The size of a class does matter! Teaching a 50-student class is a challange for any EFL/ESL teacher. Engaging all these people into the class content is no easy task. Chao-ching Lin [1] points out the importance of "convincing students that learning should be meaningful." But how? By recreating the outside/real world into our real and virtual classes. Just imagine us teachers creating online assessments that can be graded in situ by a Website hosting service! We could "increase student engagement in the curriculum" [2] and help them with some kind of "flex time" in terms of test-taking hours or schedules.

Can we teachers keep a face-to-face contact with 50 students or more? Why not? With so many free Internet-based tools available for us, we can still create this sense of closeness with our students. We cannot go back into pre-technological times and deal with all students, face to face. But we can replicate, as much as possible, a sense of closeness with our students to guide them through their learning. Discussion forums, PBL assignments, blog posting, and online skill-building sites are great ways to get closer to our students. We deal with humans, and students deserve a fair treatment.

John Locke (1998) [3] in his book, The De-Voicing of Society states that "During a period in which feelings of isolation and loneliness are on the rise, too many of us are becoming emotionally and socially mute. Just when we need to reverse rising levels of distrust by achieving greater familiarity, we are becoming increasingly still." This social muteness in our large classes is a hazard for both students and learning. We do not want to isolate students in a big class, nor do we want them to feel lonely in their learning process: Technology may "reverse rising level of distrust" and create a more familiar, friendly environment for both students and teacher.

What do you think? Should we give our students a way to regain their voice especially when dealing with language learning? Internet is a means to bring students and teacher together.

Jonathan

[1] Chao-ching Lin (2002) Personalizing Language Learning in Large Classes at http://iteslj.org/Articles/Lin-Personalizing.html
[2] http://www.uoregon.edu/~tep/technology/blackboard/docs/testsurvey.pdf
[3] Locke, John (1998) The De-Voicing of Society: Why We Don't Talk Anymore at http://www.congregationalresources.org/ShowOne.asp?RID=8126&TC=2

Dear colleagues and instructors,

To give you a brief account of what kind of technology-oriented changes I wanted to do with my BIN-08 Reading Skills II students, I would have to say that I wanted to create "Reading Blogs" that somehow reflect what we are reading for this class: Short stories. The idea of having students create their own blog was to have them work on the analysis of selected stories rather than having quizzes about them. The analysis of the stories implies identifying the theme, create a characterization chart for the story characters, a plot analysis with introduction, rising action, climax, and resolutiion, and a summary of what the story is about. To accomplish all this, a WebQuest will be created so students can post their findings. Then they will be able to interact with one another about their final products.

STEP 1: Thursday, February 11

After I have explained my students what we were going to do with the following quizzes, which now will be online assessments, the very first thing I asked my students to do was to open a gmail account to have full access at blogger.com. I asked them to send me their addresses to keep a record of all students who did it, and to talk to those one who "forgot" to do this.

Secondly, I asked them to start reading the story we will be using for this PBL assigment: Doctor Heidegger's Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Once they read it, on their own, they will start completing a short story plot analysis chart to get the gist of the story.

STEP 2: Thursday, February 18

Due to the fact that this particular page was not available for public use at Ulatina, I asked our Facutly dean to help me out with this issue. The idea behind eliminating this restriction is related to the opportunity I had to demonstrate the use and settings of the blog for my students in class. Because we have Internet access in class and a giant LCD screen in the classroom, explaining how this is started -step by step- was "piece f cake." To do this, I just followed the step-by-step description given to us by our instructors, Ms. Jeffs and Ms. Healey.

With the information provided in class, they have to start their blogs and send me the corresponding URLs before next class.

And what surprised me the most is the fact that some of my students, by the time we had class, had already created their blogs including profile information and their own photos. (These "kids" are sure digital learners.)

STEP 3

Although I am in the process of working on the next step for this project, I will design a WebQuest related to the story to fully develop my idea (What I stated in my introduction to this post.). As soon as I have it ready for my students, I will also post it over here so everyone can have a look at it. And I would really appreciate it if you can provide some feedback to complete this task successfully.

I'll keep all of you post it with the next step, Step 3.

Jonathan

"Information is not knowledge."
"The only source of knowledge is experience."
Albert Einstein

To say today that in large classes, whether they are lecture-style or language-learning oriented, teachers cannot get to each single student is just a fallacy. If we bear in mind that “teaching consists of getting students involved in the active construction of knowledge” (Finnan & Shaw, 2008) [1], it is the instructors' duty to reach every student in class to motivate them to fulfill his/her dream of getting a major.

On the one hand, to enhance our teaching, and consequently our students' learning, we need to keep in mind several things we have been learning through these six weeks. First, by having clearer learning objectives we will know where we want students to stand at the end of the process. Secondly, PBL is a great tool to engage students in their learning and grasping of the subject-matter presented in class. Thirdly, the availability of free Internet resources will shorten the distance between instructors and students by giving them a bit of interpersonal contact. Finally, the fact that learning styles exist and we teachers must cope with this to maximize learning have to be part of our lesson planning.

On the other hand, keeping in mind a good answer for the question posted by Ms, Jeffs, “online discussions” with one's students is a way to provide human contact among participants (Intrapersonal learners). (Our own experience in this course, no matter where we are on this planet, is a good example that this kind of discussions work.) Students have opinions to share, but at times we give them no room to do so. What about this? In my case, I am sure my students will benefit from this experience as we have done by our exchanges on nicenet.org. As Aleyda commented, although she borrowed the idea from Amjad, http://www.mind42.com/ is a great tool to have students keep on developing the subject-matter studied in class by making them continue building a mind map (Logical/mathematical learners). And I want you also to try https://penzu.com/p to work on notes that can be shared with one's students.

To conclude, I am sure these technological variations in our teaching styles can be fruitful, not only for our students' learning, but for our underlying learning objectives. Many “birds” will be killed with just one stone. Don't you agree??

Jonathan

[1] Finnan & Shaw (2008). Teaching Large Classes II – Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students at http://aei.uoregon.edu/de/iraqelt/handouts/engaging_students_handout.pdf

(My personal reflection on Technology and Language Teaching, taken and edited from Building Teaching Skills W2010, University of Oregon, American English Institute)

This week's learning has been intense and rewarding. After being exposed to so much information on Project-Based Learning and one of its uses, WebQuesting, one starts to mull over all the potential uses it can really have on our students' education.

On the one hand, I talked to the Dean of Education at my university, Universidad Latina de Costa Rica, about the possibility of using one of my two reading classes to "execute" a technology-based change to this particular class. Not only did she agree on the project, but also provided interesting information to have this idea come true. (See presentation on Adult Learning provided by our Dean of Education: www.scribd.com/doc/26812835/LHEG-Adult-Learning-Nov-12-k-Schoch-Notes)

On the other hand, my two partners in the curriculum development unit at Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano have become great sources of feedback for this project. Of course, we want to see what the implications in those students can have, but also in the potential uses for our bi-national center students.

PBL can become an important conerstone for the b-learning program we are going to be lauching second semester this year at Centro Cultural, and I am looking forward to experiencing as much intense learning as we have all experienced this year.

It's a shame I could not find any WebQuest posting service for free on the Web. What I found was a WebQuest Creator for Spanish speakers, which can be accessed in the following address, www.orospeda.es/majwq/. If anyone has found a posting service for WebQuest for free, please let me know.

Jonathan

If I were asked about what it is that I got to learn this week on our U-Oregon's Web Skills online course, I would have to reply by saying the I cannot deny the importance of incorporating b-learning as part of our language curricula. And this can be achieved by those wonderful steps that our instructors are having us take: skill-building websites, reflection on articles related to what is being learned, and CALL environments.

As I got the chance to comment and share with some of my partners, in our endless Web searching sessions, we come across valuable skill-building sites that must be shared with colleagues. If I had the chance to exort my partners to share this wonderful Web-links on activities, readings, and the like, I would encourage everyone to open their learning in this course and share learning links with colleagues in their teaching centers and during national conferences or trainings you take part of. All of us will be making the difference in education for all those who are in our classrooms, not to be kindly remembered by them but to prompt learning in all of them. Let us share to make our reservoirs of skill-building links available to our colleagues, in our countries or elsewhere.

By reflecting on the selected articles provided by our instructors, we can come to important realizations that can guide our teaching style differently. No doubt that our instructors know the ulterior goal of this course, but this goal will only be achievable if we do our part. Valid information for our "digital" experience is hidden among the words found in the articles; if correctly decoded by us participants, we will start making the difference for our students no matter where we are working: primary school, kindergarten, high school, or the university. Updating ourselves with a bit of information on language teaching, as if we were computers, is a way to avoid becoming "obsolete," -someone who resists doing things different to benefit students.

CALL environments are a reality, and if we don't take the chance of learning about them and how to use them effectively, we are neglecting our teaching and our students' learning. Computers and the Web are here to stay and to be used; we can't go back in time and teach how we were taught in our school days. Education is being transformed worldwide, and now that we are in these course, we are experiencing the benefits of studying online even while being in our home countries.The fact that we can interact with one another is just the best way to profit from everyone's experience, experiments, and insightful opinions.

To conclude, now that we are an "online/digital teaching community," we are to spread our horizons by the exchange of ideas among ourselves. This "exchange" with partners and instructors can trigger positive changes in our teaching styles, lesson planning, learning objectives for students as well for ourselves.

As you may remember, I am a senior ELT professor at Ulatina in Costa Rica mostly teaching reading skills, oral communication, and pronunciation (phonetics and phonology). Currently I am teaching a class whose code and name is BIN-04 Reading Skills I where students beginning their English Teaching major learn the basics of vocabulary building techniques, scanning, and the fundamentals of short story analysis, which is going to be crucial once they start taking the literature courses which are part of the 5^th quarter, and on, in our program. Besides, most of my students have Internet access either from home or at the university, and, in extreme cases, they can access the Ulatina’s Website from a cyber café and work on our Central Core, which our Internet platform for our classes and documents sharing.

Although some of the BIN-04 students are somewhat reluctant to use Internet-based tools, such as skill-building websites, they are confronted with the fact that computer-assisted learning is part of the goals Ulatina wants to inculcate in its students. Bearing this idea in mind, I like to provide students with student-oriented sites that can help them better understand what we are studying in class. For instance, since part of our class deals with short story analysis, the use of information available on the Web becomes a must. Although it may sound rather childish, http://kidsclick.org/toplite.html has become a great source of information for students who want to deepen their understanding of the fundamentals of short-story telling and how they are structured. Students can then work independently and, in class or while socializing with their peers, comment what they have discovered on the Web. A cornerstone in the maxim of education, 50% teaching + 50% learning = education, becomes true for our university standards. Furthermore, with extra web-building links, we instructors can guide students and encourage them to become autonomous learners. And in my particular class, I can broaden student understanding with literature-oriented sites that can help students further comprehend how to analyze a short story and create their own short story maps or diagrams. (Please see http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=2983.)

From a teacher-oriented point of view, with so many tools available on the Web, we can keep track of student learning and progress. If we educators believe in autonomous learning, we have to also become guides and signal paths for students to follow. But at the same time, we teachers become responsible for what students do in regards to our class content. How about, depending on the subject-matter we teach, to have “reading” students create their own digital vocabulary logs that we can visit and check, and help correct if it is the case. Tracking what students do for one’s course in terms of vocabulary building is something that we could not have done years ago when so many free online teaching-oriented services did not exit; keeping a vocabulary log on a blog, for example, on a notebook is something that belongs to yesteryear eras. Digital resources are now around us that can help us become “digital” teachers.

As a conclusion, especially now that I have become to ponder additional uses for available Web resources, I would like to materialize two different things with my beginning reading students: on the one hand, to have students create their vocabulary logs in a blog-like style with a one-click access to the word pronunciation and with an online dictionary definition, especially after they have created their own and personal definition of the word based on the context studied in class or in the reading; on the other hand, to have students create short story summaries that can be shared with their peers to cooperatively assist others who have a bit of difficulty in grasping the conflict or theme of the stories studied in class. With these two ideas, it seems to me that the maxim of education can be exponentially magnified for the sake of student learning.

(My personal reflection on Technology and Language Teaching, taken and edited from Building Teaching Skills W2010, University of Oregon, American English Institute)