of 8 pages read out loud. Here is the result:
You can get a larger, high-definition version of the video by clicking on that square icon next to the volume button. Actually, the full-screen version is going to be great for showing Jamie on my or my wife's computer screens! Just a pity I didn't have time to read the full story here...
I'll let you download the actual print version (PDF) of the story as well:
For Jamie, I've printed these out on thicker paper and I use them as a kind of card story.
Most of the other reading material I make for very young children involves far less text, so I'll have to think about putting more of them into this online Screenr format. Fun fun fun!
Okay, the little skit above isn't all that funny (if you can't read it, try the original larger size version here), but it serves to show just how easy it is to generate your own simple comic strips using a fantastic site I was recently referred to, called Make Beliefs Comix.
It's delightfully easy to use, with just the right amount of options and not too overboard to the point that it becomes complicated to understand, and the generated comic strip can be printed or sent to yourself and your chosen contacts by email.
There is also this neat YouTube clip showing students from City College, New York talking about how MakeBeliefsComix helps them to develop their English:
Fantastic idea and awesome tool for language education for learners of all ages!
Well, I have some wonderful and exciting news: Bob Stein (one of the founders of the Institute for the Future of the Book and writer of the article A book is a place, which I posted about >> here << a few days ago) has agreed to an informal interview with me, to be published here on the English Raven blog!
It's going to be fun and intriguing to ask Bob about his thoughts on educational applications for the future books he has in mind, as well as what he figures this could mean for both authors and readers.
I'm putting together some questions to ask Bob, but I thought it would be even more interesting to open the field and let YOU contribute some questions for our discussion! What would you like to ask Bob? Post your questions here (I may not be able to ask all of them, but it will be helpful to identify some common threads of interest or concern).
Look forward to reading and discussing your questions! Remember, this is THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK WE'RE TALKING ABOUT HERE!
If you've visited the front page of English Raven any time recently, you may have noticed the logo featured above - and perhaps even followed the link through to the introductory preview page for World Adventure Kids!
This is a rather ambitious publication I am embarking on, and I thought it might be interesting to comment about its background and ongoing development here on my blog. Later, these posts could make for interesting reading!
The concept of World Adventure Kids! has been in my mind as a writer and teacher for at least 10 years. However, as a type of genre and style of reading, it goes back much farther even - to when I was about 10 or 11 years old. At that time, some friends and I were getting right into the Choose Your Own Adventure reader-oriented fiction stories, where - basically - the book is written in the 2nd person, talking directly to the reader as the main character in the story, who then makes the important decisions on how the narrative turns at given points and what outcome is achieved. While CYOA was cool, we thought the Fighting Fantasy books - written in the same fashion but within a fantasy world with additional game rules (and, of course, plenty of monsters and sword and sorcery style swashbuckling) - were THE coolest set of books possible!
These books were (and no doubt still are) powerful for young readers. Becoming the main star of the narrative makes a young reader feel like they are flying, and being able to control what happens (for either good or bad outcomes) represents a challenge that totally absorbs the reader. Now, later - as an educator - something important that occurs to me is that these books were read by both girls (who generally were ready to read anything) and boys who technically "hated reading" or weren't considered to be all that gifted in the classroom. We were so into these books that a couple of friends and I even wrote our own version of one, with each person exploring a different adventure direction, and all the entries pulled back together to make one interactive story with multiple adventure options and endings. The compilation and editing job fell to me. It took forever to put it all together, but the result was - well, seriously COOL!
The Choose Your Own adventure style books were enormously popular in the 1980s, and then suffered a catastrophic decline in the early 90s with the advent of video games. It now appears they are starting to make a serious comeback - something I wasn't actually aware of some 3-4 years ago when I embarked on putting something like World Adventure Kids together.
You may be wondering (quite rightly) why I would develop and go ahead with World Adventure Kids if the original CYOA series are being revamped and re-released. Well, my approach to this genre is somewhat different, in a variety of ways:
I wanted to make something that reflected the nature of the world today, and the world today's children will face in the future, making things like technology, global issues and the environment key issues.
My background is in ELT (English Language Teaching), and I wanted to make a series that doesn't just talk to English-speaking children in western countries, but children anywhere in the world (the emphasis on teamwork with characters from different nationalities is fundamental in World Adventure Kids; I won't say that the books are culturally neutral - but I will claim that I've tried to write books in a way that is culturally respectful).
In combination with the EFL/ESL angle, I wanted to make a series of books written in a way that caters to children who may not be expert or patient readers - I might even go so far as to say I wanted adventures and a reading style that could be considered "remedial" - especially in terms of getting struggling readers going (and just as importantly - keep them going!).
Of course, I also wanted to write a series of books that I would enjoy writing and reading myself! The 10-year-old boy in me still wants to go on amazing adventures all over the world, meeting other kids and solving mysteries and problems. Writing commercial coursebook materials over the past 3-4 years has definitely shown me that it's not all that enjoyable all that much of the time. In spoiling myself, and going back to what feels like more genuine writing - writing from the heart, and with the spark of imagination - I might end up with some books that kids will really enjoy reading! Hopefully, in being selfish, I'm actually going to end up doing a better job overall and entertain more readers in the long run...
Occupied as I was with other work and writing projects (you know, the kind of stuff that might actually help pay the bills), I had to be content with just musing about this project for several years. When it came time to actually put something down on paper, I did - several times over a period of about one year, with an equal number of trips to the wastepaper basket. For some reason, it just wouldn't work.
At about this time, my 20-book coursebook series with Pearson Longman (Boost! Integrated Skills Series) was really starting to take off, not just in Asia but in several regions around the world. Suddenly I had a willing audience of major publishers ready to listen to my ideas about new publication ideas... Under some pressure from one of these publishers to get the idea down properly on paper, I finally sat down and wrote a whole double-adventure kit in about three nights - and this time, it didn't just work, it really worked!
As thrilled as I was with the final product, I re-read it yet again and realised that the ELT publishers I was being courted by probably wouldn't like it all that much. It was too innovative, too niche, not cookie-cutter enough, too sophistocated for the publishers to neatly package and sell with a big bang into an already highly competitive industry that was as cluttered with coursebooks and leveled readers as it was unwilling to ever try something genuinely new...
Still, the publishers wanted to see it, so I sent off my manuscripts and publication prospectus.
And... I was right! Despite ELT publishers telling me the concept and actual story were brilliant, fun, innovative, and definitely appealing to kids - it was too niche for their tastes, it couldn't be packaged up easily and sold as a coursebook series, it wouldn't be able to compete with the reading series already out there, etc. etc. I'll be fair to ELT publishers and concede that it's not easy for them to bring new innovations out into the market, and they are under enormous pressure to appeal to the company's bottom line and produce things that will sell well. I'll also be critical and say that new ideas and approaches don't often come out in teaching materials because major publishers - the entities best positioned and equipped to support such endeavours - won't try them. As one academic and coursebook writer said to me recently "no, they'll let some start-up go ahead and have all the ideas and take all the risks, and then they (the major publishers) will just copy them and claim it as their own new bandwagon..."
Well, I decided to take this as a sign and a direction rather than a cause for dejection. I decided to go ahead and produce World Adventure Kids! entirely on my own. I hired a fabulously talented illustrator named Declan Walsh, and got down to work. I created a careful level system and also an overall approach concept for this style of educational writing: IARA (Interactive Adventure Reading Approach), and then went over the storylines and text very carefully to make sure they provide an "even keel" for readers of different reading proficiencies and motivational interests. The results have been very exciting and now I even have a nice-looking preview page up on my site:
At this point, I am looking at both print and online versions of these reading materials, as the interactive nature of them works well with an online format. The first two adventure kits are going well, and will most likely be released in late October (this year) in online format, with print versions available not long after that.
I have to admit it is a little scary (there's a part of me that really wishes I'd done this sort of self-funded risk-taking adventure before I got married and had two children!), but it is also really exhilarating! World Adventure Kids are seriously cool, with really unique characters and action-packed Indiana-Jones-style adventures that address global issues. If nothing else, I know my own kids will have some fun and motivating things to read as they grow up! But more importantly, I am already proud of this work, irrespective of how well it does or how much money it makes me. I've added to my own education in terms of researching the themes, issues and contexts in the adventures, and had a lot of fun being a 10-year-old again...
There has been a lot of talk in a lot of different circles about what the future holds for the humble old book, and it is a subject that seriously intrigues me. I have for some time now been contemplating and experimenting with ways to bring books into more of an online format and create more chances for readers to interact with content and each other.
One of the people I follow on Twitter, Darcy Moore, put me on to a really amazing article that appeared recently in Melbourne's The Age newspaper: A book is a place.
This article was written by Bob Stein, a media expert who has been watching and speculating on the development of books for more than 30 years. The main thrust of the article is that books, authors and readers appear to be evolving in a way that allows a book to be considered a sort of "place" (rather than a "thing"), where the writer can meet and interact with readers, and readers can interact with each other - alongside or as part of the content of the book. Of particular importance is Stein's notion that this meeting and interaction should take place alongside the actual text, on something akin to equal footing - not just as footnoted comments following below the text.
It really is mind boggling and exciting at the same time! Aside from the actual implications for reading and writing, this has spectacular potential for education, and Stein mentions this along with some actual examples of successful trials in educational settings.
Stein is one of the founders of the Institute for the Future of the Book, and helped create something called CommentPress - a specialised plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that "allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text."
Take a look at what they've come up with:
This example is of a speech by President Bush (The President's Address to the Nation), and as you can see, the text can be scrolled through while a comment box stays put just to the right - alongside the main text. This is where readers can reference paragraphs and leave thoughts and questions. Basically, it's a mini discussion thread that connects to the reading text by paragraph, but is accessible right next to the main text (rather than as a following or separate application) and positions reader input as being equally important as the original text itself.
In essence, it makes this text a place - for meeting and discussing, where writer and reader are both considered fundamental, but not in the stereotypical fashion we have become accustomed to.
A book is a place is a cracking read - make sure you read the whole article! It might change your perception of what books are (or can be). It has certainly got my brain ticking over...
Do your English language learners find reading boring? Perhaps it's not just a matter of finding the sorts of reading texts that will catch their interest. It could be time to think about how you apply your reading texts in class and what you can add to make the overall reading class more dymamic and effective!
While the advice presented here is possibly most apt for learners in the 9-15 age brackets (who already have some basic English under their belts), most or certainly many parts of it can be generalised to almost any kind of reading class.
I'm sure readers of this blog already know about the Twitter phenomenon, and many may already be proficient and copious twitterers. However, if you are a teacher and haven't joined in the tweet-fest yet, I'd like to urge you to give it a try.
Of course, everyone has their own reasons for joining Twitter, and everyone gets something slightly different out of it. For me, I joined Twitter some time ago as part of my usual dabble in new tech and social media things happening around me. I thought it was interesting, but potentially annoying - rather like the way Facebook rapidly (for me) transformed from something with potential into a right pain in the behind. When people started offering to knight me, or land vampire bites on me, and when my email started getting those ridiculous "compare" notifications, I began avoiding Facebook like the plague.
Thankfully, Twitter is quite different. It has the same connecting and networking qualities that Facebook has, without the peripheral temptations, distractions and constant sense of having your personal identity sharked all over the Internet in the name of innane dithering. Twitter's magic - quite aside from the obvious networking potential - is in its simplicity and relatively no-frills design and application.
For me personally (as a teacher and ELT materials designer), Twitter really began to appeal once I moved back from my 10-year stint in Korea to my home country of Australia. Fulfilling a long-held dream, my Korean wife and I settled in a small coastal town some distance outside Melbourne on Victoria's fabulous surf coast. Wonderful lifestyle change, and awesome spot for our two little kids, but quite suddenly I realised I had absolutely nobody to talk to about teaching, English language learning, etc. etc.! For ten years I'd been surrounded by schools, classrooms, learners, teaching colleagues, ELT events and conferences, and - in general - a very active public and social interest in learning English as a foreign or second language. Now, here in our new home town, it's all about the weather, the football, catch-of-the-day specials at the local Fish & Chips shop, and what's going on with the local kindergarten's Parent Council! Worthy conversation topics for sure, but the shock of being extracted from my old life in the thick of things in an EFL environment was pretty harsh.
So I've embraced Twitter with a vengeance, and while it isn't quite the same as before, it's often as good and in some ways even better when it comes to staying in touch with teaching and learning issues, meeting like-minded colleagues, and hearing about all the latest developments with teaching and technology.
So here are ten things I love about Twitter as a teacher and ELT materials designer:
You can "meet and tweet" with hundreds, thousands (if not tens of thousands - depends on your appetite!) of other teachers from all over the world.
These teachers can come from all walks of life, from all sorts of different teaching contexts, and from all sorts of disciplines (i.e., not just your own area of specialisation, but also related or entirely new teaching spheres).
You can listen to and interact with professionals from various spheres within the field - fellow teachers, teacher training specialists, authors, publishers, etc.- and at a very personable level (though you may end up "culled" from people's contact lists if they feel you are being too innane, or don't quite relish the same level of interpersonal contact, so watch out for that!).
You can stay very up-to-date with what is happening in your field, at a rate that far exceeds anything you experienced through website browsing or email correspondence.
You get a plethora of links and recommendations for materials and teaching ideas (just need to be careful of the distinction between plethora and imbroglio - see below...).
You can actually build and benefit from genuine relationships with people you meet on the Twitter network.
Teacher-Twitterers tend to be quite interested in technology, without needing to be experts, and this is good if you want to develop this side of your teaching skills and resources.
You can enjoy different kinds of participation - some people like to chat, others just to highlight resources, others to ask questions or challenge ideas (and you can choose how you participate or "listen" from day to day or mood to mood, so to speak).
You gain a good audience for your blog posts and web-based materials - so long as you're not just in Twitter to relentlessly promote yourself, as Twitterers tend to have a sensitive radar for that sort of thing.
You have a lot of control over what you are exposed to - it's relatively easy to switch other people in the network "on" or "off" depending on how valuable you personally find their comments and contributions.
There are probably a lot of other things I like about Twitter as a teacher, but those are the ones that come to mind first.
Of course, there are also some potential negatives to keep in mind:
Don't be tempted by the "Social Status" game often associated with Twitter in terms of how many followers you have versus how many people you yourself follow. It can seem like a bit of a popularity contest at times - if you let it. So don't let it!
There is a subtle "tweetiquette" involved with Twitter which involves a lot of "mutual grooming" - things like making sure you compliment people who compliment or recommend you, ensuring you "RT" (or Re-Tweet) appropriately, and promoting others through things like #teachertuesday and #followfriday. It can become quite tiring quite quickly, but you need to remember that this is an important way of introducing and confirming people on Twitter - sort of like making sure you introduce your friend when meeting someone else you know, or when someone admires your teaching idea acknowledging who gave it to you in the first place. That said, it requires careful balance. Don't go RTing and recommending people willy nilly or in a sycophantic fashion, as you may be falling prey to the risk I mentioned in (1) above. Be reciprocal but restrained, generous but genuine in the way you acknowledge fellow-Twitterers.
The amount of links and recommendations appearing on Twitter can be quite overwhelming at first, and finding the things that will really interest you can feel like you are trying to spot and hit a single tennis ball as one hundred others are launched over the net (mind the pun) at the same time (rf. the potential imbroglio I mentioned earlier). The "mutual grooming" factor can make this even worse, as several people in your contact network re-tweet the same resources at you and everyone else in their networks. My way of handling this is to basically only check out the links from contacts I've found to be the most reliable in terms of similar interests, and/or links that appear several times from different people (the more recommendations something gets, the greater the chance it might be of relevance or interest). Think of it as like being at a big international teaching conference or something, with hundreds of teachers moving and chatting around you, a huge list of options in the presentation schedule (some from teachers like yourself, some from ELT celebrities, some from academic experts, and others that are just straight up commercial), and the constant distraction represented by the publishers' stalls... Negotiating Twitter is rather similar - it can be a matter of focus or tuning out at times, and/or just seeing where things take you.
Twitter can become very addictive very quickly, as the real-time nature of it feels so much like being in several conversations at once that it feels like you just can't walk away while people are talking to you (and everyone else, of course!). Once you download something like Tweetdeck, it can become even more addictive as the "tweep" sound notifications come through your computer constantly, no matter what you are doing at the time. You need to be willing to switch Twitter on and off for set periods, or else get used to having it chirp away in the background while you get on with your other online jobs - dropping in from time to time to see what is happening or if there is anything worth checking out or contributing to. As one Twitterer recently commented (a little snidely), the entry message in Twitter ought to be changed from "What are you doing?" to "What are you supposed to be doing?"...
So there are some basic pros and cons of Twitter from a teacher and materials writer perspective (you'll find many many more around the Internet from other people as well - and remember, I'm a bit of a beginner and not high up at all in the Twitterverse).
Later, I'll let you know whom I've been following on Twitter, and hopefully give you some ideas on like-minded and helpful people you yourself may like to follow.
And if you're interested in following me on Twitter, I'm right here!
This time last year, I was juggling two ELT positions in Korea at the same time: visiting professor in the English Education department at Kyungpook National University (mainly responsible for training Korean secondary school English teachers), and Business English consultant/teacher for an outsourcing company working with Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction (one of Korea's BIG companies!).
It was always interesting to discover ways in which the two positions could overlap!
For the Doosan execs, one of the things I had to do was prepare them for the TOEIC speaking test. After many years of grappling with test-prep, I found the TOEIC speaking test to be refreshingly pragmatic and grounded in the real needs of learners and business settings. Still, as is my wont, I couldn't help finding ways to adapt the basic format to more closely target the situation and needs of my Doosan students (Korean managers and technicians specializing in everything from research and design to international sales and major project management). After creating my own version of the basic TOEIC speaking test for the students to practice with, I went ahead and designed a more targeted version for my Doosan learners - called TOEIC FLEX Speaking (HI): a flexible rendition of the TOEIC speaking test especially for Heavy Industries and Construction.
I was mightily pleased with the learners' response to this specialized version of the TOEIC, but also at just how easy it was to adapt and really target to the learners' real world needs and professional requirements. That was when it occured to me that this basic TOEIC speaking test format could be adapted for the professional needs of non-native English language teachers as well!
The result was the TOEIC FLEX Speaking ELT test - a much expanded and reinterpreted rendition of the basic TOEIC speaking test made especially for English Language Teachers, and ready to trial with the 20-odd students in my Methodology of Practical English Teaching course at Kyungpook National University! I now tentatively call this application the TSELT (Test of Speaking for English Language Teachers).
Making, applying, and following up on this specialized test was an amazing experience, full of new discoveries and revelations. You can peruse the full test here, but of equal or even more interest are the follow up applications that were experimented with following the actual test-taking.
Based on their experiences and impressions of the test, I had students give their opinions in a variety of quantitative and qualitative polls online. A full overview of the test syllabus, screenshots of the individual sections, plus quantitative and qualitative survey results can be seen at a glance in the following document:
This was a handout accompanying a presentation I did on this topic/research at a regional teacher conference in Daegu not long after students took the test. Contrary to initial expectations, teachers saw the worth in this test and thought they'd gained a lot in taking it! Helps of course that it was applied informally and did not count whatsoever toward their final grades in my course...
The qualitative responses were collected in an online forum at the link here, and make for very interesting reading! The point made about this test being equally valid and challenging for NATIVE English language teachers is possibly the most intriguing!
Possibly even more interesting was the final follow-up application: I put the students into groups of 4 and had them go ahead and make their own new versions of the test, using new content within (what they figured were) the parameters of the test I'd already made and applied with them. Here is an example of a new version of the same test, made by a group of student teachers. The general point of this was to include the students in the process, take them inside test-design (to learn in a hands-on fashion about test validity and reliability), and reflect on the sorts of classroom challenges and speaking skills they'd need in their future teaching careers.
So far, this has been little more than an interesting experiment, exploring the idea of a reliable and useful measuring tool of non-native English language teachers' ability to not only speak English, but use it effectively while applying good basic teaching methodology in the classroom. To be honest, the process was more about taking these student teachers on a journey of discovery and professional critical thinking and self-reflection than anything else. The plan is to expand the basic format more and adapt it into a tool for teacher self-development, goal-setting and awareness - hopefully avoiding that word "TEST"!
For now, I'd be interested in anyone's reactions to this initial research, and I'll throw some carrot questions out there in the hope it provokes some opinions...
Is it fair to "test" the speaking ability of English language teachers?
Is it possible to actually test this ability reliably?
Is it a good idea to go beyond basic everyday speaking ability and apply it to the professional occupation and settings most relevant to professional language teachers?
Would non-experienced or non-trained native speaker teachers end up doing better on this test than trained and experienced non-native teachers with less speaking confidence?
How many teachers out there would realistically be willing to use this tool (and test themselves) independently fo professional development purposes?
What would you add to or take away from the test format as it currently stands?
During my most recent twanderings on Twitter, I came across this fascinating online resource made by Faiza Khan in the States - called WordAhead.
It's a beautiful site with wonderful vocabulary cartoons for learners. Admittedly the word list varies from high intermediate to extremely advanced (quite a few words there I hadn't used for some time or couldn't actually recall!) - but more importantly, I love the concept.
Faiza also lets you install widgets featuring her videos and card games on your site or blog, so thanks Faiza - I shall!
Now, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to my usual audience of teachers of children and teenagers (unless you have some exam prep going on for later teens), but I've posted it here because I love the concept!
Faiza, if you can make a version of this for younger learners with more basic vocabulary items, you'll be on a real winner - I assure you!
This guy is just amazing. Every time I go to this blog I'm blown away by the references to new tools and ideas for teaching English.
Larry usually manages to post a link to something interesting every day, and he really does his research on it.
In particular, I recommend his websites of the month and websites of the year sections, which is where all Larry's daily work gets condensed down into the very best resources and links.
I am currently in the process of developing a fully Internet-based school of English - something that has been challenging but loads of fun as well (more details on that to be unveiled in the not-too-distant future...). This evening I got a chance to trial group-based video conferencing (something I'm calling [+] interTalk for the moment) with some of my online students, using the great browser-based conferencing service provided by TokBox.
Wow!!! It went down an absolute treat!
To the left you can see a screenshot of the conferencing session, featuring myself with my great students Soorim, Helen and Jeanie (all of them advanced level students in their late teens developing their English skills for Academic Purposes).
Once we got over a few very minor technical hitches (more to do with individual computers, mic settings - that sort of thing), we got down to the business of having an extended discussion focusing on news and topical issues.
Soorim and I presented and summarized articles we had read online representing issues we thought would be interesting for the group. We then took turns with a Q&A process to elicit more details and opinions about the articles, somebody summarizing the interactions, then follow-up discussion based around hypotheses and opinion-sharing.
The group handled the discussion process and technology involved really well, and I was so impressed to see/hear so much free-flowing discussion. These students also gave me a lot to think about through the questions and opinions they presented, and that is always a very stimulating experience for a language teacher. All up, the trial worked brilliantly and after an hour of in-depth talking face-to-face online, I think we all left the experience motivated and satisfied.
TokBox's video conferencing set up has marvelous potential. We did experience some hiccups in the form of time drag and sometimes some confusing echoes, but I'm really not sure how much that had to do with our individual computers and Internet connections. I did notice, for example, that when I took a couple of seconds to take a screenshot of us chatting in the conference room (to post here, as you can see!), my connection in the conference room slowed down tremendously as I quickly grappled with some copying and pasting into some image editing software. Once I'd shut that down, my connection to the other participants picked up noticeably.
The great thing about TokBox is that it is fully browser-based, something I've mentioned as a major plus elsewhere (see for example my post about Eyejot Video Mail). Having trialed what seems like hundreds of other audio and video applications for online teaching purposes, I now basically only ever really pay attention to services that allow me to link up with other users directly through an Internet browser-based service. I (and my computer dashboard) got sick to death of time and space consuming downloads and installations for other services (things like Sightspeed and Skype included), and my users appreciate access to services that don't require complicated (or for that matter compulsory) sign-ups, installations, and finnickly little free services that in effect force you to pay expensive fees for anything close to a useful and practical application.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not against paying for good applications and services. I'm perfectly willing to pay for them, if they are practical and easy to use. As a teacher with fee-paying students, I also don't mind making an investment in the necessary technology. But for the students themselves, they shouldn't be forced to go through brain-busting installation and sign-up procedures, or for that matter fork out money in expensive fees. I've already tried that with one service provider, and when it came time to forward on the costs as part of the students' fees, I realized the process had made online learning somewhat prohibitively expensive for my students.
In any case, for the moment TokBox appears to be offering online video calling, video mail and multiple person (up to 6 at a time) video conferencing free of charge. It looks really impressive, remembering of course that they are in Beta mode and still developing their services. At the moment, I find their video mail a little unwieldy compared to the polished service provided by Eyejot, but the live video calls and conferencing service direct out of an Internet browser (with only myself required to have an active membership) - that's some sweet stuff they've got going there. It certainly helped facilitate a great online group-based class with my learners tonight!
TokBox also has some cool "embed" features that make it great for integration into websites. You can, for example, embed your own personal Video Mail / Video Call service into a page on your site, where users can contact you live through a video call or leave you a video message.
The question now will be, when will TokBox move out of Beta mode and start requiring payment for their services? I sincerely hope they don't go the way of companies like Sightspeed, Webex or for that matter the Adobe-based conferencing set-up. There is some undisputed quality in those set-ups, but the prices they charge are so steep I doubt any users outside a major company set up will want to use them. These companies also need to recognize that smallish set ups like myself are willing to pay and sign up for certain services, but forcing our clients/students to do the same becomes prohibitive and frustrating.
And there's always another outfit on the rise out there ready to do the same basic things for a whole lot less...
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for TokBox - they so far have all the functions that could help make online education really rock. By all means slap me with a feasible charge for your services, but please, please, please! keep things open and accessible for the people I need to deal with online. In my case, they don't realistically have the budget, and in terms of English language learning - sometimes don't have quite the language or computer skills to handle complicated sign-up procedures.
I recently re-commenced teaching advanced level students 1-1 online, for things like iBT preparation and interview and essay practice for students in the process of applying to universities in the United States. It has been a little while since I did online teaching, and it has been great putting to use all the new gadgets and programs that have developed and become available since the last time I was doing this sort of teaching.
One of these new "toys" has been Eyejot, which basically promotes itself as being browser-based Video Mail. This has been a real boon to my battery of online teaching tools, especially in terms of asynchronous task submissions that add a video angle to the already widely available online audio programs. Basically, using the easy code provided, I am able to place a video mail recorder on my students' web pages that allows them to record and send tasks to me pretty much instantly.
As you can see from the screen shot here (for one of my iBT TOEFL students), I can create a private page for a student that includes an i-frame based online iBT test, and next to it goes the Eyejot video task recorder. For the student, submitting a speaking task is as simple as hitting "reply", then activating the Macromedia Flash plug in, and then recording and sending. The student does not need to download any special programs or software, and is not required to go through the process of signing up for an Eyejot membership. In fact, the web-based recorder here has a 1-minute time limit (with a counter ticking down to zero) for recordings that I find ideal for test-prep style recordings (given they always have time limits of similar duration). Paid up Eyejot members (like myself, but not my students) can record messages of up to 5 minutes duration. In my situation that is ideal for then responding to my students' task submissions, as I can reply with a longer video mail giving them in-depth feedback, and it is delivered direct to their email.
Eyejot recently also added an upgrade that allows video mails to be embedded directly into webpages. This allows me to create an online speaking log for my students where they can scroll through the tasks they have submitted for review purposes. By providing the Eyejot recorder again on the same page, the student has the option of reviewing their own tasks and then re-recording them right there in the one place.
I got my Eyejot membership when their initial offer only cost US$15 per year, and it's since been raised to US$30, but it does represent excellent value considering the ease and reliability of the service. Compared to applications like Sightspeed, this is not only much cheaper, but also more practical. Sightspeed doesn't allow you to embed recordings, costs US$15 per month for any sort of practical functionality, requires membership for anyone to record messages back to you, requires a software download, and unless the person is willing to pay, they are limited to 30 seconds of recording time - which is pretty much useful only in terms of expressing how frustrated you feel. Even with the paid membership in Sightspeed, a member can only record messages of up to 3 minutes in duration. Eyejot, by comparison, allows anyone (with or without an Eyejot membership) to record messages to you directly from your own website for free for up to one minute, is fully browser-based (thus not requiring complicated installations), has the instant versatility of embedded videos, and a paid membership (at a fraction of the cost compared to Sightspeed) allows the option of recording messages of up to 5 minutes in length. From my (and my students') perspective, Eyejot's service absolutely creams things like Sightspeed, and even makes it a better option than things like Skype (which also involves a time-consuming and potentially complicated installation and doesn't have embed functions).
All in all, Eyejot has added a very convenient and stimulating resource to my online teaching options, and my students love it. I can't wait to see what other improvements they have in store in the not too distant future!
If you feel like trying out Eyejot yourself, right here on the blog, check out the video recorder below. So yeah, I forgot to mention - this is also a communication tool for things like blogs as well!
I know that, technically, people like me are not really supposed to get online and sing the praises of massive conglomerates like Google Inc.
As much as I'd like to needle the big guy on the block, I have to admit that what Google has done with its email and talk programs is nothing short of stunning. And as a language teacher interested in online interaction, learning and collaboration, I also have to say that what can be achieved in this field using straight up applications like Gmail and Google Talk is as breathtaking as it is vastly under-utilized at this point.
Aside from the vastly improved and user-friendly interface in terms of sending, receiving and storing email correspondence, what really clicks for me is the built-in chat program. When you install Google Talk and link the two up (the talk and the mail applications), you basically have a situation where you can see all mail coming and going, spot who's online and who isn't, start up simple text chats, call a contact for a live spoken conversation, or leave them a voice message if they aren't online or are busy at the time. Probably best of all, other than a quick download for Google Talk (which is sort of an optional extra anyway), everything is completely browser-based, making it fast, simple and convenient to use. I used to use both MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger in the past. Other than the fact that Yahoo seems to have lost the plot with the new version of its email program, Google is killing these services purely by having everything they have, plus more, all easily linked up and browser-based.
I know these other mail programs are starting to offer similar services, and I think Google would be the first to admit that their mail and chat applications are still a work in progress, but what gets me is just how smoothly everything is integrated, how easy it is to use productively and conveniently, and how - well - friendly it all looks and feels.
As part of what we do over at OnlinEnglish.net, myself and the two other directors constantly need to share and update information. We're all connected through Gmail and Google Talk, and it's a cinch. One great aspect of the text chat in Gmail is that you can have the chats saved. This is sooooo useful. At the end of a very long chat exchanging a lot of information and ideas - and even for chats interrupted and stopped and started over a long period of time - the whole correspondence can be accessed as one long text in your gmail account. You can then print it, or even forward it on to other parties.
It would be great if the same thing could happen with the pc-to-pc phone calls (even if we couldn't "print" them - yeah, come to think of it, that would be a pretty big ask), and heck, things would be truly spectacular if we could add video correspondence to the whole mix. But for the time being, I'm ecstatic with what I'm getting and positive about the new roll outs that will inevitably come with the service.
As a language teacher, I've seen the benefits of using Gmail and Google Talk on several occasions, but a very recent situation showed it to me in a very obvious way. I was helping one of my older students with his interview preparation for some of the top universities in Korea. We were on different schedules and it was pretty hard to meet up for more than about an hour face-to-face on any given day. So I teed him up with Gmail, and then arranged to meet him online late at night (when both our families were snugly tucked away in bed). Using both the text chat and pc-pc live talk connection, I was able to give him a lot of additional interview practice and type away posting him feedback snippets all the while. At the end of a given session, I could go into my chats section in Gmail, and forward the entire transcript to him for reflection and review before the next day's face to face session.
Gmail came in equally handy when, a little time later, I was helping the same student with his essay applications for U.S. universities. He posted his essays to me directly in gmail, then we'd meet online straight out of our Gmail accounts and I'd deliver him corrections, comments and advice using the direct text chat function. The live interactive nature of this was really useful in that he could ask me ongoing questions as I went about my feedback. Again, the fact that the text chat interaction was all automatically saved and filed away meant I could review and forward on the entire transcript after the lesson. We both had particularly hectic schedules at this point, and it was almost impossible to schedule time together with any degree of certainty. But Gmail's interface allowed us to do it completely on the fly, as the contacts list shows you who is currently online and available. When we both appeared to be online and had 20-30 minutes at hand, we were able to get straight down to work.
The effectiveness and ease of the Google mail and talk programs is just stunning. For some time now I've been imagining what it would be like to build a whole network of students from all over the world, and help and teach them straight out of the Gmail and Google Talk interface. It would totally work, though admittedly a couple more things need to be added to really round out the service (namely multiple party live pc calls - or conferencing, video-based interaction, that sort of thing).
For online language learning, the biggest impediments have always been complicated programs requiring downloads and installations, and limitations to any one given application. Google has already conquered several of these problems and is fast on the way to solving a bag of others.
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