Check out this nifty photo book created with Bookr. It fits in with my (kind of) yearly Valentine’s / technology theme.  This could be a great activity to use with students.

Check out this blog entry with links to presentations about task-based instruction in foreign language learning.  Jane and Dave Willis also have a site where you can download lessons that use task-based instruction.

My Desk

Label the parts of my desk using the vocabulary we looked at during the last class. Copy the picture and paste it in a new entry on your blog, followed by the list of words.  For example:

A. Computer
B. Chair

Allyson just recommended word clouds describing each of the candidates as discussion points for the upcoming election day events. You can find this info on the blog for the Pew Research Center, where they give the results of a survey where registered voters were asked what one word best describes their impression of the candidates for president and vice president.

Words that were most commonly used to describe McCain as presidential candidate

Wordle creates “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

I’ll have to admit that I was rather surprised at the number of people that didn’t specifically write out objectives, or that said they have them in their head.  If I didn’t write out my objectives to a workshop, or a course, or a curriculum, how would I ever remember where I was supposed to be at the end or how to evaluate?  How many times have I heard, “I’ve taught it so many times I don’t need a lesson plan.”  Is that really true, I wonder?  What about all those things you could change, or keep track of, if you thought it out well before you walk into the classroom?

I think that NETs would be nice to add to the overall program curriculum, but I also think that the program curriculum should be more in-depth, more connected to the CEF, and include learning strategies and cultural aspects.  Maybe it’s not something I think about every day, or even every course, but that it’s there in my mind that my students will need to be able to use technology and English together.

The Dynamic Instructional Design model for me is simply a reminder of what I need to take into account at each level of planning a course, a unit, a lesson, an activity…I wouldn’t use it all the time, but off and on to get myself to think more about what I’m doing in the classroom.  The documents we looked at, including the DID designer, lesson planner, and action planner, don’t point out anything new, but remind me what I need to do. The last step of the DID designer, describing the summative evaluation process that I’ll use to evaluate my design and how the results will be used to revise caught my attention.

Found this article and thought it was interesting.  Didn’t know about the windows + D to minimize all windows. Check out  Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User.

To kick of my third ELFship, I’ll be presenting a series of workshops on educational technology at the Colombo Americano in Manizales.  Hopefully I’ll be able to revive this blog to use with these workshops, since I’ve left it alone for a little too long!

This series of workshops will focus on exploring teachers’ beliefs related to using technology to enhance the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) and building new skills related to the use of technology to enhance the teaching and learning of the English language. Opportunities to reflect and analyze teaching beliefs will occur across the experience. Each workshop will focus on a topic of personal and professional interest. These topics will be based on needs and ideas of teachers. Possible topics from other course experiences include:

• Exploring teachers’ beliefs about technology;
• Creating a digitally-enhanced classroom;
• Using the Internet for professional development;
• Creating materials for the foreign language classroom,
• Designing project- based EFL activities;
• Evaluating Internet resources;
• Using virtual environments for foreign language learning and teaching;
• Identifying strategies for teaching with video in the foreign language classroom;
• Identifying strategies for integrating authentic audio in the foreign language classroom;
• Creating traditional non-electronic resources as well as digital resources for learning and for professional development.

The workshops will also include a wiki and individual blogs.

It’s time again for the annual TESOL EVO courses. Usually I’m okay for at least the first couple of weeks, but this time I had to travel to present at two conferences in Costa Rica, along with a site visit from Georgetown for the English Language Fellow program, so I’m already behind! I’m also adopting a kitten tonight (exciting, my first pet that’s “mine”), so I’m not sure it’s going to get much better.

In the first week, there were several tools that we were supposed to create accounts for and play with. I already had accounts from past EVO years with WordPress, Bloglines, Flickr, Community Walk, 43Trio, and del.icio.us, although the last three I haven’t done much with. Twitter, VoiceThread, and dotSUB are new for me.

My context, as I never got around to posting it on the SMiELT forum, is a binational center in El Salvador, where I am in my second year as an English Language Fellow.  My current projects are curriculum design, creating new program assessment tools, planning for the national teacher’s conference, teacher training, and on and on.  I don’t have any group of students (or teachers) on a continual basis, so most of what I’ve done in El Salvador with social media is a workshop here and there and playing on my own time.  I suppose that my fascination in this topic comes partially from the fact that my undergrad was in information technology, which has been a create combo with my later love for teaching! 

Here it goes for Week 2’s questions:

After observing the usage of these tools and behavior of users in these environments, read the suggested articles and discuss on your blog the affordances that open and participatory environments offer in ELT.

• What are the benefits/constraints that these open environments may bring in your context?
  I feel right now that the biggest benefit for my from using these tools has been keeping in touch with other English Language Fellows (ELFs) that are in the same region as myself.  The constraint is often access to a decent Internet connection and the time one can spend with that connection, as well as access to a lab for teachers and students (something which is in the process of changing at work).  The time required for training teachers in using these tools is doable, but then they have to have time to play for themselves and to try out how they might use these tools with their students before actually introducing them in class.  Many features of an open environment are currently blocked in our lab at work, which makes it difficult.

  At least in San Salvador, there seems to be a reluctance to share information in general among institutions that teach English (just my perception, as someone who is somewhat “neutral” in that community of professionals since I have no real boss).  So, as far as having open, participatory environments as defined in the e-book…it’s been difficult.  If social media “thrives on connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people,” that has not yet been successful in my experiences here.  As others said in their postings, many people are unaware of the options available or are unwilling to try them out, so with other than a select few, no one really wants to talk about it.  On the other hand, other binational centers in Latin America have begun to use these tools, so once we have the new computers for the teachers in a few days/weeks, I think we can figure something out.    
  
  

• Are you promoting open participatory skills in ELT? How?
  Whenever we have a teacher training course at my current place of work I try to encourage the participants to use Yahoo Groups to communicate, but many times they struggle even with using email.  We spend time exploring Groups, but it’s been difficult.  With the teachers at the binational center, I’ve talked about using blogs and so on, but then run into the “time” factor.  I don’t have any regular classes at the moment, so I haven’t been able to use many things with students, only with teachers in training.  It’s been the topic of many of my conference presentations in the Central American region.

  In the past, I used blogs with my students in Colombia, but mostly for writing.  Right about the time we started experimenting with video I moved to El Salvador, but it provided a space where they felt comfortable sharing ideas and collaborating.
   

• Can these social media help you? How?
  Right now I’m focused on how social media can help keep English Language Fellows in the region in contact with each other and share resources that they’ve created (so we don’t reinvent the wheel every 10 months—the length of our contracts).  Some of us have connected through Facebook, which has been fairly successful since it’s addictive.  But places to store resources? Conversations that don’t disappear?  Last year we tried a Moodle, forums, and Yahoo groups but many were too difficult to use without training and/or time to play with them.  And then when the moderator(s) disappeared, so did the resources that we’d posted.  I’m still pondering the how in this case.   

This is a great explanation of how Web 2.0 is changing learning….