TED-Ed Lesson:

I made a TED-Ed lesson based on Melissa Marshall’s Talk Nerdy to Me talk. Marshall briefly discusses some of the difficulties people have understanding scientific and technical content, and offers a few tips to better communicate these ideas. The need for clear and simple communication is certainly not limited to scientific or technical fields. The ideas from this talk are fairly universal concepts for more effective communication.

Many language learners are excited to use new, challenging vocabulary as often as possible. Though this can be great practice, it also leads to misunderstandings. Communicating in clear and common language may seem less impressive at times, but is much more practical in most situations. The primary objective of this lesson is to have students understand the difficulties of using jargon. Students learn what jargon is, why it is beneficial to communicate in clear, simple terms, and then practice re-wording a term that may cause a misunderstanding. Students could be evaluated by their discussion reply or by rewriting a few jargon-rich sentences in clearer terms.

The Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom is a class that reverses the function of homework and in-class work. It requires a system of instruction for students outside of the classroom, using a video, textbook chapter, slideshow, or some other vehicle to deliver the content of the lesson. When the students come to class, they work on completing an activity or task that would typically be assigned as homework. This allows the teacher more time to assist students individually with their specific needs while completing their tasks.

I have used this idea for one-off projects before but have never ran an entire course based on the flipped classroom model. It does seem to promote a very attractive use of classroom time. The ability to better address students’ needs as individuals and in smaller groups talked about in the Flipping Your EL Class: A Primer article is certainly a great benefit to implementing this kind of system. Similarly, the article Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom notes that this model provides an opportunity for students to absorb the lesson at their own pace. Students could pause a video, go back, listen twice, and take their time with the material.

With such easy access to so many powerful web tools, it is really not all that difficult now for teachers to put together a lesson using a video or web presentation. I think it is approaches like the flipped classroom that really show the most advantageous uses of technology in schools.

Twitter for Teaching

An interesting read, Amanda Wynter’s article Bringing Twitter to the Classroom shows a high school English teacher experimenting with integrating Twitter into his classroom. He does ultimately seem to have success, and students appear to have been more engaged and interested in participating in discussion when given the opportunity to do so online.

There are quite a few interesting observations about having students use Twitter throughout the article. In particular, I liked the part about how students could “utilize their experiences in English class and include their class hashtags as they responded to tweets from One Direction and Tim Tebow.” This allows the teacher to measure students' comprehension and application of concepts introduced in class. The opportunity to directly connect students back to class during their leisure time is certainly attractive, but could also be difficult in terms of winning over reluctant parents who may be particularly protective of students’ online activity. I also liked the idea of this teacher sharing students’ tweets to his network of education-oriented followers to favorite and reply to students’ ideas. Not only would it be a great opportunity to practice for a language class, but students can also experience their ideas being thought worth reading by other people out in the real world.

Searching for more ideas about how to make use of Twitter as a teacher, I came across 60 Inspiring Examples of Twitter in the Classroom by Global Digital Citizen Foundation. It’s a pretty straightforward list of (you guessed it) 60 links to examples of ways to implement Twitter into a class. They’re split into sections like Communication, Organization, Resources, Writing Skills, and Twitter Exercises. Many seem obvious, but there are a few that stuck out as clever.

I like the ideas of having students follow public figures or news agencies for easily digestible news summaries, network with native speakers who share interests, and build a foreign language content stream. I also liked the idea of teachers connecting their classes to exchange foreign language practice. Twitter is a great way for the language learner to practice because each post is limited to 140 characters, so students never have to struggle with staring at a big page of foreign language. They can feel good about understanding and being understood more easily in such concise messages. Using any of these activities over Twitter seems like it would be a smart way to get students to practice outside the classroom.

In addition to the social networking benefits teachers enjoy when growing a professional network, there are also many possibilities for language learners to improve by making direct use of a global communication tool like Twitter.

#LangChat - Twitter as a Professional Development Resource

Logging into Twitter can be overwhelming sometimes. There’s a lot going on and any given tweet could be pushed out of view before we get the chance to give it a look. For those of use who check our Twitter feeds every once in a while, it can seem like too much of a mess to bother keeping up with. Scheduled at specific times and organized by hashtags, Twitter chats turn the microblogging platform into a more straightforward chat session about a given topic. Yesterday, I spent about an hour checking out a Twitter chat about language education, #LangChat.

LangChat has multiple sessions scheduled throughout the week, which makes a lot of sense given the global nature of the topic (world language education) and platform. I joined the session that starts at 10AM EST Saturday morning. The chat is operated in a Q&A format with moderators proposing questions and participants posting answers, sparking some discussion as replies. At the end of the chat, participants are asked to share what they took away from the session.



I think this platform and discussion format works really well. Dropping in on a weekly chat like this is a great way to find and share ideas and resources. It’s also a great way to find professionals active in your field to expand your network. The questions posted by moderators help jumpstart discussion on relevant topics, and suggestions from participants are also accepted throughout the week. What I like most about doing this via Twitter, as opposed to a discussion forum or similar, is the real-time access to other users. Shooting someone a reply to ask for clarification or to elaborate on a point made is very straightforward, and the responses are more or less immediate. Of course, this also means we have to schedule a specific time to be available to join the session in the first place. Overall, this felt like a great way to utilize the immediacy and quick-moving nature of Twitter in a way that benefitted me more than just occasionally checking a disorganized feed of everyone I’m following.

ePals

Aimed at giving students the opportunity to cooperate on projects with students from different cultures, ePals allows teachers to connect their classes online. This seems like a great way to get your students to interact with and become more aware or even interested in people from other cultures. The students aren’t the only ones who benefit. This looks like a fun way to expand our network of education professionals and perhaps experience some different perspectives from educators around the world.

I like the experiences they have listed, which are basically activity ideas that students can complete with their ePals from classes in other countries. One I liked in particular was the cultural exchange Taste of Culture experience, which asks students to share recipes from their culture with their ePal partners, and then go home and try to cook one of the recipes they learned about.

I would definitely consider using this kind of tool in my classroom. Especially in foreign language classes, students get really excited about foreign cultures and even more so when they can apply what they're learning to something productive and real. This kind of cultural exchange and cooperation gives students the opportunity to put their language skills and culture knowledge to use, and to learn more from natives of that culture. Even something as simple as a recipe exchange would be great for fostering positive experiences and a feeling of fellowship between students from distant cultures.

The Educator's PLN

I have recently joined The Educator’s PLN, a network for educators hosted on the customizable social networking platform Ning. As a new member exploring what the site has to offer, I am finding a lot of great content and potential here.

When I logged in and landed on the home page, I was immediately drawn to the Edchat page, where I found information for weekly Twitter chats about education. Not only that, but there are archives of transcripts from previous discussions. Extensive. For more discussion, there are forums. It seems like a good place to find interesting posts on a variety of topics. For more specific discussions, there are groups, which feature their own forums and comment section. Unfortunately, I am currently having a little difficulty finding currently active groups relative to my educational interests. There’s also a number of blogs users are posting directly on The Educator’s PLN, the advantages of which we’ve discussed a little bit before.

The section of the site I found most immediately attractive as a new member was the videos section.

It’s a great collection of videos submitted by users about anything related to education. I like to dig through the vastness of YouTube and such for useful material but it’s always difficult and time-consuming to find the good stuff. Using a social network as a way of curating videos we find useful as individuals is a great way to kind of filter out the less useful results when looking through content-hosting sites directly.

While the daily activity is not as abundant as some other groups found on more mainstream platforms, a social networking site dedicated entirely to educators has many perks, including less distracting unrelated content. I like the ability to connect and share accounts for other social networks in user profiles, offering an opportunity to expand our networks of knowledgeable professionals exponentially.

Connectivism

In Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, George Siemens explains the need to adopt more contemporary understandings of knowledge and learning that fit our current technology and educational habits. Prior learning theories, such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism, do not really address the practice of acquiring and sharing information through networks. Siemens describes connectivism as “the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.” And goes on to identify learning as “a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual” (Siemens, 2005).

Paul Chan, Score for 7th Light, 2007

Siemens’s depiction of today’s learner is much like a jazz musician. Though a more traditional player could be trained to read and recite music written on the score, many players without composition backgrounds find it difficult to improvise. In jazz, however, players tend to focus on playing by ear – that is, listening to the relationships between notes and mentally connecting those sounds to physical positions on their instruments. Jazz musicians often play around a barebones musical structure that offers players minimal information about the skeleton of the song. The individual notes and how they are voiced are not specified, left to the players to make those decisions on the fly. In traditional educational settings, learners may have similarly been expected to read and recite scripted knowledge. Today’s learner, like the jazz musician, seems better served by becoming familiar enough with their tools and skills to improvise by creating a solution when prompted by a particular situation. In his presentation What is Connectivism, Siemens notes, “through technology, we’ve had the ability to increase our participation in the creation and sharing of content” (Siemens, 2008). Like a musician listening, calling and responding to the other band members, the learner also uses this call-and-response trade of creative information with other nodes to acquire and share knowledge through their networks.