Trepidation

I introduced the video project in the two communication classes.  One class is a day ahead of the other because the second class has more students (29) with another one added today than the first one (21).  At least it is a group project, right?

Now, the trepidation comes from two sources.  First, I don’t really know a lot about making videos, but I know a little more than I did last summer.  Second, and the more important one is what do I do with myself?  I felt like the observer of a three ring circus in the summer, now I will have to “supervise” a five or seven ring circus.  It feel like Murphy’s Law is licking its lips.  Still the enthusiasm was there in the first class and hopefully in the second class on Monday.  I have given them most of a week for preparation since that took more time than I thought it would during the summer.  One nice thing about my timing is that we are following the Clay Shirky video on TED where he early in his talk he points out that the revolution in technology has made us both consumers and producers.  I am expecting a lot of discussion and problem solving on their part and a lot of “what do I do with myself?” on my part.

I responded to the student mentioned in the previous post to work in our lab on some of the more challenging materials and read.  She now reads in class with the book under the table.  How can I object because it is a reading class?  The disciplinarian whispering in the back of my mind is saying “make her pay attention” while the educator admires her solution and wishes he could figure out how to get everyone reading in the class and enjoy it.  I keep toying with changing this class, but it may not even make enough students next semester.  Furthermore, I need to remake the midterm and final exams to reflect what we really do in the class. 

Can’t do it this Friday (my work in the office day) because Angel has thoroughly messed up a teacher’s class and none of the practice tests work nor can the old ones be imported because it won’t allow anything to be done.  I plan on spending as much time as possible with the tech people tomorrow. 

Challenge

In my low intermediate ESL reading class, I have a student who emailed me that she has already done the kinds of things we are doing.  This got my back up, but not for a good reason rather because she threatens to make my job more difficult.  Getting over that, I now have to figure out if she really is poorly placed, which happens, or is over estimating her proficiency.  I am playing with the idea of having her do a vocabulary levels test on-line since I don’t have a printed one immediately available.  The problem is I have nothing to compare her results to, so I can’t really make a judgment.  Another option I have toyed with is giving her the first vocabulary test before we finish the material.  This is more doable without causing a lot of work.  With my administrative duties taking some of my time, this seems a possible answer.  If she passes it without preparation, then I have to figure out something for her to do.  That is the crux of my problem. 

I will introduce the norms video project tomorrow in one class.  I have tried to keep it simple with a Peace Corps video about gaffes and some discussion before I divide the class into groups of three to four. 

PowerPoint and Video

The students finished their midterm presentations, and everyone used PowerPoint though a couple of them could have avoided it though even they used it well to supplement their talks.  However, there is a growing trend to use videos in their presentations which stretch out the times of their presentations and are usually related though not always in good taste (at least for this old fuddy duddy).  The problem is that they don’t know how to put the videos into their presentations, so they end up clicking on a hyperlink, if we are lucky, or cutting and pasting the link with their backs to the audience for several seconds.  This tells me that they like to use video and I have to help them use it better.  That is my next project.  To me, this is letting them lead me to where I want to go: effective use of technology while building communication skills.  Hope I get there before I retire.

I use Philip Zimbardo’s TED talk on how people become monsters or heroes.  To prepare for it, I have been using some clips from “A Class Divided” which someone pointed out about a year ago on YouTube.  It seems to make a good lead in, but in the future, I think I will break the videos into smaller pieces to help the students better understand what is going on in the videos. 

I thought we would be able to incorporate video into the debates, but it looks like that is going nowhere.  I am considering the possibility of a group video project on an issue instead of a debate for fall semester.  I haven’t thought it through yet, but I think it would involve some issue such as global warming or gay marriage.  They would present the video and then lead a discussion on the video.  I really want to try to use student videos in class and stretch out what they and I can do.
 

Video Activity Update

All the time seems to have been worth it.  I told the students I would give them full credit if they gave me feedback on the activity.  So far, over half of the class, six, have commented.  Although the videos were a mixed bag, the feedback from the students on the activity has been very positive.  They enjoyed working with their classmates and communicating as well as learning about their classmates cultures.  Some students liked learning the new software, MovieMaker, and commented on how easy it was. 

I floated the idea of doing the second group project, a debate, with them and the students in class today seemed to like the idea.  I have given some thought to adjusting the activity, but now I am toying with giving them input into designing the activity.  Here, I begin to worry that I am getting a little carried away, which I have been warned about in the past, so I will give it some more thought.

I used Clay Shirky’s TED linked talk, “How social media can make history” and tested their understanding.  One problem they had was with the word “bored” which they understand as something that is frustrating while Shirky uses it to mean very simple or uninteresting because it isn’t challenging.   For the most part, they understood the idea of the talk though the test may have had a stinker or two in it.  I will have to re-examine it and revise it before I use it again.

I have been working on some things this summer while teaching.  Some times I think I could get more done if I didn’t teach, but then I realize I get my ideas in the process of preparing for, teaching, or assessing what happened in the class.  

No net

We are now into the video activity which I scheduled for two days and it is stretching into its third day with one more to go.  It definitely takes more time than dividing them into groups, having the students choose a norm violation, perform it on campus, and present the results.  For one thing, I left the organization open.  I did that because I didn’t really know how to organize it since I didn’t know what the students needed to know and how to go about providing it.  As the activity developed, I got the tech people to put MovieMaker on the desktop and made a resource page for the students to use.  I developed a basic handout that I will revise now that I have a better idea of what to do.  We have given over time for the students to develop scripts, shoot the video, and tomorrow edit and present it.  We are a little tight on the edit and present because one student is taking a couple of days off to go to her dentist in Venezuela. 

My preliminary notes on doing it again are develop a handout that identifies the task as comparing a social norm from more than one country with the norm in the U.S.  Since this previously was a norm violation activity, I didn’t have a lot of examples until I had to think of some in class.  I began with a Peace Corps movie called Gaffes.  This is a keeper.  If I do it again, I will discuss more norms like wearing shoes inside the house, greetings, tipping, going through doors, holding doors, treating people older and younger.  I will make the activity more of a comparison activity and ask for thoughts about adjusting.  Second, if I do it again note to myself is to discuss different types of movies they can make. They are supposed to show the movie and discuss making it along with the social norm they are portraying.  I will see how that works.

I feel a little like a tightrope walker working without a net, both excited and terrified.

The positives have been a lot of talk in English about what they are doing and about different norms. 
The negatives are that it takes a lot of time and space.  During summer semester, there are many empty rooms around us, but that won’t be the case during the semester.  Unfortunately, our ESL lab is not a good place for making movies though it might have to suffice. 

Summer Rewind

We just finished the first summer term and the next one begins on Wednesday.  I reserved the television studio on campus for our final presentations to give the students a little something different. 

After reserving it, the coordinator bumped into me at the grocery store and told me he was being laid off.  Our presentations were the last use of the television studio on campus.  I have no idea what will come next there.  The coordinator is hoping to land a job with the campus planetarium.  I hope he does too.  37 years of work with the college and now he is looking for a job.  He has a son in middle school or early high school. 

My students asked me if they had to use PowerPoint for their final presentations.  I told them I don’t require it.  They all used PowerPoint in their presentations, and none of the PowerPoint presentations were bad though some were mediocre.  However, from what people tell me, their mediocre presentations may be better than the presentations they will get from some of the their professors.  Some of their PowerPoint shows were very good and showed a lot of thought, creativity, and time spent getting the right image or look.  Now, I don’t teach them how to use PowerPoint.  I offer to if they want to come to our lab, but I rarely have someone come. 

I am teaching the same course for the second term, and the department I check out the camera from may be trying out a new longer term sign out for the video camera.  I am thinking of requiring a video project that they would make during the summer.  The only guideline I can think of is that it show all members substantially in the final product.  My thinking is that they will have to use a lot of English in putting it together.  I think they can figure out MovieMaker fairly easily.  I don’t know if I have the guts to let them go or the idea of what kind of guidance to give them.  Also, I will have to look at the language make up of the class because if it is not possible to form groups with at least one person from a different language group, it won’t work as a English usage project.

Recording their videos has lost some of its effectiveness because I have no place on line to post them.  They don’t want them on YouTube and the college won’t let me use the space on the server that I used to be able to use.  I am back to making DVDs and only a few people get to see themselves. 

Self-Access Center idea for my program

I read this article “Self-Access Centers: Maximizing Learners’ Access to Center Resources“by Benjaimin L. McMurry, Mark W. Tanner and Neil Anderson in TESL-EJ and thought it might work for my program.  We have a lab which students use occasionally for Facebook or for printing their papers and sometimes a desparate student for proofreading.  However, it doesn’t get much use beyond that.  In part, this usage is a result of that fact that we don’t have much software on our computers, but mostly because our (read my) efforts have gone toward the schools change of LMS to Angel last year.  Also, we could never find a pronunciation program that we liked.  So the lab has gone fallow.  

This is quite in contrast to the ESL lab when I arrived in 2000 when students were in there everyday because they had lab requirements which included doing exercises is several workbooks, on the computer, or with other materials available.  The lab requirements died as the college emphasized the LMS, the software we owned would no longer function with the upgraded computers and was too expensive to buy, and emphasis shifted to the web.  We were never able to take full advantage of the web in part because of our size.

After reading this article, I thought a self-access center might be the way to go.  It would give the students the capability to find out what the center has available for them as they work to improve their English.  We are a skills based program, so they could find out what materials fit the skills they want to work on by going to a web page and locating the materials for that skill that are available in the center.

I asked a colleague for the name of people in the college could help make a web page database.  He gave me a name and the person said it could be done.  My colleague is in the administration and likes new approaches, so he is putting some of his influence to use in getting the project moving.  In the next summer term, I will have my student workers compile an inventory of our materials after I find out how to arrange the inventory and what information we will need.  While I don’t think this will bring flocks of students into the lab, I like the concept behind it of students taking more charge of their learning.   

PowerPoint Design Guide

As I think about designing lessons in PowerPoint and read a little more about how people process visual information, as in Stephen Kosslyn’s Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (Oxford U Press), it becomes clearer that four principles should guide me.  The four principles are size, simplicity, contrast, and predictability.   In writing them down, they seem so obvious, but they weren’t obvious to me when I began using PowerPoint nor as I learned how to do “cool things” with it.  So at the risk of belaboring the obvious, I will discuss the guidelines a little here.

Size matters because everyone has to easily see the information on the slide.  I keep going back through presentations that I have used in previous semesters and making the text bigger so that even my students who need glasses but don’t or won’t admit it can see the information.  That is not what I want them struggling with.

Simplicity, which may be the most encompassing principle, should rule almost every design decision.  Simplicity in part rules because every piece of information on a slide will be processed.  The cute little clip art butterflies put there for decoration must be processed and determined whether they need attention or not.  Some students might give them attention and not the content I would like them to focus on!  So simplicity of design should rule, and anything that is not essential to helping the student understand or focus should be left out.

Contrast is like size.  The students need to see the material, and contrast makes it happen.  I have had a few disasters in which the contrast was not strong enough to overcome projectors that washed out much of the color, or the slideshow looked good on my home computer, but it did not in the classroom.  I have simplified as much as I can by relying on dark and light contrasts.  I saw somewhere the recommendation to use only three colors, and if I were limited to only three, I would probably choose red, white, and black with red used for emphasis.

The fourth guide is predictability.  Predictability reduces the cognitive demand on the learner as they process the information in the slides.  If the slides are predictable in design, the learner can more quickly focus on the content.  Predictability also enables us to sneak in a surprise that is really a surprise from time to time. 

Those are the four guides that I will be using in designing my PowerPoint slides: size, simplicity, contrast, and predictability.

 

Main Idea

I have been trying to put into words or a chart the reading curriculum that has evolved in the ESL program I coordinate.  I have made a few tentative steps in that direction because some day I may have to hire some new teachers.  I want to be able to give them a sense of how the classes fit together.  This became an issue for me when I taught an intermediate reading class and ended the semester giving the final and finding 20% of final consisted of fact and opinion items.  I had not taught fact and opinion in any detail because it was not on the schedule I had inherited as more than a mention.  The two previous teachers who had taught the class most of the time over the last 8 years apparently previewed the final exam and taught accordingly.  I didn’t preview the final. 

Any way, now I have been trying to put together a more balanced final and schedule for the class.  As I am doing so, I am thinking about what we teach.  Today, I explored main idea as for what we need to teach about main idea.  I did it without a textbook, but with the textbook and materials in mind.  Now, the materials suggest that we teach general and specific with main idea, and I have done so.  However, that doesn’t work so well.  General is not an absolute term to apply to main ideas. 

A main idea consists of a topic and a comment (controlling idea).  The topic does not have to be general to be a topic of a main idea.  I can write “Gainesville is a beautiful city.”  Gainesville is my topic, yet it is specific.  The comment generally is abstract because it consists of a judgment, evaluation, or some type of opinion.  Perhaps that is the general part.  But then what do I do with exercises asking me to identify general words and specific words?  How do I relate them to main ideas? 

As I pondered this problem, I began to see how this might confuse students more than necessary.  How do I fix it?

change

Seth Godin has a good blog post on change.  He starts by discussing the demise of Word Perfect as the word processor of choice and moves to the time when a choice has to be made.  To quote Seth Godin:  “Do nothing is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree. Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What’s in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing.” 

This reverberates with me because of the program I am now coordinating grew stagnant during the previous coordinators final years.  She was a fantastic teacher and leader, but she got to the point where change meant creating more work for her.  Consequently, tests that worked went unchanged.

Last week I gave the final exam in the reading class I was teaching.  We use a standard group of tests semester after semester.  In this case, the final was 20 percent on fact and opinion, which I had just touched on because it wasn’t highlighted in the schedule and several questions on relationships within and between sentences, which I did not teach because it wasn’t in the book nor was there any indication it was important.  The teacher who had taught the class had worked around the schedule, which I make off of a template, and never brought these problems to my attention.  She simply worked around them, masterfully.  However, she left to take a job in Russia leaving me caught flat footed.  The test must have matched up to the content and textbook when it was created who knows how long ago. 

Now, I have another project for the summer.  The experience leads me to feel even more urgency to create some type of curriculum that lays out what we teach.  Presently, our program consists of experienced teachers, some of whom have been at the school longer than I have.  However, some day we will have new teachers who will need more guidance.

Finally, I will work to embrace principled and needed change.