The Effectiveness of my Teaching Style in a College Setting

As part of this course, Laureate Educator in the XXI Century, all of us participants were dared to analyze how effective our teaching style is when dealing with students who are not used to it. This questioning of my teaching style made me think about this issue in terms of the Use of the Case Study Methodology to arrive at a possible accurate answer.

A teaching style that is not compatible with students’ diverse learning styles is doomed to be a failure and become student and teacher frustration from the very beginning. Whether we consider that kind of students you have sitting in class or not, Generation Y students or Adult Learners, as teaching professionals we have to find the right alignment for one’s teaching style and students’ learning styles. Otherwise, the expected learning outcome on the students’ side is bound to be ineffective and unsuccessful.

Aligning one’s teaching style with Adult Learners’ learning style seems to be an easier task. Based on the extrinsic motivation that drives this sort of student, my personal teaching style can fit his/her need for learning new skills and for accepting new challenges as part of his/her previously-conceived goals for his/her education and enhancement in his competitiveness at work. Due to his/her working experience, it is probable that the learner’s learning orientation becomes beneficial to find the golden means needed to get aligned with my personal teaching style to really profit from my college courses. A mere talk with them can actually trigger the desired alignment, and then everything will go on target.

In the case of the Generation Y students, echo boomers require a different orientation or alignment that implies the use of technology. For this reason, having most of these students in college classes, it is important to use Web 2.0 tools to access their intrinsic motivation. By means of Web 2.0, one can fulfill the needed reinforcement of course contents, information retention and retrieval, and the transfer of knowledge to other learning or day-to-day situations in life in society. A bit of learning of these Web tools is needed and required from the teacher.

To conclude, using these two approaches regarding these two types of college students, we can assess the needs of each group of learners and strengthen the learning objectives for each course we teach. Using this simple exercise regarding the Case Study Methodology, it is possible to find the most suitable way out for both kinds of students, to guarantee learning, and to assist one’s teaching in class.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Social Networks in EFL Learning Settings

On a personal basis I have to admit that I am not part of any social network. The reason is simple: I do not believe in sharing personal information, videos, or pictures with strangers or acquaintances. But this has been my personal choice. Yet, I have to admit that they can serve as Personal Learning Networks (PLNs).

I cannot see myself using Facebook or Twitter; however, Yahoo Discussions Groups can serve a nice purpose for writing classes or oral communication courses in which you want students to keep the discussion out of class. Yahoo Discussion Groups can be used as a nice platform to work on forum discussions with students that can reflect the content covered in class time or the course objectives. On the same line of work Google Wave can also serve as a means to connect to students and create a class discussion group in which students can discuss, in real time, any issue relevant to the class content.

By talking to my students at Universidad Latina, over here in Costa Rica, I can say that 95% of them have a Facebook account that they regularly check and update. I have gotten several invitations to join some of my former and current students, but I have turned down the offer endlessly. They cannot believe that I do not have a Facebook account and do not seem to understand my reluctance to the creation of one.

Since my students are “digital natives,” what I devised was another way of getting in touch with them. I created a class blog in which I embedded a chat-box to talk to them if they need my assistance. At the university I seem to be the only one who specialized in pronunciation, and I do not have any student attention hour to deal with doubts or questions. After listening to some of my students last term, complaining about the student attention hours, I decided to create a means to get in touch with students when I am working online on my planning or examinations. (Visit my chat-box at http://bin-02.blogspot.com/)

Now that I have read and researched a bit more about PLN, I have to admit that this could be a nice way to foster student autonomy. I would like to try Yahoo! to create a discussion group where students can post their questions and clarify other partners’ doubts with my assistance, as a monitor. I can still invite them to my pronunciation class blog to talk to me, or send me their questions to my institutional email account. But what happens when I am not available? I guess another peer can be responsible for answering any doubt, and then my role will be just monitoring and fostering a PLN for sharing, advice, practices, materials, and links to consolidate learning.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Innovation and Connectedness with the Real World

After being asked the following question, now that I am taking this online course entitled Laureate Educator in the XXI Century, I have given it some thought and came up with this answer that I would like to share with you. “In what moments or by means of what set of actions, do you consider that your didactic approach reflects the beliefs held by Laureate’s Educational Network?”

Working on an answer for the question provided in one of the course’s forums, I would like to state the following: “As an EFL professional working for more than 12 years for Universidad Latina, I have tried to focus my academic efforts in class towards Web-based technologies that can foster foreign language learning and student language autonomy. For this reason, I have been working on this field for about a year now to innovate on homework and project assignments I ask students to develop for my courses, based on the course contents and objectives.”

Right after taking another online course with Laureate’s Network entitled The Use of the Case Study Methodology, I have tried to design activities and learning tasks that somehow reflect this new didactic tool for me, mostly on my Oral Communication courses that present the perfect learning/teaching scenarios for this methodology. In this way I have also tried to align what is going on in the working environment and surroundings, which they will have to live once they become teaching professionals, with the class content and activities. With this innovative tool in my language teaching style, I can, up to a certain extent, connect the class with the real world.

To conclude this rather long answer to the question above, I personally believe that these two educational maxims, which are part of Laureate’s teaching philosophy are cornerstones to fully train the professionals-to-be found in one’s classrooms. With every single bit we teachers contribute with our students’ education, we can try to make the world a better place to live. Our personal educational standards can grow exponentially in the development of knowledge in the minds of our students. And students will be better prepared to face the working challenges they will encounter later on in their professional lives.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Podcasting Services for EFL Classes

One of the never ending complaints by EFL/ESL teachers has been about the sources of authentic audio material for classes. Podcasts can be the solution to this problem.

Can learners benefit from this form of audio material? Of course! Having the chance to exercise their listening skills by listening to audio material, aside from the one they usually get along with textbooks. is always great practice for their ears. Being exposed to other kinds of accents is a nice training for students.

Is the language in podcasts too difficult for students? To answer this, it is the teacher’s task to listen to this audio material and evaluate the level it is appropriate for, bearing in mind Krashen’s maxim of i+1. Once the level is identified, if the material is suitable for any of the course book units or as an extracurricular activity, the teacher can decide which students will benefit from the listening task.

An important piece of advice for podcasting in or out of class is to keep some kind of “library” for a given class. Depending on the podcasts you may find on the Web or through iTunes, it is a good idea to create –somehow- a classification for them: in terms of thematic units or by the level of difficulty based on a CEF rating. Perhaps, a class wiki could be a good repository for this listening material, including the tasks students need to complete related to the podcast.

Considering the advantages of using podcasts, rather than other online audio clips, is that we can indeed find specialized ones for EFL/ESL learning. That is, we teachers can always have access to interesting material that somehow can be related or is linked to our course units. For this reason, it is really advantageous to use podcasts to foster language learning among students or as a nice way to consolidate what students are learning in class.

Some interesting sites I have used before with students are the following:

For vocabulary building: http://www.justvocabulary.com/

For new words: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Languages/Vocabulary-Building/MerriamWebsters-Word-of-the-Day-Podcast/19450#plink

For various thematic units: http://www.eslpod.com/website/index_new.html

For podcasts and vodcasts on various topics: http://www.podanza.com/

For podiobooks, not exactly podcasts: http://www.podiobooks.com/

For vodcasts, link to youtube: http://www.openculture.com/

I hope you find these sites interesting to explore and eventually use with your students. Good luck!

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Setting up a Class Wiki: My Personal Experience

Before I got to understand what a class wiki was, I started using it while being part of an online class. I might have mentioned this before, but I took a class about Web tools with the University of Oregon. Part of the class projects and homework was posted on the class wiki at sites.google.com. After this first encounter I wonder how I could start one for one of my classes, and my Web Professor –Deborah Healey- gave me the answer and some basic instructions to set it up.

By using sites.goole.com I discovered that I was able to create different pages and wikis for my classes. However, since I got into wikis, I have kept only one for my Reading Skills 2 courses. The reason for this relies on the fact that I use it to post my students’ email addresses, their reading projects in blogs and glogs (This is something new, like my new acquisition to Web tools for my class.), and any other reading homework for them to complete.

Having a class wiki has lots of advantages. As a university professor it does give me good control over students’ projects to keep track of their progress and to grade them when the deadline has come. As for my students, logging into the wiki allows them to comment on their peers’ projects, exchange points of view –in class or online- about what they are doing and the way they have done it. All this can be done by grating them permission to access the wiki page by means of their Gmail accounts. (I decided to use sites.google.com because all of them have the chance to use www.blogger.com as well.)

As you can see, my class wiki has served its purpose since the very beginning. I have not tried to use it as a place to edit works implying having students working all of them at the same time. I guess I have to give it a try. And if you feel like taking a look at my present class wiki for Reading Skills 2 visit it at the following address: https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsiiiii2010/. After that, please give me your feedback.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Educational Blogs

Blogs are used for many different purposes. In regards to education, we can find two basic types: Class Blogs and Student Blogs. Although this is not an extensive classification of blogs, in this particular analysis, let’s include the Teacher Blogs as well.

Based on my particular experience, I have been working with blogging for three college terms in a row (since January 2010). At the beginning, for a university project on Web 2.0, I decided to work with blogs to enhance my students’ understanding of short stories studied in the university’s Reading Skills 2 class, and, to somehow, help students develop their sense of editing when writing, since it was very common to find lots of syntactical mistakes, problems with word choice, and the wrong use of verb tenses.

For Reading Skills 2 I created a class blog to post a step-by-step analysis of a story entitled Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne in a WebQuest format [1]. Since I was not sure how things would come out, I just designed one WebQuest. Eventually, I included other stories, and some other assignments for students to complete. Giving them the class blog’s address was an easy task; keeping up their good work among students a tough task. At the end, this online experience proved to be worth the effort, and that is why I continue to use it by changing bits every quarter.

Since the very first class blog I created for a university course on reading skills, I have asked my Reading Skills 2 students to create their personal student blogs. The first quarter (January to April 2010) [2], I used this PBL task with two WebQuests and a creative writing short story analysis in a cartoon-like format. The second quarter (May to August 2010) [3], I just worked on my students with two WebQuests and a novella analysis for the final examination. And this last term (September to December 2010) [4], we have already worked on two WebQuests, a glog with another short story analysis, and a cartoon-like analysis of a science fiction story. Most of this material is posted on their blogs or in the class wiki.

After all this rewarding experiences, I decided to work on a class blog for Pronunciation 1 [5] that I have not been able to fully develop. There are lots of things I want to include, but it takes time to work on each post. I also have two other sub-developed class blogs for Reading Skills 1 [6] and Pronunciation 2 [7]. And after I took an online course on the methodology regarding case studies, I created another class blog for my Oral Communication 4 class [8] to use this methodology and its scope in language learning.

In order to deal with student questions, because all of these class blogs are password protected, I included a “shout box” or a “chat box” for students to leave their comments or questions. And in the case of student blogs in Reading Skills 2, I encourage them to edit their posts because they do not want other people to see their grammar mistakes. Some of them have edited their entries; some others have left what they produced the way it was after I gave them my “written” feedback.

Finally, I have tried to keep a Reflective Teacher Blog [9] ever since I started leaving my Web imprints. Now that I am taking this online course with Laurate: ENGT.TDM3.EN.2010.T4.A, I have kept on leaving my reflections on my blog. Based on this lengthy online experience this year, I am sure that all teachers should have some kind of Web site that can host a blog for them to mull over the things they have been able to achieve along a school term, a school year, etc.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Links to blogs:

[1] http://bin-08-reading-skills-ii.blogspot.com/

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsii/

[3] https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsiiii2010/

[4] https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsiiiii2010/

[5] http://bin-02.blogspot.com/

[6] http://bin-04.blogspot.com/

[7] http://bin-06.blogspot.com/

[8] http://bin-14.blogspot.com/

[9] http://reflective-online-teaching.blogspot.com/

As a highly frequent user of www.delcious.com, I wouldn’t ask my students to limit the number of bookmarks per topic. What if they are really interested in a topic, and they want to do some kind of extensive reading of the topic? Who am I to stop their thirst for knowledge by asking them to limit the number of bookmarks they have. In addition, once the students get to use their bookmarking pages in Yahoo! Or Google, they are the ones who need to come up with their personal “mechanism” to retrieve the information (Web page) they need. A general thematic unit tag can help a lot to get to the information you look for when your bookmarking page begins to grow big.

As I get to learn from my instructors at the University of Oregon, Distant Education Department, a good way to share bookmarks is to create a wiki in sites.google.com [*] once students have created their corresponding pages. After that, you can instruct them on how they can send each other bookmarks for them to explore. This procedure is then applicable to www.delicious.com and www.diigo.com.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

[*] sites.google.com

My Personal Web Imprints

By working online with Web 2.0 tools such as course wikis and educational blogs, I am sure that I have left my personal Web imprints for people to track me down. Somehow I have avoided leaving so many footprints for “cyber dogs” to easily track me down. Because I don’t believe in social networks, I have no accounts on Facebook and the like because I really enjoy my privacy as a human earthly being.

I cannot be against people who use these tools for communicating with their dear ones or students, but count me out! I guess it is a great idea for them, but the idea has never sunk in my head, ever! I’m not really interested in being exposed the Web visitors trying to quench their thirst for personal information of a language teacher happily working in Costa Rica. Let them quench their thirst in some other puddle.

As you many have noticed, you can conclude that I am not a member of any Website, online forums, and the like. I do write lots of emails to teaching partners in various parts of the globe, but we do that among ourselves privately. Because my privacy is my legitimate right, no picture or video about me is found online. I am not interested in that cyber “fame,” Yet, by searching my full name on the Web I can see a bit of my imprints: comments I made on national issues on Local newspapers, reviews of items I have bought online, my educational blogs, and surprisingly enough for me, I got quoted by a TESOL member, Shelly Wong, on the TESOL Quarterly article after a consulting participation in a local TESOL affiliate conference.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Web 2.0 Tools in Language Teaching

Are there more advantages than disadvantages when getting to use Web 2.0 tools in a language class? Understanding the most of our students in today’s classrooms belong to the Generation Y, -the digital learners-, the usage of free Internet tools is a way to create learner autonomy. The use of these kinds of tools can become an engaging and meaningful way –for students- to contribute with their personal language learning.

But are there disadvantages when Web 2.0 tools become part of the language class staging? I tend to believe that there are no real disadvantages if there is a “real” purpose in using a given tool as part of one’s language course. If part of the learning objectives present in the course outline given to students at the beginning of a college term are translated into Web 2.0 products that can reflect them, we can feel satisfied that they were achieved, and students got the hang of using a “new” tool that can be highly beneficial to them, eventually, when they become professionals.

However, when using Web 2.0 tools as part of one’s course content production, accessibility to the Web is a crucial thing to consider. Intending to use a given tool in a language class course –knowing that students will have limited access to it- is a fruitless effort since many of a student will not fulfilled the expected task. In this particular case, going to the old days when books and paper-made activities were the only thing to use can be much better to accomplish the learning goals students are to learn in one’s class.

Do you think the time you need to invest in using some of these tools is worth it? Before a teacher ventures in using a new Web 2.0 tool in a language class is important that he/she knows how to use it properly. The reason for this is that the teacher becomes the students’ trainer and needs to exemplify what he/she wants students to produce, having a clear rationale of learning purposes underlying the task. Once this introduction to the “tool” is given to students, being them digital natives, it can be very easy for them to discover other things that can be done with the given tool. If this explanation is provided with the proper exemplification, the time invested is worth it!

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

WebQuest Repositories

A fact about being a language teacher is that at times, between checking papers and exams and our daily lesson planning, we may find no time to work on developing more challenging activities for our students such as a WebQuest. Can this lack of time be somehow compensated for a teacher willing to dig the Web? Sure it can! Just get to visit a “WebQuest Repository” such as the one hosted by http://zunal.com/.

The Chocolate Quest, at http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=72623 and designed by Jose D. Caban, an English teacher from Puerto Rico, was my choice since, according to our Reading Skills 2 course book “Active Reading Skills 2” (by Neil J. Anderson), our next section of the book to cover is Unit 9: The History of Chocolate. Now let’s evaluate the Quest’s suitability for my class.

1. Is the language level in the WebQuest appropriate for your students?

Because my Reading Skills students are pre-intermediate language learners, about a A2- based on the CEF, the level of English in the WebQuest is right on target. The “i+1” by Stephen Krashen can be easily met by the students in my class. The language level is challenging enough for my students to fully complete the task.

2. Do you think the topic would be motivating for your students?

Chocolate, made from the seeds of theobroma cacao, has been one of those tasty delicatessens embedded in our culture ever since. Dealing with this particular topic by sharing a Hershey’s kiss with the students can be all the motivation they need to start digging the “delicious” past behind this “food of the gods.” (That’s the meaning of theobroma, “food of the gods.”)

3. Is the WebQuest appropriate to the age group of your students?

This particular WebQuest, not just because it is in our textbooks, is suitable for a reading skills class. The reason for this is that two of the cornerstones in our course are skimming and scanning. Can you think of a better way to have students skim and scan written material? I am sure that students will be able to apply their reading skills on the Web and complete the task.

4. What editing would be needed to make the WebQuest appropriate for your students?

The one thing that would be needed to be changed to fully fit my lesson planning purposes is regarding the evaluation the Puerto Rican instructor is using in it. His main goal is to have students present that material in some kind of oral presentations. Had I been working on this subject-matter in an oral communication class, it would have been suitable. But in my Reading Skills 2 class, the WebQuest should be modified to contribute with the Reading Reports they must submit along the course. And since Zunal allows you to sign for “one” free complete WebQuest and allows you to import it and modify it, I would have to make to proper changes to fit the course needs and standards in terms of the evaluation.

5. Where and when would your students be able to consult the Internet links recommended in the WebQuests?

Based on the framework used for my Reading Skills 2 class, students will work autonomously on this PBL task. That means, as most of the graded pieces of homework we have throughout the course, they will have to do this at home, consulting the Web links on their own, whether that is in their very home or cyber café. We try to encourage students to use the Internet to work on their projects and homework, so it would not be strange for them doing this sort of online task at home.

As a conclusion on the use of WebQuests in language learning, do not make this kind of PBL tasks optional or as a mere homework. What I mean is that some kind of grade or percentage needs to be tagged to it. It has been our experience at Universidad Latina that not every student will be willing to do this kind of autonomous work for the sake of their learning. I would not like any teacher trying this kind of PBL tasks to get an unexpected result with their students: finding that just 50% of the students did not do any work regarding the WebQuest. A grade equivalent to a given number of points of students’ final grades can be more than enough to fully motivate them to work on their projects, for the sake of their language learning.

Jonathan

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica