Thought this was interesting in general, and specfically the highlighted bit!

 

Re: Breaking down the walls of the classroom + Virtual Worlds

Posted by: "Sven Cederberg" sven@forumeducation.net   svenceder

Sat Feb 12, 2011 5:05 pm (PST)

Hi Nik and all,

In your replies to Pete, Ron, and me, you touch on the very core of
breaking down the walls of the square classroom - AUTONOMY.

The teacher's prime task is, has always been and will always be, to
guide his/her students towards autonomy, or as I prefer to call it -
self-reliant learning. You point out, Nik, that "all children are born
as autonomous learners, an ability that is later 'beaten' out of them by
schools". Well, at least the portenial to develop autonomy. Instead of
saying that the ability is "beaten out of them" you could say that many
learners won't develop the ability when they are faced with learning
tasks they cannot see the immediate benefits of. In The Seven Keys to
Self-reliant Learning, I make a distinction between spontaneous and
directed learning. In spontaneous learning, e.g. when teenagers are
tinkering with their mopeds, autonomy is 'plugged in' automatically.
Directed learning, in my terminology, concerns the kind of things you
(feel you) are forced to learn, e.g. brushing you teeth or to read and
write. There are great individual differences when it comes to what is
spontaneous and what is felt as forced upon you. In order to accomplish
the goal of guiding his/her students towards self-reliant learning
(accepting directed learning tasks), the teacher must have the
competence it takes to provide individualized learning opportunities in
challenging, creative and relaxed learning environments, be a super
motivator, and constantly work on the balance between spontaneous and
directed learning tasks.
Education is faced with tremendous challenges: The more complicated a
society gets, the more directed learning is needed, which in turn puts
ever-increasing burdens on the shoulders of teachers and teacher
trainers - not to mention our poor students. Over the past century we
have seen basic education for blue-collar workers go from six to twelve
years. We are now witnessing how lots of young people drop out of
school, and how boys are falling behind the girls in all subjects.
Naturally you could say that we humans cannot cope with the fast
development of technology and other major societal changes, but I don't
think we should sit down and wait for the inevitable holocaust. We need
to address the educational challenges that threaten to bury us in an
enormous avalanche. We need to better understand the possibilities and
the limitations of human potential and how that potential is transformed
into competence by learning.

Learning must not be seen as something that "prepares you for life" in a
square classroom, it has to be regarded as the most essential part of
your life from birth to death. The roles of our teachers and their
students must be clearly understood and appreciated. That's why I have
been trying to get you guys to dress the incomplete teacher so that not
only the square classroom walls are knocked down and teachers realize
the potential of extramural learning, but more importantly so that we
all get better prepared for the avalanche.

Best regards,
Sven

Onward ever onward...

Just finished a session - 9 people came and it's getting easier.  Made much more use of the breakout rooms tonight and this worked well, especially for those who had microphones - I think I'm going to encourage people more strongly to get microphones, because it's a much richer experience for all if you can use voice.  Discovered that the participants can move the slide show on themselves when they are in the breakout groups, so that was a bit of a revelation, and made managing them much easier.  I asked the learners about the breakouts and they were very positive about them - said that they gave them time to think.

In terms of the material, had a bit of a re-think about what is important to teach them.  Things do go slower in  on-line teaching, and I think I am being drawn into too much detail (especially with pronouns.....) I need to pare it back a bit and keep up the levels of practice.

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

Voice or Chat?

Just finished my first session in my bigger room - I had 8 participants, four of whom were the same people who came last week, so were really seeing the same thing again.  A couple of interesting things - one is that the number of people who are interested in this is quite a bit lower than I had hoped - only 8 out f 23 trainees - and (of course) the really weak trainees who need it most aren't coming. I guess that you can lead a horse to water.....

On a more technical note, although the voice option seems to work quite well with ConnectPro, it's interesting that most people don't seem to want to use it and are much more comfortable with the text chat option.  This has the advantage that it's easy to get answers and feedback from a wider number of people, but it's less personal from my point of view.  The new session went well, though - I estimated the amount of material much better and the visuals were good.

Another small technical hiccup is that when you put them into the breakout rooms, the powerpoint presentation in each room is on the first page (ie hasn't moved on.) Not sure if there is a way around this, but it'd be helpful if there were - I can't leave them with a quiz, because they're not on the right page.

How to do it better...

I signed up to Adobe Connect yesterday, so now I have a room that I can fit 100 people in (wow!) at a cost of around £40 a month.  I spoke on-line to the trainees in their input session, so now they all know what's available and we'll see how many turn up tonight at 8pm.

I've been thinking about the differences between this kind of on-line teaching and face to face classes (f2f).  It is a different animal, and is going to require some different techniques, I think, or at least a rethinking of the emphasis of different things.

The main two differences (and they're related) are that you can't see the learners' body language, and that makes it more difficult to ask them questions and have any idea of whether or not you're going to embarrass them.  In a class, you stand a good chance of knowing if they know.. not so, on line.

The other thing is similar, but related to the teacher, and is that it's easy in a class to create an atmosphere with your personality - you can sense the mood, run with it, and use your own energy to 'gee things up' where necessary.  This isn't so easy on-line.  I've been pondering how to help to inject more interest into the sessions (although, to be fair, the learners seem to like it so far, anyway).  I've re-adjusted the parts of speech session so that it's got about half the content of the original, includes lots of images, cartoons, etc and has a 'quick quiz' slide after each new bit of input -four in all.  Let's see how that goes....

Adobe Connect and keeping it simple

Tried this out last night.  I think it's going to be my vehicle of choice.  It only needs Flash Player, which apparently is pretty universal and only has one version, and the interface is nice. You can use Powerpoint and the animations work and there is the possibility of breakout rooms.  Having said that, I tried to use this facility last night and it seemed to result in the screen going blank and all of the learners losing sound and vision!  I thinkmore practice is needed with the software, preferably in a room where we can all see each other and play around with it a bit. 

Adobe is better with voice, too.  I only had 3 people  there, so I gave them all microphone rights and they can just press 'talk' when they want to put their microphones on (thus avoiding all of the feedback issues I had with Elluminate (which were probably my fault...)  Interestingly, though, they weren't all that keen on using the voice option and still prefered the 'chat' option often.  Not sure why - I'll have to ask them.  There is a bit of a delay with the voice communication, it's not as easy as speaking on the phone, for example, and it wasn't all that easy to hear all of the participants.  All bugs to iron out, I'm sure.

The other thing is simply that I'm still, despite paring back this session, putting in too much.  This isn't about the on-line part of it, I don't think, but just about what they do and don't know.  I HAVE to go back much more to basics - I tried to look at overall meanings of the perfect and continuous forms, but this was too much - I'm going to re-plan it looking just at the form.  It's hard, as always, with this kind of stuff, to see it from the trainees' point of view.  The nomenclature of the verb system seems so straightforward to me, but it really isn't to them.

Onwards and upwards......

Click Meeting

Just tried out this site.  It's quite nicely laid out, and it's on a 30 day free trial for a room with 25 person capacity.  More importantly, you don't seem to need to have any plug ins to run it.  The drawback is that you can load Powerpoint presentations, but like Elluminate, the slides will show but the animations don't work, so you can't easily reveal things.  I guess you'd have to put them on separate slides.  Adobe is better in this respect.