What happens when we mix teachers and social media?

     On Monday 7th July we had a very interesting meeting at Learning2gether as part of the regular sessions Vance Stevens hosts either on Sundays or Mondays with educators from all around the world to talk about different topics regarding the use of technology in education.  I have already mentioned how I met Vance.  He was the first one of many teachers willing to share, and help, and listen, and learn with you. By you I mean anyone interested in whatever the topic at hand.  The topic today was Social Media Management and the special guest was  József Horváth, from Hungary, who has given his classes a special twist so that his students wouldn´t look at the clock to see how long it is till the bell rings.
1. Picnic in the Punctuation Park How many times did we glance out of the window on a glorious Summer/Spring day wishing we could all be outside enjoying the outdoors?  József takes his students outside to teach a topic which suffers from a bad reputation among them and pretends he is not teaching, but having a picnic instead. (which they actually do because they bring food and drinks and everything else)
2. Befriend your students on Facebook.  József is in touch with his students through Facebook, and by doing so he learns a lot about them.
3. József gives his students the possibility to write for a global audience.  By using Feedbook his students´ work is available for everyone to read. The original work includes the book cover design as well. Mind you, students are not required to write a book, however most of them do!
4. Emphasis on freedom.  His students usually have a range of ten tasks to choose from and they end up choosing three or four.
5. Collaborative work.  The writing of the book is done in pairs and each student has the chance to be a writer and an editor as well.
6. Evaluation is provided by the student and the teacher, the teacher being the one who usually assigns higher marks!
What I reflected about when I heard about all these techniques and practices had to do with why I did not attempt to do any of those! I was missing all the fun in the world!  The freedom given to students has to do with acknowledging their part in the learning process and recognising that they have something to say and there are people out there who are willing to listen. (or read in this case)
A few years ago I was isolated as a teacher. I did not have access to proper internet until a 2 years ago.  Methodology books have always been extremely expensive, and the Teacher´s Seminars full of theory oriented lectures.
Fortunately things have changed.  If you ask me what I like best about being a connected educator it is the contact with teachers like József whose enthusiasm is contagious because you can tell that he is enjoying his teaching.  After all as good old Paul Seligson says it all comes down to that: "Enjoy your teaching, if you  don´t, who will?"  So eventually it´s not about what technology you use or don´t use in your class, after all as Jozsef put it very simply: "The most important app is the person´s mind.", but rather it´s about making us all want to be there!

Szia!      See you!    ¡Nos vemos!

Check out for the latest podcasts by József Horváth!

My life on Flickr!

www.flickr.com

Éste es un módulo Flickr que muestra fotos o videos públicos de Maria Colussa. Crea tu propio módulo aquí.

On how assessment has evolved

Assesment has evolved from the old times when we got a test back with a grade which we would never know where it came from.

I will concentrate on a particular assesment I did to evaluate my latest student´s ability to communicate with a native speaker.  Pressed for time since I only had two months to get her ready to establish meaningful interactions with strangers in English, I came up with the idea to set up a virtual meeting via Skype with my good friend David Karnorcak. (I blogged about this meeting in my last entry)

In my teacher training college years I would not have dreamed of having a student assesed in the way I will describe below.  I am happy to be a teacher today because technology enables us to strech our brains as to how to make assessment more meaningful and less stressful for our students.

The following is part of an assignment for the LTMOOC I´m doing these days.

     What are the outcomes to be assessed?
I wanted to check if she was able to communicate in English, given the fact that she said she didn´t know a word in English.  I knew this was not true.  

      What are the capabilities/skills (implicit or explicit) in the outcomes?

The skill was oral communication

      Is the method of assessment chosen consonant with the outcomes and skills?

The method was chosen because the social interactions that she wanted to do would share the same nature.

      Is the method relatively efficient in terms of student time and staff time?

The method was efficient in that it gave the student the chance to experience what social interactions during her trip would imply. 

     What alternatives are there? What are their advantages and disadvantages?

The "safe" alternative would have been to play a CD with a listening activity for her to do a given excersise from a book, in a highly artificial environment, and with vocabulary which she would probably not encounter later on.  The disadvantage was that she was angry with me for putting her in the position to talk to a stranger , which implied taking her out of her comfort zone. (This lasted just a few minutes) 
  

      Does the specific assessment task match the outcomes and skills?

The assessment was not only a sample of what she would encounter, it was useful in order to determine the weaker points to be dealt with in future classes.

     Are the marking schemes or criteria appropriate?

There was no marking scheme.  After the chat the class was based on how to improve the communicative skills providing vocabulary and structures.

    Who should make judgements about student learning – the teacher, the student, the student’s peers or others?

In this case we received the feedback of the interlocutor who provided ideas as to what she could say and how and also praised her on her performance.  This made a major positive impact on my student´s self esteem. The re-listening of the recorded version of the interview from the part of the student allowed her to focus on what she would like to be able to say better. The teacher highlighted language for later practice.

On "I want to learn English asap!"

      I sometimes come across this individual: the middle aged adult who for several reasons wants to enroll on an English course and wants to acquire the language the fast way. They approach us as if we, teachers, were the guardians of the Holy Grail of language learning. They say: "I want to learn English, I don´t have time for homework, I need it because I realized that it is important during my last trip abroad. Oh, and I don´t want to write, after all I just want to be able to talk." Fine, I take the challenge. I start building from what they bring to class I find it fascinating when they start remembering vocabulary and structures. Eventually, they have the chance to try their knowledge out in their next trip and they come to class with renewed energy after being able to successfully interact in English.
     Nevertheless I found myself questioning my own teaching lately. I have this student who goes on a trip next month. Ok, let´s put her knowledge at work. I asked my good friends of Hello Little World Teachers Skypers if anyone would be available for a short chat with one of my students. The great David Karnoscak accepted the invitation and there was Monica in front of the computer screen face to face with a native speaker! Of course I did the arrangements without her knowing about the interview, because had I asked if she would like to do it, guess what? She would refuse and ask to do it later when she´s better prepared. When the time came, she would be too nervous to do it. The conversation started and David was friendly, chose the correct words and reformulated the sentences to make things easier for Monica to understand, I often translated.  Sometimes I remained silent. I wrote down all the sentences my student didn´t know how to say and all the vocabulary she couldn´t produce. I filled two pages. We thanked Mr David for the wonderful chat and then the class started. I gave my student the English version of all the things she wanted to ask or was unsure about. She was reassured by the fact that she understood most of what David said.
      However the most important achievement was in a level you can´t see. The renewed confidence. The magic of communication took place and I felt proud to have facilitated it. That´s after all why I became a teacher twenty years ago.

Content Based Instruction Revisited

     After reading Fredricka Stoller´s article on Content Based Instruction I remembered my teacher trainning years, when we were first introduced to the key principles of this methodology.  I actually planned classes based on it, which I later delivered with great enthusiasm.
     CBI would be my ideal approach for a lawyer who comes to me for one to one lessons to help him brush up his English for a presentation he has to deliver in English in seven month´s time.  In this case where I know the learner has some basic grammar knowledge and a specific learning need I could use all the ideas clearly presented in the article.  Technology would certainly facilitate the planning process as well as the production of student generated material.
     As regards the general English courses I am asked to deliver I don´t see myself using CBI, simply because I consider you need to have the knowledge of the content and I am not a science teacher for example.  Concentrating on one particular topic, may have the drawback of not catering for the variety of all students interests.
     Lower level students pose another challenge when trying to implement this methodology.  Charts and diagrams are appropriate here, as well as comprehensible chunks of language for students to use and practice and build from there.
     We always use content to teach languages.  After all the purpose of communication is meaningful interaction, that´s what most of my students are after when they enroll in my classes.

http://www.carla.umn.edu/cobaltt/modules/curriculum/Stoller2002/stoller2002.pdf

LTMOOC ACTIVITY: Introducing myself

     My name is Maria del Carmen Colussa and I am from Argentina.  I live in a quite small town called Santo Tomé, where I started learning English at the age of 13.  I graduated from Instituto del Profesorado Almirante Brown in Santa Fe city, which is about 14 kilometres away from my city separated by the Salado River.
     After I graduated in 1993, I started teaching English non stop at Liceo Municipal de Santo Tomé Faustino San Juan,  so I returned as a teacher right where I had begun studying several years before.
Back in February 2012 I started exploring the possibilities of using ICT tools in my language teaching practice and I  have been doing that since then.  Always learning something new and meeting likeminded teachers.  As time went by I became interested in the possibilities of working together with other teachers and classes all over the world.  The Skype Community in Edmodo is an attempt to do just that.  I have been having Skype chats (either Mystery or not) with several classes around the world, so my family is used to my  meetings over the internet.  I am also a member of the Hello Little World Teachers Skypers.
     I have concentrated on teaching English to adults for the last 3 or 4 years and I do it as a freelance teacher from home.  However, I have discovered  through my Skype chats that people are interested in learning Spanish and also things about my country, so I found myself sharing those in my native language as well.
     By joining this LTMOOC I hope to get new tools to use in my teaching and I also hope to share practices and experiences with other teachers.   As I stated in the discussion group I am here because of Vance Stevens one of the moderators at the MultiMOOC EVO session last February 2013.  He encouraged several of us to be here and I only have kind words for teachers like him or Miguel Mendoza and his Venezuelan crew, who introduced me to the world of Podcasting during the same sessions. (this blog also contains part of the work produced then)
    As regards my hobbies, I have 3 adolescent children and a husband so I can say that I used to love cooking before I had to do it in large quantities and on a daily basis.  As a result of so much time spent sitting in front of the computer and in order to compensate this, I practice several outdoor activities which vary with the seasons.  These could be: bicycle riding, and an afternoon walk in Winter and wakeboarding and early walks in the Summer. All year round I read (at the moment "What I talk about when I talk about running", by Haruki Murakami), I usually keep about 5 books on my bedside table by Latin American writers (my favourite: García Márquez) or Argentinian ones.(Borges or Cortázar´s short story books)  Several years ago I discovered that I also like photography, so I enrolled on a course and learned a few photo editing techniques.

Here´s my flickr page.
Hello Little World Wiki

On MOOCing. /mu:kin/ 

      Many times I found myself envying my children´s gatherings at home with the excuse of the production of some creative piece for school. I tried to recall when was the last time I gathered with student friends in order to produce a creative piece. It was over twenty years ago in the Teacher Training College. The subject was Language and Communication Workshop. We had decided to record TV programmes: there was a weather report, a newsflash, commercials, music (rap), soap opera, weather forecast. It was an exhausting experience but I still remember how much fun we had.  Teachers and students working together, making original creative things for an audience, which was the rest of the teachers and fellow students. It did not feel like work, we were engaged, we were having fun. It was a success. Then we got our degrees, we got serious and stopped having fun.
      When was the last time I did something just for the sake of enjoying the ride? I have recently signed up in a Language Teaching MOOC in order to look for some fun by sharing teacher stuff with others and in so doing recovering that feeling of togetherness lost in the rush of everyday teaching. We are supposed to teach communication skills. I want to put mine into practice. However I am open to the unexpected. I know I will receive more than what I am expecting to get. We will see. This morning I heard that in order to learn your brain should be engaged.  I am very curious about language teaching.  There is so much going on out there that I will take this opportunity to catch up with what other teachers are doing or struggling with to find myself in others to recover the togetherness lost somewhere between my student years and today.

Interview with Jeremy Harmer
Here´s the schedule in case you want to peep.