Answering questions in a VLE

Had a conversation today with the participants in the VLE about how they felt about answering questions in 'text chat' mode.  I can see that the advantage of this pedagogically is that more people get to answer, and it does help to show up any misunderstandings or misapprehensions that they are labouring under. On the other hand, it's more of a permenant record of a mistake and it's very public, so I wanted to know how people felt about this.  The people I asked acknowledged that this was true, but didn't find it too embarrassing.  Other things that were mentioned, however, were that :

• some people don't type fast, and so the touch typists have an advantage and that
• sometimes people don't know whether to type or talk. 

Re the second point, I think it is an idea to make this explicit and to 'train' people to understand that:

•  text chat works best as a whole group
• If you want to speak you should put up your hand or a confused icon etc
• When you're not speaking, you should turn off your mike -this is causing some problems in the breakout rooms with feedback.

What we did do today that was a great success was that the participants wrote on the whiteboard screen to provide answers and this worked very well, both in the breakout rooms and in the main room.

Transmission vs collaborative learning

One of the things I'm noticing is that on-lin teaching is probably better suited to a transission model, or at least, that's where the balabnce more naturally sits.  It's easy to tell people things, but the pairwork is harder. This doesn't sit easily with me,  as it makes for a much more teacher centred classroom and I felt last night as if I were dragging them through it (another lesson to keep learning is to limit the amount of material.....

The main problem is that the breakout rooms are a bit isolated - you can't keep your eye on them in the same way that you can in a class, and it's less easy to see whether they are stuck/ finished etc. One of the suggestions from feedback was to put a timer on the breakout sessions, so that they knew when they were coming back.  I did this last night and I think it was a good thing overall, but one comment was that in one case, they were given too long (it was only 2 minutes...) for a particular task.  You can easily move between rooms to check out how they are, of course.  The difficulty when they don't have microphones is that the breakout rooms are laborious for them and difficult to quickly assess for me.  Hopefully, in the next group, I've emphasised sufficiently that they need a mic and they'll mostly have one...

Thoughts from Nik Peachy

This was posted on the IATEFL ttedsig group  - digest number 1206  - 9th Feb 2011.  Thought it was interesting.
"Teaching is (broadly) a transferable skill and a good face-to-face teacher will
usually (not always) find that they are able to transfer
their good practice to new environments; their ability to reflect will enable
them to deal with the
difficulties / obstacles they encounter. "

This one I tend not to agree with. I think there are some teachers, possibly
exceptionally good ones, who will work best because they have a very direct face
to face connection to their students in class and for these teachers I think it
can be very difficult to transfer that to the online environment which can seem
very 'cold' and devoid of the kinds of paralingusitc 'clues' that many teachers
depend on. Teaching online can also undermine many of the very physical gestures
and techniques that classroom teachers use. It can be difficult and take a long
time to rebuild these and develop the same degree of comfort with expressing
yourself through your computer and digital tools.

These are just a few examples. I think it's a bit like saying that somepone who
is a good cyclist can tranfer those skills to become a good lorry driver. Well
yes, many of those skills are transferable, like respect for other road users,
knoledge of the rules of the road etc, but they also need a lot of support and
training to develop new skills and techniques too and time to adjust to a very
different environment with very different sensory indictators and connections.

best

Nik Peachey

And so it begins

I started my on-line teaching career last night.  I invited 12 of my celta trainees to join me at 8pm - four of them came... is that a good uptake, I wonder?  I guess once the ball is rolling and word spreads maybe more will come.  We have 23 traineess at the moment, so I may invite all of them next time, but I was a bit worried about being overloaded.

I had originally planned to use AdobeConnect as a platform.  I downloaded a free 30 day trial of that a few days ago and have seen Russell using it once, but in the trial version, you can only have 4 participants in the room (plus the presenter) and I was hoping for more.  As it turns out, that would have been enough, but hey ho....  Instead of this programme, I investigated Elluminate yesterday and found that you can also have a 30 day free trial with them, but have up to 25 people in the room.  This seemed a good option since I didn't want to exclude anyone that wanted to attend, so that's what I used.

So, how did it go?  Well, generally OK - the technical side of things seemed to work quite well - the only problem with Elluminate is that the box with your floating, talking head in it doesn't have a specific place to sit - you can move it whereever you like, but it always seems to be a bit in the way.  One of the participants said that hers was in front of her voting tools and she coudln't move it, although everyone else was able to - something to think about - sometimes it's just not easy to explain things to people on-line. The other small gripe with Elluminate is that, although you can upload a Powerpoint presentation, you can't use the 'reveal slowly' tools that Powerpoint offers (you can do this in AdobeConnect), so I felt a bit as though all my cards were on the table at the same time!

The main, glaring difference between this and face to face teaching is just how teacher centred it is (or maybe that was just me).  If you have all of the microphones switched on, the echo/ distortion is terrible, so you have to keep theirs switched off until they indicate that they want to speak.  It's then a bit of a faff to remember to switch your mic off and remind them to switch theirs on - I guess this will get easier with time and practice.  Also, although you can ask questions to individuals directly, this does put them on the spot - none of the peer-checking that you can do f2f is available and, more importantly, you can't get an idea from people's body language whether or not they have the answer and would like to give it to you!

There are a couple of ways to get less feedback in a less threatening way - Ellumnate has a nice tool that means you can 'poll' people for answers - give them a question and they answer 'tick' or 'cross' (usually yes/ no, I guess).  You can then display the percentage on the whiteboard, which shows how many understood without it being too obvious who didn't!  The main way that I get feedback from the group (and maybe this was only possible because it was a small group) was to ask questions and ask them to send a reply in 'chat'.  This worked well, but meant that I was the only one on voice and it feels to intuitively wrong to me to be talking so much......

Any other thoughts... well, it all took longer than I planned - I'd thought that an hour would be good, but it took an hour and a half, and I felt really tired afterwards (probably just to do with it being new).  Next time, I'll definitely make it shorter, and add in some more exercises - less presentation, more practice - that's not a new lesson to learn, I suppose!

OK, onwards and upwards - I might try AdobeConnect next week and see if that's any better.......