Podcasts in Language Classrooms

Podcasts are great resources for foreign language classrooms, and they can be used in a variety of ways to improve language skills. There are so many different podcasts about many different topics that you can use in the classroom. I have found a website which is mainly used by parents homeschooling their kids. It is called The Wired Homeschool. You can find podcasts about many different topics on this website, and use it in your flipped classroom.



I most liked that you can find podcasts about current events, issues, technologies etc. on this website. For example, I can assign this podcast Are Road-Crossing Workshops R eally Necessary?  as homework. I can ask students to listen to it and write their reactions to the podcast. Or I could have students listen to the podcast and ask them questions and have a discussion in the classroom. Students will be able to connect their already existing knowledge to the content of the podcast and reflect on the topic of the podcast in writing. Students will be listening for details and it will contribute to their listening comprehension skills.

Using Dvolver in Classroom

This week I used Dvolver in order to create a mini digital story about going to the movies. I really liked this website. I first tried using Strip Generator, but after I got errors each time I tried to publish my story, I turned to Dvolver. I liked Dvolver because you can easily choose from many different characters, music and settings, but I would have loved it more if it had let us customize it all a little bit more.




By creating their digital story, my students could demonstrate the following performance indicators:

ESL.1.5-8.4.1.9: Students use appropriate vocabulary, expressions, language, routines, and interaction styles for various audiences and formal and informal social or school situations, noticing how intention is realized through language.

ESL.1.5-8.1.1.12: Students convey information and ideas through spoken and written language using conventions and features of American English appropriate to audience and purpose.

I would assess my students on the basis of their content being meaningful. If I make it clear that I want students to use certain forms, terms, words in their dialogues, I can check and see if they used them properly, I could also have them act out their role plays in the classroom and assess their spoken performance based on stress, intonation, and pronunciation.

Using Animoto in Classroom

This week, I have learnt about an amazing website, Animoto, which is used for creating videos. People use this website for many reasons but mainly for business and education. You can create educational videos by using pictures, music and text. Animoto offers great background themes and music you can choose from. It is very easy to use. I usually watch Youtube tutorials before I start using this kind of tools, but I did not really need it for Animoto.



I prepared a video about the life cycle of a frog using Animoto this week. Using this video, I can make an introduction to teaching storytelling and how sequencing helps order events or steps. Students will also learn and practice the use of transition words such as first, second, third, next, then, after that, etc. I can ask students to create a video using Animoto. I could ask students to make a video about how they spent their last birthday, or I could ask them to create a video about a simple recipe. When I assess them, I would consider how they used the pictures and text- if the picture really represents the text. I would also consider their performance in using transition words correctly and efficiently.

Performance Indicator- ESL.1.5-8.1.1.9: Students convey and organize information using facts, details, illustrative examples, and a variety of patterns and structures.

Performance Indicator- ESL.1.5-8.1.1.12: Students convey information and ideas through spoken and written language using conventions and features of American English appropriate to audience and purpose.
   

TED-Ed Lesson

I have created my first TED-Ed lesson today, and I must say that the website is very easy to navigate, and you can use these TED-Ed lessons for a lot of purposes. In this lesson, I imagined that I am teaching adult English language learners. I designed this class as a pre-reading task for my students to complete before we read an article on what minimalism is. In the video, Graham Hill talks about what he means by "Less Stuff, More Happiness". It is about 5 minutes long, which is good for a pre-reading task. Students are expected to watch the video, answer two detail questions and discuss what minimalism means to them.














Below are my objectives:

1) Students will be able to relate what they know with the text they will read.
2) Students will be able to listen for details to answer the comprehension questions.
3) Students will be able to understand what minimalism is.

I could test the first and last objective by reading their response to the discussion question. Their response to the discussion question will show how much they relate to their background knowledge, and what they understand from the concept of minimalism. I could test the second objective by looking at their answers to the comprehension questions as they will show if students were able to catch those details.

Flipped Classroom

I think the idea of flipped classroom became popular a few years ago (Dear readers, please leave a comment below if you think I am wrong), and I have just found out about it this week! These articles here and here summarize the flipped classroom approach very well. It is a new approach to teaching which is reversing our understanding of traditional teaching by having students learn about the subject at home, and classroom time is used for exercises, projects, and discussions. 

I love the idea of flipped classroom as a teacher and a student! Here are a few reasons. First, each student learn at a different pace and flipped classroom strategy gives them freedom to learn at their own pace. If they are using a video as the instructional material, they can rewind and watch again if need be. Second, classroom time is precious, and with this strategy you use it to solve problems and strengthen comprehension, which I call a better use of time. Third, flipped classroom promotes learner-centered classroom where a lot of time can be allotted to collaborative exercises.

I also have some concerns about this approach. First of all, flipped classroom means students will need technology outside of class. Not every student has a computer and internet at home. Second, flipped classroom means that students will need to spend a lot of time in front of their computer. If all their lessons are flipped, it means hours and hours of studying at home. Lastly, it will sound selfish but will my students think that I am not needed anymore? I understand that flipped classroom is more than assigning videos to students, but what will parents think? It is not always easy for people to embrace something so untraditional like this. It is a big change!  

Twitter for Professional Development and Education

When I hear "professional development courses/certificate programs" I immediately think of travel and accommodation costs. Professional development is very important to me as I don't want to lag behind while things are changing so fast! I want to know what is out there and what is happening, what the new trends are. I am always curious about other teachers' classrooms and what those teachers are doing differently, what works for them, what their opinions would be on my classroom struggles. I have recently found out that Twitter can be used for this purpose. We can still benefit greatly from those professional development courses and all, but Twitter is a gold mine for educators. Many educators today are using microblogging to talk about many different topics which we can all relate to, and they are sharing invaluable tips and amazing ideas. It is very easy to follow and you get a lot in an hour. I will recommend this to all my colleagues who are not aware of twitter chats.

You can also use twitter for educational purposes. In their article, How Twitter Can Be Used as a Powerful Educational Tool, Alan November and Brian Mull mention that Twitter can be used as part of the learning process by any classroom. One of the activities that he explained amazed me. A teacher from Texas posted a twit to her students along with a picture from a game and the picture was her holding a soda cup in her hand. She asked students to come up with questions based on the picture, and reactions from the students were amazing. They were very creative and came up with a lot of questions. What was amazing was that students stopped whatever they were doing and rushed to respond to their teacher. This is a great example of sharing learning opportunities with others outside of classroom




 Another way that we can use Twitter for students is we can have them collaborate on writing a short story. It is a fun activity where one person starts it and another continues. It can take a few days, weeks or even months to complete it, but it is a fun activity and very good for improving writing skills.

Twitter Chats

This week I joined two twitter chats: #ELTchat on Wednesday afternoon, and #langchat Saturday morning. This has been my favorite professional development platform so far! It is a treasure! I use twitter on a daily basis mostly to keep up with trending topics in my home country Turkey and in the world. I also use it as a news source quite often. But, little did I know that I would some day use twitter for professional development.  

To my surprise the topic in both chats were the things we have been studing in my linguistics and literacy classes over the past few weeks. ELTchat had people join from many different countries. They discussed pronunciation teaching, why teachers skip it, what are some good sources etc. It spoke to my heart! I am personally not confident teaching pronunciation mainly because of my accent. It was great to see that I was not the only one feeling this way. Topic in #langchat was collaboration with colleagues in other disciplines. Moderator posed discussion questions and people were so generous sharing their experiences, concerns, resources, ideas etc. At the end of the chat, moderator asked what people took away from the chat, which was a great summary of the conversations. I mostly observed both chats, but I learnt a lot in a very short time! I loved it for many reasons, but here are some:

1) It is a free professional development platform you can join in your PJs from your home.
2) Conversation topics are very well chosen and discussion questions are to the point.
3) You get to meet genuinely enthusiastic professionals from many different places and build a network.
4) You learn a lot in an hour! You learn a lot of practical tips. This week someone from NC said she has her elementary school students use voicethread to describe the self portrait they did in art class. Amazing idea to how how you can collaborate with colleagues from other disciplines!
5) They are so welcoming! They don't mind if you are just there to observe. 
I loved twitter chats so much that I will definitely be a regular.  

ePals

This week, we explored an online network for teachers and students where they can connect with many other students and teachers from around the world: ePals. I should admit that it took me a while to figure out how it works, and I made use of e-Pals is Global Education in order to see how people are using the website. You will see comments from other users on the right side of this page.

There are a lot of things you can do on ePals. You can find connections from around the world to collaborate, and while looking for connections, you can narrow your search results by choosing the country, language, student age group, average class size, subjects, interests, grades taught, and specializations. I was really  happy to see that there are many connections from my home country, Turkey. If I had known about ePals when I was in Turkey, I would have definitely used it while teaching English to my students. It would provide us with opportunities to connect with native speakers of English, and participate in projects with classrooms from around the world. Needless to say, this would contribute so much to my students' cultural awareness and communication skills in many ways.

I especially loved the Explore Experiences feature. I liked the idea of School Swap project, where you can have your students partner with a classroom from another country. Through this project, students will be discovering the similarities and differences between their classrooms, activities, campuses. As a culminating project, it is suggested that the students create a video presenting facts and info about their partner school. It is a very interesting project where students will have the opportunity to communicate with native speakers of the target language and use this info while creating their video. I also loved the Taste of Culture project, where students exchange recipes and examine what the ingredients tell them about the other culture’s location and climate. Food is always fun, and you can use this project when you teach imperatives in English as the recipes always have directions.

The Educator's PLN 

This week, I learnt about a social networking website where teachers from all around the world come together and create a network of educators. You can sign up for free, but your membership needs to be approved before you can view some features of the Educator's PLN.

Signing up for this website, you can make connections with teachers from all the world no matter where you are. It currently has more than 18,000 members. You can use this website to ask questions, chat about classroom problems, share your resources and expertise with others, find out what is going on in other classrooms, learn about teaching strategies and educational issues.   

21st Century Learner

Today, I read A Learning Theory for the Digital Age by George Siemens. It was a very interesting article where I mostly enjoyed the comparisons between learners today and learners in the past. A learner today is like a doctor. I believe that the reason I came up with this analogy has a lot to do with the fact that I have been watching the TV show Grey's Anatomy for a few months now. When you think about doctors’ offices and their equipment 20 years ago, it must look very different from the ones we see now. There is a lot of new information, illnesses/treatments have changed over the years, new treatments are in effect, and there is a lot of digital equipment they are making use of in order to diagnose and treat patients. When I think back on my times as a middle school student, I cannot see a smartphone, iPad, computer, kindle, social networking sites, smart boards, online blogs in my room or classroom. I do remember a lot of books and notebooks. The way learners acquire information has tremendously changed.

Siemens states that experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. This is where I should emphasize the significance of our networks. In today’s world, we are all connected to each other through technology and learn from each other constantly. A doctor should constantly update themselves in their fields, be aware of developments, attend conferences, talk to other doctors about their experiences so that they don’t miss anything important that would leave them behind. We learn not only from our experiences but from many sources. Siemens elaborates on this in his video the Network is the Learning where he says that the particular network I create is what enables me to stay current in my own field. Today people connect with each other in numerous ways. It is very easy to keep in touch with people from other cities, countries and even the far away ones. We should make use of this in the best way possible.  

Pinterest and Diigo

This week, I will be comparing two social bookmarking websites: Diigo and Pinterest. I had opened a Pinterest account a long time ago, but I did not quite figure out how it works, so I deactivated my account. This week, I have watched a few tutorials on how Pinterest works, and actually it turned out to be pretty straightforward. Diigo, on the other hand, is a little bit confusing for me. Both Diigo and Pinterest have their own advantages and limitations.

You create a library in Diigo, where you save websites. You can download a Diigo extension on Chrome, which I found very useful. When you save a website in Diigo, you can go back to it and highlight parts. You can even insert comments. You can follow others, send them messages, or you can create groups in Diigo. While you are saving a website in Diigo, you can enter a description and multiple tags. You can also see other people’s tags and websites that they have saved.  

You create boards on Pinterest and save your websites on these boards. Link to your saved websites are found right below the images you saved on your boards, so you can click on it and read further. You can follow other people and their boards. You can repin something that someone has pinned. You can send messages to others and leave comments under their saved images. Pinterest offers you suggestions based on your pins and boards.

Diigo has a more academic feeling, while Pinterest is much more fun. I will definitely continue to use Pinterest. I will create more boards and discover new things. I also like checking out other people’s boards and see what they have. You get a lot of ideas while doing this. I will use Pinterest to save classroom ideas and come back to these as needed. I also love the website design of Pinterest. You can spend hours on Pinterest. There is a lot to discover! I think I will use Diigo when I work on a research paper. In the past, I used to bookmark the websites that I wanted to go back to, but it was not very well organized, and it was not enough. I can save websites in my Diigo library, highlight parts of the text, insert comments and tags. It is a perfect platform for this purpose.

Technology: Embrace It

I remember the old days when I tried to memorize the phone book to impress my parents. Those were the days when landlines were still around, and they were actually very popular. Now, I know only my phone number by heart as all I need is saved on my phone. It is no news that technology has been improving at a rapid rate for the last 20 years. It is changing our lives drastically. The way people eat, fall in love/out of love, get information, read, study, buy tickets, book holidays, decide on which restaurant to go, live their lives and many other things have changed and are still changing.

According to Social Media Revolution 2011, fifty percent of the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. If you are not on Facebook, it is almost like you don’t exist. We use social media for a lot of things. We write about what is going on with our lives, share our adventures, form groups, organize events, invite people to events, share recipes, complain about bad customer service, look people up on Facebook when we meet them offline, etc. It is one click away, and it is so easy as you can log in on your laptop, tablet, smartphone, and even smart TV. Social media is real. It is happening. There is no escape. Our students will be highly likely into social media like everyone else, which means they will spend a lot of time on it. The question is how we can incorporate it into our classrooms.

Educational Change Challenge is quite thought-provoking. What struck me most while watching it was “If you put a doctor of 100 years ago in today's operating room, she would be lost, yet if you placed a teacher of 100 years ago into one of today's classrooms she wouldn't skip a beat". When you enter any classroom in Turkey these days, you will see students looking at their smart phones. When you write on the board, instead of taking notes, they take a picture of the board. Many classrooms today do not reflect the real world students live in outside of school.

Students’ learning environment should be relevant to their life outside of school.  Technology is in the center of our lives. Why not make the best use of it in education? It will enable students to get information faster, create learning communities, and probably make things easier to for them understand and practice. But first, educators must be well trained on how to make this happen. Most teachers today are not digital native, and using technology for education is not a compulsory component in higher education. If we are not up-to-date on technology, we will lose relevance, which can make us lose connection, and make our students lose interest.

While I was teaching English two years ago, I did not spend too much time thinking about how I could use technology in my classrooms. We had to cover a lot in our classes, and the classroom time was barely enough to catch up with the schedule. We also assigned a lot of homework to students on a daily basis. I am questioning these all now. Teachers definitely need school administration's cooperation on using technology in classes. It is not realistic to think otherwise.  

Blogging in Language Classes

Internet and technology have become such inseparable parts of our lives that we would not know how to survive without them. They have obviously transformed the way we live and do things. They have also changed teaching practices in many ways.

We can easily use blogs in our reading classes. In my experience, students read and work on at least three-four texts in a reading class a week. They typically read a text, answer questions based on the text, have a discussion on it, work on new vocabulary items (depends on how you prefer teaching vocabulary-implicitly vs. explicitly), and do various exercises based on the text. After we complete all the reading texts that week, we can come up with a few controversial questions on each text (say 3 questions per text), and have students respond to/reflect on at least two of them. These questions should be prepared in such a way that students will be able to comment on them, reflect on them, relate to them, talk about their experiences/opinions, etc. We should ask students to respond to at least two other friends’ post so that they will be interacting with each other. As a warm up for this big blogging project, we can start with simply asking students which reading text they liked most that week and their reasons, things they learnt that they didn’t know before, their favorite quote from the text and why, if they would recommend it to a friend and why, etc. Some students are too shy to speak in front of others in a classroom. Blogging will give them a chance to express themselves. As also mentioned in Blogging in Language Learning, it will be empowering, and we will get a chance to learn about our students. Students will also be curious about how their friends will be commenting on their posts, so it will be a nice platform for interaction. We should keep this platform a welcoming and friendly one for everyone, and not let it be hostile in any way. Performance indicator that best fits this situation is ESL.C.9-12.4.1.5: Students explain actions, choices, and decisions in social and academic situations. Here you can see more details about learning standards.

We can also have our students create a blog that they will use as a diary. We can have them write once a week on how that week has been going, how their assignments are going, their social life and school life. They can post a picture that they have taken that week and talk about it, etc. In my experience, all students have one thing in common: they love complaining. They love complaining about school, teachers, classes, assignments, etc., so this activity can go out of hand and demoralize other students, but we can take all the necessary precautions to make it a friendly atmosphere where students are keeping an online diary of their life in a happy and encouraging way. We can have them ask questions to each other under their posts. They will be interested in reading each other’s post. Performance indicator that best fits this situation is ESL.C.9-12.4.1.1: Students use a variety of oral, print, and electronic forms for social communication and for writing to or for self, applying the conventions of social writing. You can also see the learning standards here.

Teachers can use blogs for professional development. I like talking about my classroom struggles and usually ask my colleagues how they would handle it. By writing about it on my blog, I can have a bigger network of teachers. There will be teachers having similar struggles, and there will be others who can recommend way(s) to deal with that problem. It will give us a chance to create a big network where we can help each other. It will also feel good to see that we are not the only ones having those problems.