Shaun Wilden's Blog

As someone who works a lot online I have always been a fan of screen recording. I run a number of moodle sites for both asynchronous learning and for collaborative projects and have found that screen recordings can give these VLEs the ‘personal’ touch participants often find lacking in the online environment.  I tend to use Jing, which you can download and use for free though there is a pro account that costs a small fee. I discovered it sometime last year and have been a fan ever since. I have been doing a lot of screen recording this week and it reminded me how much I love using it. I have other recording programs such as Camtasia but as good as they I seem to default to jing whenever I need to record something. It’s especially useful for sharing and embedding as it creates the links for you – you simply need to pass on the link to whoever needs it and they can view the recording.

Typically I utilise screen recording for

1. Tutorial videos - providing simple walkthroughs of how a course site works, how to upload and and so on.
2. Problem solving – when a participant has a problem – anything from how to do something through to confidence issues, we used to simply email back a reply. Now we can simply record a response and send back the link, adding the visual element I think really bolsters confidence, adds clarity and makes the whole process more personalised for the participant, which leads me to the third use and for me the most the eye opening.

Giving feedback via screen recording. This has been something of a revelation for me. I first came across the idea in a session given by Russell Stannard and was able to give it a go during an exam preparation course that some teachers were doing online for the delta 1 exam.  Each module of the course deals with one of the exam questions and culminates in the participant tackling a sample question.

Previously I would have used the comment function on word along with features of moodle to give the participant feedback. There is nothing wrong with this but comments can be misinterpreted or come across unclear to the reader. In a face-to-face course you can sit down with the participant and talk through work. Online you could of course do this via the Internet but often time zones and teaching schedules can make this difficult to achieve. And in any case the screen recording has the advantage of permanency so the participant can go back to listen again at their leisure or when they are ready to review the particular question.

So during this course rather than providing written feedback I used screen recording. I displayed the candidates work on the screen and recorded myself going through the work, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each answer and where relevant displaying a model answer next to it and making comparisons. Not only does it make the whole process clearer for the participant but means you can also really highlight areas of excellence and weakness – I think the fact the participant can hear it adds an emphasis / tone of encouragement that the written word does not always convey. Once I had recorded the assessment of their answer, I simply sent them the link to it.

I also used screen recording to make an overall feedback summary to the whole course especially good for highlighting common errors and weaknesses.

I think over the course I got better and more effective recording the feedback, certainly at the beginning it was more time consuming than typing feedback but then again most things new take some time to get used to.

At the end if course I added a question to feedback to find out if the participants reaction to receiving feedback in this way. The overall response was extremely positive – here are a couple of replies:

“I found the screen-recorded feedback more useful and helpful than written feedback.”

“I think this is a great way of giving feedback and will use this method with my own students”

The last comment shows how this technique is not exclusive to teacher training courses but is something that most students of English will benefit from and indeed I know many teachers in the online community who record their feedback for students. I am extremely keen to add screen recording to all our courses as a way of giving feedback on submitted work. I also want to try out other techniques such using it for task setting and when I next teach some students I hope to be able to try many more of the ideas on that Russell has come up with.

The World Cup starts today hurrah four weeks of football and a clear excuse to do football related lessons. As such there have been a lot of resources tweeted about over the last few days. So here’s a list of those links, starting with the excellent free resource site provided by @esolcourses

Quizzes and worksheets for elementary and beginners

English words for countries and nationalities

World Cup 2010 English and Numeracy Games and Quizzes

Sean Barnville’s Breaking news site will be having daily World Cup skills lessons

The British Council are bringing us the premier skills website throughout the cup which promises videos, games and blogs

While the BBC Learning English sit is the place to go for football vocabulary and here for some football idioms

If that’s not enough to keep you going then the esl-library has a lesson plan for you My English Club Blog has a myriad of other things and Larry Ferlazzo provides you with more links here

Enjoy the football

Shaun

Last week I was in Lisbon taking part in a training of trainers week organised by Oxford University Press. The training week was very intense and could have lead to blog posts on many subjects but I’ve chosen a theme that caused me such puzzlement throughout the week.

One of my roles was to pilot some material we have written for a training course we are putting together on technology. As such on one of the days we asked the group to bring their laptops to the training room (not that this was an unusual request as a few of us always have them with us to use in sessions). This group has over 350 years of training experience between us so discussions were often long and thought provoking. On the day most of the group had their laptops a spontaneous discussion broke out over the fact people’s face were obscured behind the screen – the discussion being about what if these were students?

As the week went on it seemed that there was more and more consternation over some of us using our laptops in sessions, even leading to a night when one trainer asked us ‘Is it ok to tell people to close their laptops in sessions’. My answer to that is yes the same way we ask students to shut their books etc but I would expect them to be shut for a purpose.

We tried to explain that these days we use laptops to take notes, instead of paper but despite our assurances there seemed to be a level of paranoia over computer use which permeated through the week.

So I am confused, why the distrust of computer users? Why are people so anti them in training sessions or classes? (Bear in mind this was a closed training group NOT a conference so there was no tweeting of peoples’ sessions – something which can worry some speakers). It seems to me that by holding such views we are not accounting for the different way people learn or accepting that the people in the classroom (on either side of the teacher’s desk) are from a generation younger than our own.

Thinking back about the week (and asking my computer-using colleagues), we used our computers to:

- take notes on word (in place of pen and paper)

- take notes via mind-mapping

- look something up on google (related to things in sessions when we didn’t know words, the source of something and so on)

- collect information that we could then send to our colleagues via email

- pass notes (sending the occasional direct message via twitter)

- the occasional distraction (looking at our emails, blogs and so on)

What strikes me about this list is that that most of these things would take place without a laptop:

Students take notes, students pass notes (usually with far more commotion than a direct tweet) so how is the use of a laptop any more of a distraction? To say the laptop makes more of a distraction is simply not true – a distracted student is always a distracted student. In fact those times when I was looking at my email, I was being quietly distracted which I find much better than the little chats that break out by those neither engaged nor able to look at a computer screen. Here I reminded of a quote from Tom Whitby on twitter last week:

“If educators find their lectures are competing with Laptop distractions why ban laptops? Why not Ban Boring Lectures? Look to the lesson!”

Without laptops we can collect info, usually followed by some photocopying and it being passed around so if anything the laptop has helped make this a more time-efficient and effective way of sharing. This is certainly true of being to look things up – ok, a dictionary at hand gives me the ability to look up a word but with google my ability to look up is increased beyond measure.

This leaves us with the somewhat spurious allegations that those looking at our screens are not concentrating 100 percent or even more curious that it is impeding our ability to take part in discussions!

One final thing of note, in the breaks most people were happy to check their emails and go online, showing an acceptance of technology in the personal life but not yet able to see it as part of a learning life. Is this because our role as teachers / trainers is influenced by our experiences as learners? If not, what is it that they find unacceptable about laptops in sessions or classes?

I am genuinely curious, am I now so tech-centred now that I am missing something that is so fundamentally pedagogically unsound about their use? Or is that I am so lacking in social etiquette?

I very much prescribe to the view of each to their own so if a student is more comfortable using their laptop to paper so be it. I’ll leave you with this video from Joespicado’s youtube channel and look forward to you all putting me straight.

Looking through recent bookmarks I notice that I seem to have accrued a lot of photo-related ones. Perhaps I am just obsessed with photo apps (see earlier postings on the use of jigzone and pixuffle)

Three that I seem to have been using most recently in training sessions and talks are :

Fotobabble, which has been blogged about quite a bit. I have been using it as a way to personalize training talks, snap a photo of the place I am in, record a description of it and use it to exemplify how this can be used for speaking and listening practice.   I see this is a great way for students to increase their own speaking and listening practice.  Students upload a picture, describe it and there are a number of ways they can use it  – exam students can get feedback on their picture describing skills, students can create listening exercises for each other i.e. create a set of questions they share with class mates which then listen and answer.  Though of course they could simply describe things for fun with no need for a task, just for sharing and community building.

This one I a made for a training session in Padova, Italy as an example:

I’ve also become a fan of blabberize.  This, for want of a better analogy is the photo equivalent of voki.  Basically any photo you upload can be given a mouth, you record what you want to say then when you press play it animates the photo. I think it can be a fun exercise for students to mess around with, a motivating way to get students to play with language. Here is one I made for my marmite metaphor in a recent talk.

Thirdly, there is befunky which allows you to edit photos, personally I enjoy making cartoons out of them and though there are plenty of sites for cartoon stories, I like the fact you can use this along with photo babble – go to Befunky first, make the alterations then upload that to fotobable and say what you’ve done and why. This is a photo from IATEFL that I turned into a cartoon.

Anyway since I am only training and not teaching at the moment I can only give reactions based on training but they have been wholly popular so I hope you can get as much fun out of them.

Shaun

This is a version of the talk i did at  IATEFL on Saturday. The powerpoint is the same, I just sat and screen recorded myself this morning. It is about 30 minutes long as I edited bits and could not include the video clips I had in the talk. There is also a bit of a clumsy edit in part three for timing reasons. The websites I used for the talk follow the videos. Enjoy and if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment.

Making Digital Sense in the Classroom Part One

Part Two

Part 3

References:
These are the references and websites referred to in the talk:
The quotes are from various blogs:

http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/content/seven-deadly-sins-e-learning

http://www.eqa.edu.au/site/aninteractivewhiteboardwhatnext.html

http://shaunwilden.com/40-reasons-teachers-use-technology/

http://marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org/2009/11/28/dont-forget-the-peda…

The other quotes were taken from:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/ (episode 2)

From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education by Mark Pegrum University of Washington Press

The Origin of the species by Charles Darwin

The Ray Clifford Quote is taken from a session title at the virtual rountable conference last year.

Websites used:

Wikipedia.org

Blabberize.com

Wordle.net

Xtranormal.com – the ‘interview’ is http://shaunwilden.com/?P3QYa01Z

Glogster.com

Superteachertools (for the ‘millionaire’)

Youtube.com – (The Ferris Bueller Clip is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWzMyKSIbFY&feature=related)

Finally the questionnaire results are from a survey undertaken by OUP in America

Back at the hotel after a great first day of IATEFL. Apologies if you follow me on twitter and got inundated with tweets, I use twitter to collect my notes from talks (I used to simply type them in word but now I can type, collect and share.)

Just looking back over all the tweets now, there’s no surprise that most of my day was attending the tech-related talks.  However the day started with a plenary on The Professional Life Cycles of Teachers and this gave a insightful overview of the stages we go through from the initial enthusiasm of our career through to ‘serene and conservative’ latter stages and apparently in 4 more years I reach ‘veteran’ status.

The first of the tech sessions given by Nicky Hockley really brought it home to me how much kids have embraced technology (when they have access to it, of course). This was illustrated with videos showing how kids use their camera phones and windows moviemaker.  Other examples of showed how school kinds (of 8 years old) in the UK were using Ipod touches as part of their day to day learning – from accessing weather cams through to researching history. The motivation of the students was truly incredible. We also got to see how phone cameras were used by language learners to produce ‘tourist guides’ of their hometown. Again the results were simply stunning in the quality of language produced.  Unfortunately I am not teaching at the moment but as soon as I get the chance I want to try this out.

It seems that phones and mobile technology can be used to great affect both in and out of the class – from projects to iphone apps for more independent learning. You can access Nicky’s talk here.

Next up the indomitable Gavin in what was essentially a talk aimed at those who have spent the last year naysaying the use of technology and talking about it being simply faffing.  Since Gavin and I agree on most things when it comes to technology, I was never going to walk out with much new, but the talk did show the historical use of naysaying from people in the 1700s worried about the introduction of slates into the classroom through to those saying that the intro of the biro would have a damaging effect on learners.  The talk explored myths, criticisms and worries labeled at tech use. Concluding by making the point that technology in schools was often a top-down process i.e. coming from the school directors. In order for it to be smoothly integrated into schools more thought needed to be given to how it was going to be financed (why spend all the money on hardware if people cant use it), support how are people going to be trained and the realization that this training needs to be ongoing and therefore how much support would be given to encourage technology adoption. We also heard not for the first time (and surely not for the last – well I know its not the last cos I say it in my talk on Saturday )– that technology IS only a tool and if used correctly is not the domineering white elephant in the room.

In the afternoon I attended the twitter focused talks  – Graham Stanley on how life has changed since twitter. How it has become an incredible resource for teachers for everything from a research tool to the often-quoted 24/7 staffroom. For me as a teacher, trainer and writer, twitter has become one of the most powerful tools at my disposal and it was good to see how many people felt the same. In a lovely juxtaposition my final talk for the day was Petra Pointer’s excellent talk on using twitter with students. She explored why the so-called digital natives that made up her students had not embraced twitter and showed how she cajoled and encouraged them to take part. Twitter has now become a way for her students to extend classroom work from further readings, to discussions, and greater class cohesion through sharing of information. Again I can’t wait to try her ideas out in the classroom.

Overall I have really enjoyed day one on many levels, IATEFL is always a good place to catch up with people. This year especially so as many of my twitter PLN are present. On top of that seeing and speaking to so many like-minded people and being able to extend those discussions out to the web 2.0 communities has been great. I have also been reassured that others think like me, learnt something new things’ I cant wait to try out and for the most part being thoroughly impressed with the professional presentations put before me.

Roll on day two but now time for a well-deserved beer and catch up with colleagues.

See you tomorrow.

Today was the learning technologies pre-conference event  at IATEFL and hopefully the discussions we had there are an indication of the quality of the talks to come over the next few days. The event took place both f2f and in second life with excellent discussions in both environments.

We had three talks followed by discussions addressing the use of technology in teaching. Mark Pegrum started us off with a talk on Digital Literacies (you can see the slides here) where he posed the following questions:

1. To what extent is it our responsibility to teach these digital literacies?

2. Are there certain literacies we should avoid in the classroom?

3. Where, when and how should we start teaching DL in the classroom?

The discussion group I was in raised some interesting points looking at the need for students to understand such skills as being able to filter information, being able to summarise what they read (leading to a sub discussion of whether twitter helps you learn to summarise or do you need to be of a certain level of skill already?). We also discussed the need for students to understand the need for contribution not simply plagiarise what they find on the web by copying and pasting. We also explored the role of critical thinking, with claims that technology was eroding the need for CT skills.  In conclusion we seemed to agree that there was a need to embed the literacies across the curriculum  but it’s a question of time (what with everything else we have to teach). And in fact the more ‘traditional literacies’ still have a place (perhaps more so with the emphasis now being placed on technology).

Next up was Scott talking about how it was reasonable for teachers to feel threatened by technology (illustrating his point with stories from the web such as ‘robots to replace’ teachers)  as its application in the classroom can lead to fundamental role changes for the teacher. He then explored how technology might fit in with a dogme approach to the classroom.  Is it possible?  He made the point that here are two approaches

1. start with the technology and look for appropriate ways to use it – this would be tech driven not theory driven

or  2. Look for a theory of learning and for appropriate tools with which to apply it

The post- talk discussion centred around these ideas asking us to consider ease of use and availability.  The group summaries mentioned similar ideas  perhaps best summed up with a set of variables we need to consider:

The teaching context, resources you have, the curriculum and its flexibility, how comfortable you are with the technology, the number of teaching hours, the language levels of students and training provided for the teachers.

In conclusion Scott reminded us not to be glib about saying teachers need to be trained (though in my training experiences this is always what teachers say to me) and that teachers will only respond to training when they believe it works , the best kind of training is experiential if you have experienced it then you will  be brave enough to do it.

We were asked to remember that technology  is only a tool but tools come with a lot of baggage, they do need to be evaluated on their merits and there are some things that are pedagogically bad, driving people back to chalk and talk (or should that be click and drag) as they merely foreground the technologies

Which leads to the final talk by Steven Bax which looked at how technology can be a waste of time and money if employed badly and therefore what can we do to normalise technology. The talk started by asking to consider that normalised technologies are invisible to us (i.e. we don’t see them as we are so used to them). Normalisation was the topic of the discussion, looking at what is preventing normalisation and how we can move towards it (something I blogged about recently).

All in all it was an excellent day of discussions, valuable sharing of ideas and an impressive harmonisation of first and second life ‘conferencing’. If I have one small criticism, it’s that overall the discussion was very similar to those that many of us have been having for a couple of years – perhaps an indication of how unnormalised technology and teaching still is? Now bring on the conference proper.

This week I wrote the guest blog post on the OUP blog – you can read my post ‘Technology in the classroom – the teacher’s equivalent to marmite?’ here

References from my Prague and Ostrava Plenary:

I’ll put the slides up in a week or so after I have done the IATEFL version of the talk but here are the references in the talk:

The quotes are from various blogs:

http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/content/seven-deadly-sins-e-learning

http://www.eqa.edu.au/site/aninteractivewhiteboardwhatnext.html

http://shaunwilden.com/40-reasons-teachers-use-technology/

http://marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org/2009/11/28/dont-forget-the-pedagogy/

The other quotes were taken from:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/ (episode 2)

From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education by Mark Pegrum University of Washington Press

The Origin of the species by Charles Darwin

The Ray Clifford Quote is taken from a session title at the virtual rountable conference last year.

Websites used:

Wikipedia.org

Wordle.net

Xtranormal.com – the ‘interview’ is here

Glogster.com

Superteachertools (for the ‘millionaire’) (see my post here for other flash sites)

Youtube.com  – (The Ferris Bueller Clip is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWzMyKSIbFY&feature=related)

This list is taken from asking audiences attending the digital day tour:

1.Teachers are set in their ways

2.Possible technical difficulties

3.Fear of using digital resources

4.Increased preparation time

5.Not able to monitor individual students

6.Danger resources dominating the classroom

7.Students become distracted

8.IWB activities seen as a bit childish.

9.Taking away thinking time

10.Could make the classroom more teacher-centric

Finally the questionnaire results are from a survey undertaken by OUP in America

This week the IATEFL online site 2010 went live.  Harrogate 2010 is a good way to participate in the conference whether you are going to the ‘live’ event or not. Presenters are going to upload their talks, some talks will be broadcast live and starting from this week the discussion forums are open. So if you are a teacher I recommend you go along to site and join (it’s free) – and if you do see ,  come and say hi in the learning technology forum…see the message below from the online team for more info:

IATEFL HARROGATE CONFERENCE: HARROGATE ONLINE WEBSITE NOW LIVE!

Online conference coverage of the 44th IATEFL Conference

The Harrogate Online website is now live at:
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010

The British Council and IATEFL have launched the Harrogate Online website which offers live web coverage of this year’s IATEFL Conference in Harrogate.

The Harrogate Online website allows remote participants to take part in one of the world’s biggest ELT conferences through a variety of resources including:

- Video recordings of selected sessions
- Live interviews and streamed plenaries
- Moderated special interest discussion forums
- Text reports and photo albums

To visit the Harrogate Online website, go to:
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010

This initiative builds on the earlier collaboration between the British Council and IATEFL.
Last year, 1,600 teachers and trainers attended the Cardiff IATEFL Conference, and over 20,000 participated online.

This year we expect a much larger audience, and this is a real opportunity to take part in the biggest online ELT training community.

The Harrogate Online website gives you an opportunity to share ideas with teachers all around the world. There will be interactive live coverage with video presentations, reports and interviews from Harrogate.

We look forward to meeting you online, and hope that you will share this information with your colleagues worldwide.

Gavin Dudeney – Honorary Secretary, IATEFL
Julian Wing – British Council Harrogate Online Project Manager
Nik Peachey – IATEFL Online Editor