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.