The Internet Grammar of English

Kate Fuscoe (thanks Kate!) sent me this link today for another on-line grammar course.  It's produced by UCL and is aimed at undergraduates (not necessarily trainee English teachers.)  I've had a quick look and it looks quite comprehensive and easy to follow, and it's free for anyone with an e-mail address that has an 'ac' in it - ie if they're in a further or higher educaton establishment.  Again, something to recommend, but I wonder whether the motivational element of a live class would be worth paying for.  Maybe I should ask some potential trainees to take some of these on-line grammar courses and get some feedback.  This isn't so likely to be possible if you have to pay for them, but I could direct them to the ucl course.

Nice feedback

Saw the trainees that I taught on line tonight in teaching practice.  They were all really positive about the experience and felt that it had been very helpful, which is great to know.

I discovered today a pre-celta on-line course called ELA, developed by John Hughes, who I rate, in conjunction with Cactus (who I've never heard of, but who I assume are a web type company). It was nominated for an ELTon apparently, and looks interesting, but it is only on-line, so a personal element is missing - I still think I might have an idea....

Planning to try to use AdobeConnect next week and see if that's any easier/ better to use, but of course, can only do it with 4 people....

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.......