I'm not sure if this is a sign of (or a coping device to try and avoid) a mid-life crisis, but I seem to be a bit preoccupied this week with how things were a decade ago. Or perhaps, as I continue to dig up and revamp material from the English Raven website, I just continue to find it staggering how far back in history ten years ago now appears to be.
The picture above shows a listening test I developed in 2001. It was an ambitious exercise in some ways, because the school I was managing at the time was using Barb Sakamoto's excellent Let's Go series and I wanted to combine the Let's Go content with the Cambridge Young Learners of English test formats. What I did was draw on the themes, vocabulary and functional language in all six levels of Let's Go and apply them as listening tests which mirrored the sections and applications in Cambridge YLE Starters, Movers and Flyers sample tests.
Even the scripts I developed for the tests mirrored exactly the style and methodology used in the Cambridge YLE tests:
TN: Hello and welcome to this Listening Test for Let’s Go 4 Units 1-4. Please listen carefully to the instructions and try to answer all questions on this test paper. Good Luck!
Part One. Look at the picture and listen to the example.
M: Today is Wednesday. What was Ted doing yesterday?
W: He was playing basketball.
M: Oh, yes. I see him now.
TN: Can you see Ted playing basketball yesterday? Can you see the line going from Ted’s name to the picture? Now listen and draw lines from the other names to the pictures.
W: What about Ted’s friend David? What was he doing yesterday?
M: He was catching butterflies. He caught a lot!
W: Really? That must have been fun! Mmm, can you see Tracy?
M: Yes, she’s right there. She was feeding ducks yesterday at the lake.
W: Right. What about Tim? Was he taking pictures with his new camera yesterday?
M: Yes, he was! And can you see Sam? Was he playing catch yesterday?
W: No, he wasn’t. He was picking up trash with his friend Sunny. The park was so dirty yesterday!
M: Right! I can see that. That just leaves Chris. What was he up to yesterday?
W: He was playing catch, of course. Can’t you see him there?
M: Oh yes, now I see him!
But of course, a script is useless without a sound track... How did we produce them?
That's right: myself and two other teachers stayed behind after school one night and recorded them all... on a cassette recorder that looked very much like the one you can see at the top of this page. Hold down the RECORD and PLAY buttons at the same time. Remember? Then use your master tape to record onto all the other tapes, one after another...
This was only ten years ago.
iPods and MP3 players weren't around then. Phones, while definitely quite small and very mobile, weren't taking pictures or recording things yet (much less taking 1 hour high quality video and connecting us to the Internet).
Today I had a teenager making assembly instructions for a catapult, and he couldn't access his CAD drawings. We popped out of the literacy classroom into the workshop, took a variety of different angle and close up photographs of his catapult with my Samsung Galaxy S, which I sent directly from the phone to his school email address. He had his assembly instructions done by the end of the class, complete with high quality photographs.
This evening, based on a quick request from yesterday on Facebook, I joined Marisa Constantinides and her YL teacher trainees in Athens via Skype for a brief video link up to discuss ELT materials design for young learners of English. As easy and convenient as glancing out the window, really.
Not long after that, I left the screencasting tool on and left the room while my son played my newly minted When-Who-What-Where card game online. The resulting video shows his screen actions, plays his voice and also the recorded voice files I had uploaded into the game. And I can show it all to you here (a fascinating example of child language experimentation and thinking out loud, I must add), basically with a flick of a (code embed) switch:
As I look at what we are doing today (and the relative ease involved) and compare it to me sitting at a table with a cassette recorder that (now) looks like a big black fridge, it really does hit me between the eyes that technology (and access to technology) has absolutely exploded over the past decade. To look back at 2001 and for it to feel like ancient history is exciting but eerie and even a little unnerving.
In ten years from now, will that screencast above and the Skype session and my Samsung Galaxy S seem as crusty and clunky as the old cassette recorder appears to us now?
The mind boggles.
;-)
