Website Evaluation 1: The Teacher James

This week in class, we’re doing an evaluation of a website or software program. This first evaluation (of two, according to the syllabus) is supposed to be of a “language learning blog.” Now, I read a lot of blogs, but most of them are about teaching in general, tech tools for education, or reflective practice. Only a few of my regulars directly relate to learning a language. One of my favorites is The Teacher James (http://www.theteacherjames.com). Full disclosure: It’s written by my friend James, who has been very active in teacher training, professional development, and TEFL in Brazil, Korea, Belgium, and—most recently—Costa Rica. We did our CELTA together in Seoul back in 2009, and I’ve been following his blog ever since.

The evaluation I turned in is below; I’m including the questions for reference, on the off-chance that someone not in the course stops by this blog and wonders what might have been asked. They also provide handy breaks that make this a little more readable, I think. (And if you’re actually James stopping by—well, I hope I accurately represented your blog!)

Software/Website Title: The Teacher James

Website URL: http://www.theteacherjames.com/

Grade/Age Level: high school through adult

Language & Content:

1)    What is the intended purpose of the software or website?

The goal is to share teaching ideas, lesson and activity suggestions, and reflections on TEFL. Target audience: EFL/ESL teachers

2)    What is the content of the software or website and how is it presented?

This blog contains the reflections, insights, and teaching ideas of an EFL teacher in Costa Rica. It’s presented as blog posts, which are uploaded at random intervals, sometimes in conjunction with or in reference to a topic raised in #eltchat or another online ELT community. It also occasionally features guest bloggers.

3)    What external documents (some guides) does the software or website include? Are they effective?

The author frequently includes external links to articles, websites, lesson plans, videos, #eltchat topics/discussants, and more. It’s easy to find his source material or to read more about the topic he’s discussing.

4)    In what ways is the software or website interesting to the target audience?

The author has a variety of interesting insights and clever ideas for lessons. See “Strengths” (#8), below, for details.

5)    For what language goal(s) is this software or website useful/effective?

The lesson ideas shared in this blog tend to be primarily fluency-focused. The activities described run the gamut, covering all four skills.

6)    Does this program or website offer practice? Assessment? Feedback? Of what kinds? (give examples)

No. It’s a blog aimed at EFL teachers. No practice, assessment, or feedback is necessary.

7)    Is this software or website easy to use? (i.e., navigation, layout, etc.)

Yes, it’s quite easy to navigate this blog; see below for details.

8)    What are the strengths of this software or website?

* This blog is a bit easier to navigate than many of the other teaching blogs I follow. There’s a handy list of links at the top (“My ELT Blogroll,” “About Me,” etc.); and in the right-hand column, there’s a word cloud of key words, a search bar, and a list of popular posts. Previews of the most recent posts are offered, so readers can easily skim and decide which posts they’d like to peruse in greater detail.

* While I don’t always agree with the author or his teaching style, his posts are great for inspiring new, spin-off ideas; for example, his “Silent Movies” series of posts made me think about exactly how I was using authentic video in my classroom, how my style was different from his, and how the strengths of his approach might be integrated into my own classroom. (I also liked many of the videos he included!)

* As mentioned above, original sources, additional links, etc., are thoughtfully provided.

* The author is very receptive to feedback, and he usually takes the time to reply to comments on his blog. Occasionally, some interesting conversations take place in the comment threads.

* Really, as much as I love this blog’s lesson-sharing and reflections on teaching, I think its biggest strength is the enthusiasm it radiates for professional development through reflective practice and personal learning networks (PLNs). “Write about your experiences,” it seems to urge, “then share them with others! Let’s learn from each other!” In fact, it was because of this blog that I first started using Twitter to create a PLN, and my first teaching blog (not the one for this class) was a direct result of the author’s encouragement.

I think other language teachers will enjoy this blog for its lesson ideas, and they’ll appreciate the author’s recommendations for articles and other blogs to follow. Soon, they might even find themselves inspired to share their own lesson ideas and thoughts on teaching!

9)    How can this software or website be improved?

Format-wise, from a language teacher’s perspective, I’m not sure the links at the top of the page are the most effective way to organize the information. The choices currently listed there are probably not the options language teachers are most interested in. The blog might be more helpful for this audience if the posts were grouped by topic (e.g., “Lesson & Activity Ideas,” “Dogme Style,” “Using Videos,” etc.), and then these topics were listed at the top of the page (or perhaps in a drop-down menu), making the information more visible and accessible. (Perhaps the provided word cloud obviates the need to group topics this way, though.)

Content-wise, I wouldn’t mind seeing additional reflections on lessons he’s done—and additional lesson details, for that matter. I also wish the author would post more frequently! He’s been averaging once a month for the past year, but he used to post every other week. It’s his own blog, though, and I’m sure he writes as frequently as he can, about whatever topic is motivating him to write.

How Can Tech Tools Increase Interaction?

This week's discussion topic is huge--like, spend-a-semester-talking-about-it huge: "How can the strategies and activities that you're already using or are familiar with be adapted to encourage students' participation in interaction with peers? How can technology use support this?" 

Actually, this was pretty much exactly what we did in R503 last summer: investigate tech tools and consider how we could apply them to lessons. This past fall, I took the knowledge from this course and applied it to an advanced English conversation course I've been teaching every fall for the past five years. Where students previously made posters or just discussed a topic, we now made multimodal advertisements (Animoto.com), interactive sticky-note boards (Padlet.com), or more dynamic and eye-catching posters (Smore.com); where the textbook had students fill in gaps to practice past continuous, we now wrote and illustrated stories online (DC Comics Builder, Tell-a-Story StoryBuilder).  

What I discovered was that integrating technology didn't exactly lead to increased interaction in the way I had hoped. I expected that these tech tools would provide students with an excuse not only to practice the target language but also to use authentic meta-language as they discussed their project's details. To an extent, I was right: projects done in pairs or small groups led to this kind of spoken interaction, right there in the classroom. These projects elicited lots of negotiation of meaning and peer teaching as students discussed what to write or say, and lots of meta-language as students experimented with and evaluated options provided by the tech tool. BUT if students were given the option of working alone, the computer room would often be silent; when given a choice, most students elected to work solo.

At first, I was discouraged. Were the tech tools actually detracting from interaction? Students were using the language, true; but they weren't interacting. Then I realized that tech, itself, had provided a solution for this problem. Students were posting their completed projects on our class Facebook page--and that's where the interaction was taking place. The discussion I sought was still happening, to an extent; it was just freed from the boundaries of time and space as students commented on each other's projects or asked questions from the comfort of their own home, in their own time. 

The next time I teach this class, I'll be sure to more carefully balance pair/group projects and individual projects, so there's more of an even distribution of spoken and written, synchronous and asynchronous, interaction; and I might make online interaction a part of students' participation grade. But overall, I really loved the way tech tools both provided an excuse for interaction and also freed interaction from the boundaries of the classroom!

Oh, and to get back to the initial question: I can see how message boards (including class ones, such as those at Collaborize Classroom), social networking sites, Skype, instant messaging, collaborative online sticky-note boards, collaborative projects via Google Drive, etc., have a lot of potential to promote student interaction by removing the limitations of time and space. Students can work together or communicate anytime, anywhere! But apart from Google Drive and Facebook, I don't really use these options for interaction outside of class. My students are generally overcommitted, as it is, so I don't assign homework, per se. Instead, my students just have to use English outside of class for a minimum of 25 hours over the course of the semester. So far, writing book reviews and sharing them in a class doc on Google Drive, and commenting on classmates'  projects via Facebook have proven among the more popular tech-based options, promoting asynchronous (written) interaction that often carries over into classroom conversations.

So… this is my new blog, specifically created for a grad school class on CALL. It feels weird to have my reflections for this class shared so publicly; but here we go! ^^

This week in class, we read a couple of overviews of CALL: what it includes, what the future holds, etc. Unfortunately, both articles were from 2009; and while they were great overviews, they also felt a little dated already. For example, one article by Mike Levy (2009) included explanations of tech tools that are pretty mainstream today, such as podcasts, SMS (text messages), wikis, and blogs. This elaboration would be very helpful to someone like my mother (who--no kidding--didn't realize the triangle button on her DVD player meant "play"), but I suspect most teachers today are familiar with these terms. The studies it referenced also felt out of date; for example, in citing a 2007 study on student use of either cell phones or computers to complete vocabulary learning tasks, Levy notes, "[T]the student access log data clearly showed a preference for the computer over the phone" (772). This preference probably depends a lot on the kind of information being accessed and the tasks performed; but overall, I'd expect that students today would show a marked preference for their phones over computers. I suppose this just goes to show that even cutting-edge articles on tech tools will soon be out of date in the ever-evolving world of technology! The author of the other article, Philip Hubbard (2009), wouldn't be surprised by this; he, himself, writes, "[E]ven the newest material in the volumes in this set will be in a sense obsolete by the time readers encounter it" (15). Indeed! We students of edtech will have to keep on our toes.

I did enjoy the articles, however. I especially appreciated Levy's insight that "writing" now encompasses a wide variety of media: "[T]he sense in which [writing, as a skill,] is understood has broadened, reflecting contemporary thinking in multiliteracies and the combination of the word and the image in the creation of multimodal texts" (773). This, to me, is one amazing way in which tech tools are key to this game-changing reconceptualization. There is no longer one way to be "literate"; there are many new ways in which to "write"; and tech tools can provide the brilliant ink for students' metaphorical new pens. 

In the language classroom, it's very easy to integrate writing without belaboring it as such. For example, my advanced English conversation students last term created "Wanted" posters using Smore (www.smore.com) and used Animoto (animoto.com) to create advertisements for tours they had designed. This use of tech tools to integrate images and words enlists a variety higher-order thinking skills and provides students with an excuse to use language in an authentic manner--both for discussion about the project and in the project, itself.

Hubbard's article, meanwhile, identified a multitude of ways in which CALL can lead to improvement--perhaps not to "improving language directly . . . but rather to improving the learning conditions in some fashion" (2). A few areas that might be improved by CALL, he writes, include learning efficiency and effectiveness (learners acquire language knowledge more easily or quickly, and retain it longer), access, convenience, motivation, and institutional efficiency. 

I love this way of looking at it. It expands the definition of improvement beyond levels that are concrete and that can be assessed, to include elements that are more amorphous and difficult to measure but that nonetheless are vital to learning. This might not satisfy administrators who are looking for solid numbers to justify tech integration in schools, but I appreciate Hubbard's recognition that "improvement" goes beyond the obvious to include a wide variety of possibilities.

It also speaks to my experiences integrating tech tools into a conversation class last fall: though my students' test scores weren't noticeably higher than previous years' students, their motivation seemed higher; some of them used tech tools such as Facebook, Twitter, or Animoto to practice English in their spare time; and Google Docs made it much easier for me to share feedback and keep track of how much time they spent practicing English outside of class. Their long-term retention, meanwhile, is something that might be worth investigating in the future.