Learning technology: Just do it… today!
Posted on | February 5, 2012 | 1 Comment
A kid came to school the other day wearing a "Just do it… tomorrow" T-shirt. The first task I suggested yesterday in my talk at the IH Barcelona ELT Conference was intended for those teachers who don't feel very confident that they can use technology; the paraphrased "quotation" I suggested for them was "Just do it… today!".
The task
Take any piece of technology and teach yourself how to use it… properly!
Commentary
Technology isn't going to go away, it's only going to become more important, your learners are only going to become more technologically savvy, so if you're not that confident, get confident, by doing one of the following, or something similar. Believe me, I wouldn't suggest them if they weren't in fact easy.
- Learn to use a digital camera (or the camera on your phone) and take photo a day for 365 days;
- Photograph your breakfast every day (Pixlr Express is a wonderful tool for some quick and easy editing, which will improve your photos, give you greater satisfaction… and self confidence;
- Create yourself a blog and save quotations you come across on it (for blogging, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr are all really easy to learn to use);
- Blog your Mum’s recipes (she's probably got them on scraps of paper in a notebook, if she's like my Mum);
- Do both things: learn to take decent photos and set up a blog, and include your breakfast photos (or whatever hobbies you have)
- Start a blog for reflecting on your teaching (which you can make totally private; share with a colleague; share with several colleagues… or with the whole world if you prefer [here's how with Blogger]);
- Digitally audio record your own children (especially fascinating if you're a language teacher and you start when they are very small and still learning their own language); for tools, SoundCloud, Vocaroo and Voicethread are great places to begin; for recording, Audacity is also a great program, though it has a steeper learning curve;
- Post the audio on a blog (share it with your Mum, etc); if you want to use a blog for posting audio (aka podcasting), I'd recommend Posterous or Tumblr, not Blogger, as you will find that they make it easier to post the audio files.
What you'll get for the time you invest is a little knowledge and a great deal of confidence that you too can use technology. If you don't think you can, it's confidence, not knowledge that you really want.
The operative word in my task is "properly": it's not enough to point and click with your camera: you actually want to take better pictures, ones to be proud of, for which you'll need to find out what else you can do with it, what all the buttons and menus do, what all the options are (for which I can highly recommend the tutorials on Digital Photography School).
The idea is not that you do things for class; though, in teaching yourself, some of the wonderful things you could do with photography or blogging (etc) are certain to occur to you.
Technology in 10 quotations
Posted on | February 3, 2012 | No Comments
Back in 1977, when I started at University, I started to collect quotations, something which I done ever since. I've picked them up from wherever I found them, originally books and records, TV programmes and the radio, latterly from the Internet, particularly blogs and, sometimes, from things my teachers said to me.
The human brain has a limited capacity to retain information and it's impossible to absorb everything: it was impossible when I used to sit through hour-long lectures and is impossible (more so, perhaps) today when the Internet brings us so much new information every hour of the day.
Technology is very much a question of learning by doing, but in my experience it's also been a question of what I call learning by soundbite: picking up and isolating those things which seem in some way significant and which help make sense of the otherwise overwhelming amount of information coming at us.
At the IH Barcelona ELT Conference tomorrow, I'm giving a talk entitled Technology in 10 quotations in which I'll be picking out some of the quotations from a variety of sources that have guided how I've been using technology in the last 15 or so years.
Over the next week or so, I'll be posting the quotations here, along with the tasks that I'll be illustrating the quotations with.
Technology: it's all a question of (the teacher's) attitude
Posted on | February 3, 2012 | No Comments
This is one of my favourite quotations, though it's one I cut out of my conference talk for lack of time.
Using classroom technology successfully (ie. that it produces lots of learning) doesn't depend on the equipment available; it doesn't depend on having a lot of knowledge about technology; it depends first and foremost on the teacher having a positive attitude, on thinking (on believing!) that technology can and will work for them.
I also cut from my talk, because I already had two quotations by him, Doug Johnson's 4 A's of designing technology-enhanced projects:
- Assignments that matter
- Activities that involve
- Assessments that help
- (Teacher) Attitude is all
The end of the free Picnik
Posted on | January 24, 2012 | 1 Comment
Unless you happen to be OK with throwing all your eggs into the Google basket, this is bad news: Picnik, the fabulous online image-editing software is shortly (April 19) to become only accessible via Google+.
That's bad news because it was a great tool for getting students to edit the digital images that they'd taken, which was great for project work.
Now, they'll either have to head over to Google+ or else just steal someone else's images from Google-is-Evil… which doesn't make for good project work.
In such cases, I'm always glad of alternativeto.net, which is a great site for finding alternatives to Picnik and other software of all sorts.
I really like the look of Pixlr as an alternative to Picnik, and will be trying that out rather than surrendering further to the Evil Empire.
Giving up on Twitter
Posted on | January 23, 2012 | 4 Comments
Prueba que eres humano: prove that you're human… I just did!
I've decided to give up on Twitter. I never used it a lot and found that the really good things (Life.com, for example), the stuff that was actually useful to me in class, in some cases I was already following by mail or RSS or Tumblr.
What pushed me over the age was needing to re-enter my logín details and being unable to remember my password. "Prove that you're human," Twitter told me when I clicked the "remind me of my password" link (screenshot, above).
You get two choices: either the two CAPTCHA words you have to type out, at least one of which (no matter how many times you refresh it) is always totally incomprehensible; or the audio version, which is so utterly incomprehensible that failure to comprend it proves irrefutably that you are indeed human… but won't get you back into Twitter.
Hm. Let me try the "Contact details", see if I can actually talk to, or email, another human being at Twitter.
Actually, not.
Ah, forget it. My life could do with a bit less information anyway.
IH Barcelona's 2012 ELT Conference (Feb. 3-4)
Posted on | January 12, 2012 | No Comments
IH Barcelona's annual ELT Conference is coming up fast if you've not yet enrolled for it. It's February 3rd and 4th and this year has a particularly great line-up of speakers for its plenaries and workshop sessions. Scott Thornbury and Carol Read are two personal favourite speakers, but there are also sessions with Jeremy Harmer, Luke Meddings, Antonia Clare, Philip Kerr, Adrian Underhill, Nicky Hockly, Graham Stanley and a host of others.
You won't see particular tracks marked as such on the full program, but if you have an interest in teaching young learners, business English or technology, the program is designed to allow you to focus on specific interests.
New Blogger videos added
Posted on | November 30, 2011 | Comments Off
A series of new videos has been added to Blogger's YouTube channel which will be of interest to anyone starting out with Blogger (or to anyone who's not used it for some time and is now seeing an updated interface.
The one embedded above was in fact published back in March this year but new on their channel today are the following:
- How to publish a blog post (which starts you right at the beginning)
- How to create and edit pages (which aren't the same thing as posts)
- Choose who can read and edit your blog (important if you want to maintain privacy)
- Manage comments on your blog (which you want to do in order to cut out spam or anything else undesirable)
- Import and export your blog (which, like the others, could have done with a voiceover)
People will tell you that WordPress is better than Blogger but, from experience of teaching people to blog, I'd say that most people find Blogger easier, at least for their first blog.
YouTube (because it shows you how things are done) is a great place to learn how to use technology!
How many slaves work for you?
Posted on | November 18, 2011 | 1 Comment
This is one I got from the wonderful Larry Ferlazzo, and which worked great in class with a small group of (7) intermediate adults.
Essentially what we did was, together ("whole class"), work through the questions on how many slaves work for you on the site Larry recommended, negotiating our collective answer in each case, rather than doing it individually or in pairs. Doing so, and having to agree on an answer for the group as a whole, gave rise to a lot of discussion and language use (which, in a language class, was after all the point of the exercise).
In comparison, we actually made very little use of technology (we were using an interactive whiteboard, which strictly speaking wasn't necessary).
In the image shown, my own result, not that we agreed on (which was embarrassingly high!).
What you can do with mobile phones
Posted on | November 14, 2011 | 3 Comments
Among the sessions at the Macmillan Online Conference last week there was an excellent one, packed with practical ideas, by Lindsay Clandfield: 10 mlearning activities for language teachers.
mLearning? You know: with mobile phones.
If you have a classful of teens (or adults!) who'd much rather be playing with their phones than listening to you, or if you've ever wondered how you could exploit the technology now in your learners' pockets and handbags, watch the recording of the session and find out.
Getting lots out of next to nothing
Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 2 Comments
My son (thanks Toni!) just sent me the above video, which might be fun in class.
As a general rule, I like to see how much I can get out of how little material (in this case a 1'39" video clip) and how little technology I can use.
Even without playing the clip, I reckon you could get a lot out of asking what people would do in the situation: in a 150-seat movie theatre, there are 148 serious bikers and just two seats left, right in the middle, for you and your partner. Would you sit down?
You might want to download the clip in order to be able to partially hide the fact that it's an ad (keepvid.com is what I use for that).
If you had an interactive whiteboard, you could download the clip and embed it on a page, which would also conceal the fact that it's an ad (other cool ways it can be done, from Richard Byrne).
With an IWB, you could also use your camera tool to capture stills from the clip, which would be an easy way to set the context. Note that only the first 30 seconds of the video will also set the context nicely before you watch the rest, with a discussion stage before you do so.
After using YouTube clips in class, I always like to share the clips via an Edmodo group. With ads, either there or in class, the question of whether or not it's a good ad and why (not) is always fruitful for discussion, and Edmodo gives your learners somewhere they can share (and comment on) further ads, possibly ones they like more.
• Another clip (thanks Natxo!): Dylan Ratigan getting worked up about the US economy. Hard to understand but, with adults at quite a high level, how much of the gist can your learners get? Can they then explain it coherently themselves. They already know what the problem is!
Infographics on the IWB
Posted on | November 3, 2011 | Comments Off
I loved this idea on OUP's ELT Global Blog: using infographics in class, with coolinfographics.com being suggested as an excellent source.
Because they're so quick and easy to import using the "camera" tool, infographics work great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB).
What I'd then want my learners to do would be to produce their own infographics. Creating forms for questionnaires using Google Docs is one easy way they can collect their information. The results automatically come in charts… which can then be imported to displayed on the IWB as part an oral presentation.
• Just in case | Er, sorry: What are infographics?
Fun video activity for Halloween
Posted on | October 29, 2011 | Comments Off
Here's one for you if you've got class on Monday, Halloween.
I love this activity as it's so simple, requires so little in the way of preparation, and (assuming you've picked a good clip for it) always generates lots of interaction between the learners.
The idea has been around a long time, since the days of VCRs (video, that is), when that was "new technology". All you have to do is pair your students and have one person in each pair sit with their backs to the screen, while their partner provides a running commentary on what is happening. If you get them to agree on the "script" before a second viewing for everyone, you'll double the interaction your material leads to.
If you have an interactive whiteboard, it works well with that, too.
Try this one full screen, with the volume turned up and the lights off! It doesn't bother me that my learners are with me to learn English and the soundtrack is in Spanish.
keep looking »