LAST BUT NOT LEAST.

          It is already ten weeks since we have started this journey through webskills. It has been a very exciting journey which gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about integrating technology in my teaching environment. As a teacher, I have been totally transformed by this course. My complaints about the lack of teaching resources in my school have dwindled. So did my concerns about the lack of motivation and interest of my learners. I now know how to deal with both issue through technology.

        The lessons which I enjoyed most throughout this course are those involving manipulation of webtools. Thus, I felt very comfortable with building a blog and a website, creating powerpoints for engaging learners, publishing items on Padlet, opening a Delicious account, designing worksheets and flashcards with online tools.

        To make the most of what I have learned, I will purchase a slide projector which I will use in class with my laptop. The profits are well worth the purchase of such a tool: it will allow my learners to work engagingly on authentic and quality web resources such as audio, video and e-books. It will also spare me such uncomfortable situations like printing many sheets for each student. This is the unfortunate experience that happened to me during my project implementation. I have also started designing my own PowerPoint presentations to make my lessons more active and to increase interactivity in my classrooms. I will use them with the slide projector.

        I would like to say a big thank you to you Sean, the instructor of the course for your availability and your bearing with my late assignments rendering. The seeds you and the University of Oregon have sown are already yielding fruits here in Côte d’Ivoire. As the Vice-head of the English teaching unit in my school, I have already started sharing what I have learned with my peers. Right now we are implementing teaching listening through authentic texts found on the BBC website.

     

  I would also like to thank the American embassy here in Abidjan for granting me the scholarship which allowed me to follow this course. May all participants in this course (and more particularly Mounira Ben M’RAD , my peer review partner) see their efforts rewarded by a certificate on Webskills.

WEEK 9: MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES AND LEARNING STYLES

         

           This week, I have read Learning and teaching styles in foreign and second language education . I have also read Technology and MultipleIntelligences. I discovered through both articles that Howard Gardner of Harvard university identified different types of intelligences. I have also learned that these different types of intelligences in the class can be addressed through technology. Never before these articles have I heard about different types of intelligences. Not even at the teacher’s training college. My attitude towards my learners is changing since I have read these articles. I am now observing them very closely to see if I can identify their favorites learning styles. However, I am more interested in how to address these different learning styles in my class. Therefore, I have based my final project on technologies which can allow me to address different learning styles.

          My project aims at using technology for finding quality web resources for teaching economic theories. Eslprintables.com allowed me to design flash cards for demonstrating barter in a role play. This warm up activity is aimed at raising the interest of “picture smart” learners in the class at the start of the course in the project. Then I found, with the help of Delicious.com, a printable version of “a new coat for Anna” which I shared to students. Learners who are more sensitive to text based resources will thus understand the concept of barter by associating it with the real life situation presented in the story. The worksheet which accompanies the text has been produced with and has been downloaded from Google Docs Form. It is there for helping  logical learners understand barter through activities which require reasoning and problem solving skills. Finally, in the post reading activity, instead of asking students to write about the difficulties of barter, I will ask them to dramatize in groups the sequence of events which led to the production of Anna’s coat. In this role play project, students will be required to record their own performances with their mobile phones for peer assessment during project preparation. The role play will eventually be performed in front of the class. This will not only reinforce students autonomy, but also engage kinesthetic learners in the class. 

WEEK 8: A step further with the final project

          This week, I have submitted the first draft of my project. I know that it is not perfect . It will require some more work. This is why I agree with the idea of peer review. The feed-back of my partner will allow me to improve it.

I have also enjoyed exploring the different tools presented to us this week. I started by creating a website on Google sites: https://sites.google.com/site/niangthierry/

 It is a basic website with a page for each class of mine. I intend to use it for Just in Time Teaching. I'll post assignments for students to do before the lesson. This will allow me to adapt the objectives of my lessons. I will also use it for home work, which will allow my learners to continue the learning experience at home.

          With Tools for Educators, I have created a worksheet about irregular verbs. It requires students to match irregular verbs with pictures. I uploaded it in the Google Site I created this week: https://sites.google.com/site/niangthierry/1btsfc3/

          I will use it with my first year students in Finance and Accounting. Since they don't like learning lists of irregular verbs by heart, this activity will allow them to learn with fun.

I have also tried Hot Potatoes. This program definitely won my sympathy because it has all the tools for creating exercises and tests, from simple gap filling to complex video based exercises. The teacher can choose to print his exercise on a sheet or edit it as an .exe file to be played off-line. He can also create a webpage with his exercise to play online.  I created a drag and drop exercise to be done online. It is a mathching exercise about numerals. The link is provided in my Googl Site: https://sites.google.com/site/niangthierry/1btsfc3 . It is a good way for engaging beginner learners and motivating them to learn numerals.

          Finally I have had the opportunity to read  Jeff Magoto. His posts about ANVILL, a new web based tool for teaching led me to explore that tool. I think that this tool is good for teaching speaking and listening.

WEEK 7: learner autonomy

          This week I have read an article by Thanasoulas Dimitrios and another one by David Little. Learner autonomy is the main point of their articles. I agree with both authors on one point: autonomy is highly desirable for learners if we want them to be able to use the language independently of teachers and outside the classroom, through life. However, I personally find it difficult to attain for many reasons: here in Africa, culture has always made the master the number one provider of instruction in the process of education. As a result, in most educational institutions, education is carried out vertically with the teacher above, feeding learners underneath. Secondly, curriculums themselves are so designed that they betray this vertical orientation of education. Finally, learners themselves are not prepared for taking charge of their own learning. I notice that every time I ask my learners to write some comments about what they have learned or even what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, they are shocked. Some even confess that they think that this activity is a trap while others view it as a weakness or incompetence of the teacher. The same occurs when I ask learners to form groups in order to work on projects: they want me to help them choose their group partners and even share job or responsibilities within the group. In front of such a situation I agree with David little that “autonomy is not an inborn ability but it can be brought in the learners by making them more responsible”. I think that what I can do to instill more autonomy within my learners is to start talking them into the benefits of autonomy for themselves. Then, as often as possible, I will have them do activities which cultivate autonomy.

          The article “Strategies and applications for the one computer classroom” suggest interesting activities for reinforcing learners’ autonomy with just the teacher’s computer. I am very much interested in group activities because I think that they are suited for large classrooms. With my 1st year students in business management we are currently dealing with the advantages and weaknesses of globalization. As a project I will ask them to write an argumentative article about business and human rights for the website of Amnesty international (www.amnesty.org). This activity will encourage their autonomy because it provides an opportunity of using the language for an authentic purpose (writing an article which will be published for real on a website for potential readers to see). Secondly, my learners will have to go online (using the teacher computer in turn) to retrieve alone the information which they find appropriate for their task. Then, they will have to interact and collaborate within their groups, negotiate meaning, distribute their time and set their own objectives. They will also evaluate their own performance in completing the project. Finally they will have to post the article alone on the website at the end of the project. I will just provide assistance for using the computer, I will organize group rotations for using the computer, and I will allow them to consult me if they face some difficulties. In this way they will become responsible for their own learning.

Week 6 and its engaging assignments

        Engaging students has always been a topic dear to me. It is even one of the main reasons why I registered with this course. I have made very clear from the beginning of this course that my students get easily bored with memorizing vocabulary and learning structures. It is true that our masters at the Teachers Training College taught us ways for engaging students: they taught us that we should avoid “one man shows” (this is how we ironically call teacher centered lessons); that we should vary stimuli; that we should challenge students with summary questions through the course; encourage debates among students; alternate be between the course and worksheet for activities.

        However, reading the articles submitted to us this week allowed me to learn that we can also engage students through technology. I was skeptical at the outset because I found that some of the many suggestions in the articles were just not implementable in my teaching environment because of the lack of time and resources. Interactive PowerPoints for instance require long hours of preparation, though they have a very engaging potential. Besides, slide projectors are not available in my school for using PowerPoints in my large classes. Even in the event of my contriving to purchase my own projector, I can’t rely on electricity supply in every classroom. However, I have just seen on the internet that some smartphones are now fitted with built-in projectors. I am very eager to explore this solution because, after reading the article Bestpractices in presenting with PowerPoint and Howto create an interactive quiz using PowerPoint Masters I have understood that I should no longer overlook PowerPoint If I want to increase students’ engagement in my different classes.

        I learned how to design PowerPoints two years ago through tutorials on line. Unfortunately I have never had the opportunity to use my presentations in class because of my particular teaching situation. Creating myinteractive PowerPoint game this week gave me the opportunity to rediscover my lost reflexes.

screen shot of my interactive powerpoint game.

Today, many websites offer free downloadable PowerPoints for teachers. My favourite is ESLprintables.com : It offers powerpoints about almost any topic. You can search by level, age or content. What I like with ESLprintable is that it is a contribution based site: you need to contribute your own PowerPoints if you want to download others’. If your contributions are not liked, you won’t have points for downloading other teachers’ presentations. As a result, ESLprintables is constantly supplied with quality and original presentations. Besides, new comers are offered tutorialsfor creating attractive presentations. A teacher who has basic skills at creating PowerPoints but who is tight on time can find ideas and inspiration on this site for creating presentations adapted to his own needs.

WEEK 5: HALF THE BATTLE IS WON !

      It is now five weeks since we have started this course on Webskills. I can already say that half the battle is won judging by all that we have learned so far.

      This week I have been acquainted with Alternative Assessment Methods for evaluating my students. I have even created my first rubric for assessing my 2^nd year administrative assistants. I will implement it next week when I ask them to prepare a role-play which they will have to perform in front of their classmates. This is the project they will have to prepare through the study of the text “answering a telephone call”. I have learned that such projects are appropriate for students learning English in vocational schools. They lead students to work on realistic tasks that they will have to perform in professional situations. Hence it is important to allow learners to prepare Project Based Learning activities in the long run. As for the teacher, he should behave like a facilitator, not a master during students’ projects preparation.

      I have also written a reflection about the issues I raised last week concerning my school. Last week, I laid an emphasis on the lack of documents and materials in my school, which makes teaching and learning very difficult task, both for teachers and learners. This week I have made some suggestions on how I intend to use technology to overcome the difficulties my students and I face in the CBCG. I explained that I am going to use the web for finding cheap and quality documents and materials, which will  raise students interest for my English lessons.

WEEK 4: Let's C A L L it a week !

      This week, I have read Larry J Mikulecky's « Using Internet-based Children’s Literature to teach EFL”. Like many classmates, I go along with the writer that there are many profits to be derived from child books. They facilitate comprehension because of their low level and illustrations. They also ease anxiety in the classroom as they give learners a sense of mastery (learners are proud they can read a whole book in English). However I have also read anarticle by Ciaran McCloskey which warns teachers that “children books may appear dull and trite to some adults”. Therefore, the books chosen by teachers should use a language which is slightly above the level of the learners. They must also address mature themes or convey universal messages in order to raise the interest of the learners. For this same reason the teacher must also take into account the cultural context of the book. This exercise of assessing the level and interest of the book may be more difficult for teachers than it seems. One site which could alleviate the task of teachers is “Database of Award-Winning Children’s Literature”  (DAWCL ). I found this site through Delicious.com by searching the tag “children’s_literature”. Thank you Delicious for coming to my rescue again.

      As its name suggests, “Database of Award-winning children’s literature” has over 10 000 titles from 112 awards across 6 English speaking countries in its database. Though it does not give a direct access to these books, the purpose of the site is to help users create reading lists of QUALITY children's literature TAILORED to the needs of the readers. Therefore it offers up to 15 search parameters for users to fine-tune search until they achieve the best search results. You can even go as far as to narrow the search to the sex of the protagonists in the book, to their ethnicity or nationality, to particular keywords or phrases in the book.

screen shot of the search parameters of DAWCL.

       Here is how I personally used this formidable site this week for my 1^st year accountancy students: Right now, I have reached the chapter about MONEY AND BARTER in the syllabus of 1^st year finance and accounting students. Unfortunately many of my students have difficulties understanding the concept of barter. So I decided to look for an award winning child book which level would not be too high for first year students but where the keyword “barter” would be correctly illustrated for them to read at home before the course. I searched with the parameters of DAWCL and it returned a list of 5 child books topped by “A New Coat for Anna” By Ziefert Harriet. It is the story of  Anna, a girl who needs a new coat, but it is after the war and there is no money. Through bartering and patience, Anna and her mother get the girl a new coat, then celebrate Christmas with all the people that helped.

      Since the site does not offer a printable version of the book, I used the search tips suggested by Deborah Healey in her excellent “Better Web Searching” submitted to us by Sean last week. Here is what I found:

v  Aprintable version of "A New Coat For Anna";

v  A video version of "ANew Coat for Anna";
v  A study guide for "A New Coat for Anna"

      Thus, I have been able to gather all the materials I will need for my next week’s lesson. I feel confident now because I have started using technology for enhancing my teaching. Here is the link to the technology enhanced lesson plan I have writen for this book: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzeZhQo9cPgDallwaEc5SXI5QVU/edit?usp=sharing

WEEK3: Making weblinks DELICIOUS

DELICIOUS logo.

      Week3 started badly for me. I had a computer crash in the beginning of the week,  which compelled me to reformat my hard disk drive. I lost many important files in the process and consequently, I have not been able to hand in my midweek assignment on time. Things are slowly falling back into place now, but I have just realized that the loss and its impacts would have been much lower If I had discovered a social bookmarking site like DELICIOUS sooner. So far I was satisfied with saving bookmarks within my web browser. Although I have an account on bitly.com, I would just use it for shortening long weblinks for my personal blog and Twitter.

      What struck me with Delicious is its ease of use. It only took me 5 minutes to create my own page and start saving my first links. I have even been able to import some links from my browser in just three steps. I am now sure that I will never lose a link again: not only do I have an online backup of my bookmarks in case my laptop dies, but also I can access my links from any computer via the web. What I am planning to do now is extend the use of delicious across my school. Therefore, I’ll create a colleague and a student network in my Delicious page in order to add more people.

      With students I want to use Delicious for extending their learning at home. I’ll tag links to assignments or lessons with the name of the different classes (for example AD2 for my second class of executive assistants). Then I will give them the web address to my delicious page (delicious.com/niangthierry) so that they can look through my bookmarks to find the links corresponding to their class. I have also discovered that Delicious offers a possibility to register to specific tags. This feature is great for finding good websites and resources about the topics we study in class. It will spare the students browsing thousands of results suggested by search engines. 

      With my colleagues, I will start sharing links tagged with meaningful names (grammar, vocabulary, writing, for instance). When they feel comfortable using the new tool and start sharing their own links in the same way, I’ll register a Delicious account for the English Teaching Unit of the school. I’ll import into it our shared links. This will allow us to network easily with foreign schools or colleagues owning a delicious page. This form of “cooperation” will eventually allow us to find and retrieve useful websites for improving our teaching. With Delicious we will also be able to view bookmarks from users in our network and communicate in real time with them as well. Right now, I am following Deborah Healey, the author of the excellent tutorials shared by Sean, the instructor of this course. I can see her public links and believe me, she does share excellent links. I am also delighted to announce that I now have my first follower on Delicious. He is a member of our class. I also followed him as soon as I saw him in my network so we can talk about this course and share experience. Delicious actually deserves its name!

WEEK3 Developing listening with authentic materials

      This week I have read an article by Lindsay Miller about Developping Listening Skills with Authentic Materials. The article has changed my attitude about teaching listening. In my school, listening has always been a neglected skill because of the lack of teaching materials and the number of students. On the rare occasions when we venture into teaching listening, we follow the traditional listening method which consists in recording with a tape recorder a dialogue read aloud by two or three colleagues. We then use this material as the text of our listening lesson. A variation of this method consists for the teacher in reading aloud a text with gaps for the students to listen and find the missing words. Our expectation during such listening courses is that listeners should understand every word instead of just the sense of what is implied. Reading Miller’s article allowed me to understand that students can’t remember all the words heard in a listening exercise, but they should be able to remember the main ideas. I was consequently glad to discover the opportunities provided by the web to teachers seeking professional recordings that are suited to listening activities.

      But Miller goes further, suggesting ideas for teaching listening through technological media. The activities which her article suggests are excellent, but need to be adApted instead of adOpted by teachers if the latter want these activities to suit their teaching objectives and operate in their teaching environment.

      What I finally retain from this article is that if our aim is to prepare our learners to use English effectively, we need to develop this important skill which is listening. It is indeed unfair to teach students to speak a language but not to understand it when spoken. Personally, I am going to teach listening on a regular basis from now on. Our masters in the Teachers’ Training College taught us that the more regularly our learners will hear spoken English, the more probable it is that they will be able to understand it. 

      I also advise my peer teachers to expose learners to spoken language as often as possible to improve their listening. Those who cannot or will not use authentic listening texts should, even so, read the article of Lindsay Miller which contains many suggestions for teaching listening with authentic materials.

WEEK2 : Implementing the ABCD objective writing method.

      This second week has been tougher than the first one because I had to deal with an activity I was not familiar with: writing a lesson objective in the ABCD style. In the Teachers’ training college, our masters provided us with a ready-made pattern for writing lesson objectives: “By the end of this lesson the students should be able to + action verb”. We just learned how to adapt this pattern to our different lessons. So it took me a few days to learn the ABCD method from scratch. I went through the articles and links submitted for the week. I even had to call to my rescue some of the search engines provided in noodletools.com. Eventually I found out that all the stuff about Bloom’s Method could be brought back to four (4) simple questions:

 who are your learners (A)?

 what do you expect from them at the end of the lesson (B)?

 how are they going to perform what you expect from them (C)?

and what level of  of achievement must they perform to fulfill this objective (D)?

      With this in mind, I went on applying the method to the learning objective of the essay writing lesson I am currently giving in my executive assistants classes. And this is how I have eventually been able to write the first ABCD style learning objective of my career. Thanks Sean for initiating me and my peers to writing measurable and observable lesson objectives. This is going to make our lessons clearer and consequently more understandable and attractive to our learners. 

WEEK2 : websearching for language learning

     Like many internet users, I have made Google my home page on the different browsers which I currently use. The reason is because Google integrates most of the tools I use today as a teacher. I am so familiar with it that I could barely imagine that there was a life beyond Google. That was before last Monday when Sean, the instructor of this course kicked off the discussion about web searching. I was amazed to discover that Google "...is not the best choice if you are looking for academic resources or other specialized needs". 

     It took me a few days to visit the different alternatives suggested on noodletools.com because I was really spoilt for choice. Eventually, I decided to focus on the section about controversial issues because, right now, I am teaching essay writing in my executive assistant classes. The difficulty with teaching essay writing is to make students understand that they must develop arguments "for" and arguments "against" the same topic. Right now, we are discussing three different topics: globalization, wearing the uniform at school and women going to work. So I decided to search each of the three topics with the different search engines in the controversial issues section. My objective was to find which engine would return the most relevant arguments for and against each topic. Of the three search engines, gleancomparisonsearch.org won my preference for at least four reasons: first, it is the most user friendly search engine I have ever used. It guides the user through the different steps of the search process, which is very important for novice searchers like students. Secondly, it is very flexible as it accepts one word or multi word search queries. But more, the user can even fine tune the results by going beyond the preselected comparison words offered to him. He just need to type his own contrast words in the additional research area. Finally the search results are very clearly presented with pro articles on the left and cons articles on the right. This presentation fully matches the black board presentation adopted by teachers in class. Last but not least, the results are relevant and redirect learners to renowned websites where they can go further with the topic. Here are the reasons why I am going to advise gleancomparisonsearch.org to my students.

     The lesson I draw from this week's discussion is that the essential thing for a teacher is not to know everything but to know where to find what he needs. Therefore the good teacher must have both an overview and a good control of search engines in order to choose the ones which best satisfy his needs. Finally, I would recommend teachthought.com to my fellows. it is not a search engine but a website which abounds with very relevant articles about teaching and technology. The articles are synthesised from search engines and are presented under the form of numbered paragraphs, which makes the reading easy.

WEEK 1: Turning a blog into a language learning tool.

      I am a heavy user of Blogger. This is the platform where I set up my  personal blog two years ago. I created it and I still manage it today because at a given moment in my life, I felt the impulse to express my personal thoughts about Ivorian talented people who are scarcely mentioned in media. Therefore, my blogging was limited to expressing personal thoughts throughout these two years. I have never realized that blogs could be used as language learning tools. That is why I was very surprised when Sean, the instructor of this course warned us that each participant would have to create a blog.

      I set to work as soon as the instructions for creating a reflective  blog for this course have been published. I have not had much problem because I decided to keep my blog as simple as possible in order not to confuse students or colleagues who would like to refer to it. I just made the sharing modules below each post more conspicuous to allow those who are more familiar with social networks to share posts and contents more easily. I also provided a list of the main links of this course in the right side bar because I am still a little confused about all these different platforms. So, keeping them handy spares me the boring task of going everytime to my email to look for the appropriate links . Finally, I added a list of  blogs run by my peer teachers following this course. This allows me to see what the latter are pushing in real time without passing by the blog roll on the class wiki. Thus, it is easier for me  to react to their posts and interact with them , which is vividly recommended by the instructor.

       Althoug the creation process went on smoothly, my major concern was about how to turn my brand new blog (lool!) into a teaching tool. That is where this link provided by Sean came in handy. Reading it and visiting the blogs it gives as examples gave me some insights into how blogs could be used for class purposes. The samples of reflective blogs on the website of the course also gave me some ideas on how to make the most of my blog for class purpose. To match the action to the act, I started by leading some investigations among my students. I asked them:

      - if they had ever heard of blogs,

      -if they owned blogs,

      -If they knew how to build a blog,

      -if they were interested into using blogs for their courses.

My administrative assistant students.

      I found out that most of them have never heard of  blogs and none of them owns a blog. Most of them are interested in creating their own blogs, but are not skilled enough for that. The main lesson I eventually drew from this enquiry is that in my situation the most appropriate solution would be a teacher’s blog, that is, a blog where I am going to give students instructions concerning my courses , where I am going to leave assignments and homeworks, where I am going to give links to online resources to allow students to go further with courses. 
      The outcome of my reflections is the blog you are reading now.

HELLO !

      I am Niangoran Thierry Martial from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. I currently teach ESP in a public professional high school (CBCG Cocody).

      I have been posted in this school by the ministry for professional education after my graduation from the national teachers’ training college (ENS) in 2002.

My school the CBCG of COCODY, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa.

       I teach English for business and management, for finance and accounting, for transport and transit, for tourism and leisure, for executive secretaries. My students are teenagers aged between 15 and 25. French is their main language and most of them are preparing the national professional certificate (BTS). I also teach adults and workers preparing the BTS in the continued education section of the CBCG twice every week, in the evening.  

       My classes are large, with about 50 students in each. There are no air conditioner in the classes which are consequently very hot and the main teaching tools are black boards and chalk. The administration has just set up a little cyber-coffee to allow students to cope with the lack of documents. 
      However, despite these difficult conditions, I love my job as a teacher because I believe with Nelson Mandela that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.

My expectation while taking this course is to learn how to lead changes for the introduction of ICTs in English teaching practices in my school.  As a teacher, I can see that nowadays, most teachers and students in my school have access to the internet through cyber-coffees but also through mobile phones which have a lot of success in Côte d’Ivoire. I want to learn how best we might use these innovative tools to support and improve learning in our large classes where it is getting more and more difficult to arouse students’ interest through memorization of vocabulary and learning of structures.