I follow several bloggers and tweeters who introduce new applications that they find online. I explore the ones that look useful; however, I end up using few of these applications in my classroom or teaching.

For one thing, adopting many of these technologies requires serious rethinking of what goes on in the classroom and in preparation. When I shifted to using PowerPoint from using overhead projector slides, I had to learn how to use the technology and how to teach with it. At first, I thought I merely had to copy the slides into PowerPoint. Then I thought I had to show off the many cool things PowerPoint could do to keep my students interested. It wasn’t until I really began reading and thinking about how to use PowerPoint not for presentation but for learning that I changed to a more pedagogical approach.

My learning process has followed similar paths for some of the other applications I use including using word processed papers and now Google Documents, and the many ways I use video in the classroom. The biggest struggle for me has been to figure out how to use new applications instructionally to benefit and enhance student learning.

I follow a pattern in adopting new applications.

First, I use the application with a simple activity or assignment finding out not only how students use it but what problems occur that I had not anticipated.

Second, I build an activity into a class that involves more student use of the application until I begin to get comfortable with it. By building in the application, I mean that I identify what the application can help my students learn.

Next, I find the limitations of the application by trying out a few other activities with it.

These are the steps I used in introducing and using bubbl.us and Quizlet in my classes.

With bubbl.us, I found it useful for students analyzing main ideas and supporting details in reading and in identifying organizational patterns. With Quizlet I use for students to learn vocabulary roots and some tone words. My hope is that the students will continue to use these applications for other needs that they have.

While I like using technology in my classes, I tend to approach new applications with caution. Each new technology will involve changes in approaching a topic or skill, will involve additional student learning, and needs to have a identifiable payoff in terms of learning so that students feel they learn something and find the application useful.

The biggest change for me was having activities ready which focused on the areas we were working on in an appropriate way. Many times I was creating activities before the class in reaction to the previous class’s difficulties, problems with their written assignments, or something missing in the textbook. For example, I found students struggled with providing examples, so we worked on producing specific examples right up until the final paragraph. However, when we focused on good examples, grammar control slipped. I definitely need to consider ways and even a video or two that will provide possible guidance in that area.

Did the students use the videos? Relying on the counts from YouTube, not all of the students made use of the videos I made. At first I felt a little let down, but upon reflection, I think that if I give the students control of the learning, they will make the decisions themselves. After all, there were times when I lectured where clearly some students didn’t need to be there, so why would this group of students tune into the videos?

Another advantage I found with the flipped classroom model was student interaction. I spent a lot of time walking around the classroom and could help students with the difficulties they were having at the moment. Even more I saw students helping students. I had a noisy classroom, but unlike in another class I taught, the noise was a buzz of activity mostly concentrated on what we were working on.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that my transition to the flipped classroom model seemed a logical next step in my progression in teaching this writing class. Using the lecture model, I had built in much practice so I was to some extent ready for the move in terms of having materials and thinking about how to address students needs. The difference came in adjusting the classroom time so that I could have sufficient focused activities. Some of the previous activities or worksheet types of things didn’t work as well because they did not go deep enough into the content. The quick multiple choice activities served for warm ups but rarely went into depth. I decided to continue to focus on grammar activities where the students had to manipulate language instead of answering questions about it. Also, the challenges differed in that now the focus was more on understanding and manipulating than only on understanding.

We wrote more this semester than in the past. Almost every Thursday, we wrote something. We wrote five practice paragraphs at the beginning as well as the regular regime of paragraphs although we did not have a midterm paragraph. I didn’t use the midterm paragraph because it comes after the students have written on in-class paragraph and seems to show the students how much they don’t know.

What made the writing and responding especially effective for me was the use of Google Documents. I had never used Google Documents for a class; consequently, I had to learn on the fly with my students. By the time we got to formal paragraph assignments, everyone could submit their paragraphs through Google Docs. Furthermore, Google Documents enabled me to respond to papers quickly and give targeted guidance. Some students used the documents to ask questions or for further explanation. This was definitely an improvement from the previous way of commenting on paragraphs through downloading, responding, and uploading.

Out of 33 students 30 passed the class. Two did not take the paragraph retake, so they might have passed. The one who did not pass was the weakest student, and I never was able to reach her. She acted as if her English was so inadequate that she could not interact with me.

The going was not smooth. We have a final exam, which 30 out of 33 passed; I haven’t compared it to previous semesters, but it seems high. 2 of the 3 passed the retake exam. However, 18 of the 33 needed to take the paragraph retake though only one student’s retake needed discussion in the final teachers’ meeting. From my perspective, the class worked because we were on task, learned to make the tasks more appropriate and requiring deeper processing, and student involvement increased.

for Lorena

The princess of dawdling shares her song with the birds,
shares her thoughts with the sky, her dreams with the dogs,
who love her in every way but words.

The princess of dawdling has long brown hair,
soft and hard to comb. She has a smile
we all wish she would wear more often.

She has many fine qualities, but as you might guess -
one fault. She dawdles. To a maddening degree.
She dawdles when she dresses, when she eats,

She dawdles about brushing her long brown hair.
What is the rush? Her hair will be there then.
She dawdles enough to fill an hour with nothing done.

Her parents agree she inherited from the other.
Her father is loosing his hair, her mother all patience.
with this almost so fine princess of dawdling.

- her dad
– John M. Graney

I like to use technology in my teaching. I don’t think it makes me a better teacher than the teacher who eschews technology. Technology enables me to help students in my way; it enables me to provide information and practice in different ways. I teach English as a Second Language, so my students need to do something with language in every class. Technology provides ways to do something with language in class and outside of class.

That being said, I am uncomfortable with claims made about technology, teaching, and learners today. My learners run a gamut from young students wholly are engaged in the digital experience in their own ways to students who may have a Facebook page and text but little more or maybe even less. I also have older students who find the technology baffling and frustrating because it doesn’t seem to work. Thus when I read claims from publishers about “Today’s students understand technology like it’s their first language. Learn how to instruct and engage your students through the media they know with Full Sail University’s Education Media Design & Technology Master of Science Degree”. I find them at first amusing for the hyperbole, but on further thought, disturbing. Such claims, whether made by publishers, on blogs, or on Twitter, overgeneralize and can lead to problematic decisions.

Reacting to such claims teachers may feel compelled to include technology they feel little comfort with in order to meet a perceived need that does not exist, i.e., “the digital native” when other evidence suggests that students learn just as well with teachers who know what they are doing and don’t employ technology. Furthermore, it is difficult to find guidance for the applications that work well versus those that are sexy.

I am struck by the how many tweets and blog postings I see regarding the wonders of some new application. Yet, I find the enthusiasm of “early adopters” makes me more and more skeptical. Yes, I could do that something cool with the program, but I have to learn how to use it, learn its weaknesses, which sometimes means finding out I can’t do what I need to do, and figure out how to make it user friendly for my students before I can work it into my class.

I am not an early adopter which leaves me short of the recognition that they get online or even within schools. I heard about Google Docs years ago and hesitantly tried something by myself and found it didn’t work well enough for class use. I kept it in the back of my mind and tried a few things here and a few things there with it. I began using the spreadsheet to allow students to find out how they were doing in my class because I haven’t figured out how to get CMS we use to only report the scores for graded exercises and not include the online practices. There may be a way, but it isn’t straightforward enough that anyone I have asked can tell or show me how to do it, and I haven’t the time to experiment with it and devise a hack, if I could. And if I couldn’t, I would have wasted hours that I could have spent on something useful for my students.

After using the spreadsheet, I used a few Google Forms for classes and though I didn’t get numbered data, I got information that showed when students understood and when they did not. Forms were easier to use than trying to figure out the cumbersome management system. I shared a couple of schedules on Google Documents with my fellow teachers, but after one teacher accidentally erased a couple of weeks, they shied away from using it. I put presentations on Google Documents, but I found out that I couldn’t black out the screen with my remote like I could in PowerPoint, so I quit that. I put up some bare bones sites with Google Sites, but I found out I couldn’t embed TED videos, and so I went back to using the school server for that use but have continued to make sites for grammar points because Google Sites is YouTube friendly. This occurred over two or three years.

This year I have begun using Google Documents extensively with one class, a class that I am trying out the flip class model with. I am using the Google Apps through the college because students have Google email accounts through the college which includes Documents and Sites. My students have been submitting their writing on Google Documents, and I have been responding. No paper is involved. The responses are saved and available to the students. This is much better than having them submit their writing on the CMS because I can open and respond to the assignment without going through the process of downloading, opening the file on the word processor (unless it is an incompatible file i.e., .was. .dot or .pages), commenting, saving, uploading, and sending a message. There are still problems. Some students don’t want to use the college’s Google apps for email or are unable to open an account. Some students do not have internet access at home. Some students seem baffled and may be disappearing into the background in a class of 32.

My point being that I was not an early adopter, so I didn’t have to learn much of it on my students’ backs. I tested many elements before I finally reached a point where I felt that I could use it successfully without making my students’ lives totally miserable. I set up the class to have a long learning curve for the students who have not had a graded assignment yet due as we have worked out the problems they have been having.

Furthermore, working from the assumption that students are tech savvy puts additional barriers in front of students who are not tech savvy. They now not only have to work on learning the course content but also learn how to use applications that may not be user friendly or don’t work as advertised in class because of browser differences or popup blockers. In turn, their frustration with dealing with the technology may handicap their learning the content.

This is not meant as a criticism of early adopters though it may sound like it. Without the early adopters, I may not have discovered some of the applications I use. However, with the limited amount of time we all have available, skepticism and a measured approach can save our students and ourselves from frustrations and failures that will cost the teacher respect.

In the writing class, we have moved on to articles as the grammar focus and will be writing a cause and effect paragraph. I am in the early stages of thinking through one or two cause and effect videos. I didn’t make any videos for articles because the videos I linked to by JenniferESL are superior to what I could come up with. I did make a couple of gap fills for articles. One is on the Tower of Pisa, and the other is on Hawaii. I used English Articles for the texts and Hot Potatoes for making the online practices.

In class, I had the students bring the pages from our student packet, which at the beginning of the semester I had put on the LMS as a pdf file to work on. In class, I brought enough copies of the pages for the students to work in 6 groups. I told them I would only accept the group worksheet and score it for extra credit: 0 errors = 10 points, 1 error = 9 points, more than 1 error = 0 points. We worked on one exercise in class and will continue next class with the other pages.

Some things I need to work on with paragraphs and writing include: conclusions for paragraphs and the difference between that and than. We will continue to work on proofreading as the students continue to struggle with sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, and verbs. On the third skill test, there were improvements in these areas, but commas brought some of the students down as did sentence combining.

In reading class, students made presentations on fact and opinion. I got the idea from a PBS page, which I can’t recover right now, of having students report on a news article and an opinion article. So far, the presentations have been very good with only one group slipping up an not having both kinds of articles. The analyses have been accurate.

As I was preparing for class, I realized how the basis for fact and opinion underlies main idea and supporting details. Facts tend to be specific while opinions tend to be general. A majority of main ideas involve some type of judgment, thus opinion, while support should be in part factual. General information often is opinion; specific information tends to be fact. Why I didn’t make these connections earlier, I have no idea. Hurray, I am still a learner!

Classes still consist mostly of working on writing through in-class activities. I haven’t lectured for any extended time, i.e., beyond 5 minutes yet, at least, not that I can remember. I have answered questions but I try to make the answers concise. We have worked on exemplification paragraphs, and I made an introductory video for that, but I used a paragraph from the textbook, so I haven’t made the video public. I will revise it in the future without the textbook materials. We also worked on sentence combining and commas.

For sentence combining, I made a video

I teach commas by breaking the different types into two categories: adding information commas and joining commas. The adding information commas include the series and appositive commas as in this video.

The joining commas are the introductory fragment comma, the coordinating conjunction comma, and transition words and phrases punctuation as in this video.

The students have written a second out-of-class paragraph, and yesterday they wrote an in-class paragraphs. Now that we are comfortable with Google Documents, students submit their papers with few glitches and get them back as fast as I can comment on them. This process is so much less cumbersome than using the LMS that I find it enjoyable. I also put class activities on Google Documents, and we do some in class. In doing this, I learned from a student to use the copy option as a way for students to submit their version of an exercise while maintaining the original exercise for others to use. I gave the student credit in class because I felt so happy to have learned this.

From my Diigo subscription I learned about 7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers. I am especially interested in Symbaloo. I think I can use this as a place to compile resources, and it is far superior to the resources page in the LMS we use.

I am going to try the suggestions of Gena R. Bennet in Using Corpora in the Language Learning Classroom to analyze the errors. As I plan to do it, I am saving the student’s paragraphs with the errors tagged. I will use these as a corpora to highlight some of the more common errors, especially run-ons, fragments, verb errors, and subject-verb agreement. Using the information generated from this, I hope to be able to provide targeted practice and classroom work addressing more specifically the errors that occur in this group of students’ writing. I will use TextStat as my concordance program.

I made two videos this week. The first one is on fragments:

And one on sentence combining:

My recent videos have used edited versions of PowerPoint presentations I used in the past. I find I can cover in a five to eight minute video much of what I covered in a 30 to 50 minute classroom lecture though I don’t have the interaction of a lecture. I am still learning how to use Camtasia for the Mac; still, I don’t think my videos are worse than most of the home made educational videos I see on YouTube.

I have run into a frustration with using Google Apps through my school account and trying to use YouTube or my regular GoogleDocs, such as Sites. If I am signed into the school account, I can’t access YouTube or my regular gmail account. One way around this has been to open two browsers and jump between the two.

I suppose if I were forced to follow a bell curve distribution for my test results, that test wouldn’t qualify. However, a teacher in grad school once raised the point that if the teacher is doing a good job, the class curve should be skewed.

We have been working on sentences the last two weeks. Last week, for the Thursday writing event, I had them describe a bad dream using only simple sentences. The bad dreams were good, but putting them in simple sentences proved too much of a challenge for most students. We spent more time working on compound and complex sentences this week. I added videos on my resource page for sentences. Although I have relied on videos found on YouTube, I did make some of my own including one one sentence parts

and one on run-ons.

I plan to add more, in particular, a video on fragments.

I have found Google Documents to be a great time saver when students use it correctly. More and more students are getting the hang of it. I made a video showing how I want them to format their papers.

This will be a challenge based on past semesters, but at least there is a reference available.

However, I did stumble this Thursday. I brought in a couple of pictures and asked the my student writers to describe the pictures. They struggled. I had not thought the lesson through well enough and did not provide sufficient guidelines. Also, the images were challenging because of the vocabulary needed that I had not anticipated. Still, we worked away on their descriptions trying to find words and the correct way to describe what they saw in the images.

Tomorrow, we are starting the first formal paragraph in the computer lab. That is going to be a good formative assessment for me and them.

Finding videos is not difficult; finding good videos has proven very time consuming. I had one ten minute video I liked very much, but it taught compound sentences without the compound sentence comma so I had to scrap that video. My own video making has slowed to almost nothing because I have found enough acceptable videos so far, but I plan on making a few in the coming weeks. Before I do that, I need to fine tune my observation skills and start marking the paragraphs in a way where I can get a better sense of the problems students are having. At present, my responses to student paragraphs have focused on feedback to the students, providing encouragement along with highlighting errors and suggesting some improvements. But with the numerous paragraphs and resubmissions with minor corrections, I have not gotten a sense of where problems lie beyond the obvious, problems with subject-verb agreement, verb tense, and sentence structure. Why didn’t I see this coming? I have been so wrapped up in getting the class off the ground along with the other classes I teach and coordinate that I missed out on this obvious element.

Students have done more writing in this class at this point in the semester than in any class I have taught. Some of the writing has amazed me. Last week I used a picture I found on Flickr.com of two legs dangling from a ceiling and asked the students to tell me what happened. They did with many different permutations. I enjoyed the stories and found good writing. This week they are supposed to write about a day in the life on one of four people’s pictures I used. Of the ones I have read so far, the results have been mixed. They have had trouble getting the action into a single day.

Also, we are having our first skill test over nouns, pronouns, and verbs (basically subject-verb agreement, past tense, present tense, and a little present perfect). I opened a Google document and told them I would use good items that they wrote for the verb part on the test. I had three pages of items to choose from and picked several items for the test tomorrow. I think this allow students to get used to the format and study for the test. It also may make the test too easy though I chose the items based on the needs of the test.

I am encouraged with the class and glad I didn’t know how much work it was going to be before I started because that might have scared me off. I like what the students are doing and know that I need to work on assessment and record keeping to make the class go forward more smoothly. I also need to work on setting up better objectives for the students so they know better what they need to learn such as the types of subject-verb agreement areas like count/noncount, gerunds, prepositional phrases of location, expletive ( or dummy) pronouns, collective nouns, indefinite pronouns, subjects separated from the verb by phrases and clauses, and relative pronoun agreement in relative clauses. In summary, it continues to be a learning experience that keeps on giving.