Enhancing Your Classroom with Technology

At the Spring 2011 Faculty In-Service on the Edwards Campus, I offered a session on “Enhancing Your Classroom with Technology.” I created a PowerPoint for this presentation which Suzanne Thompson has asked me to share with you on this blog.

To start the presentation, I showed a part of the famous “South Park” video that makes fun of those obsessed with the social networking site, Facebook. I wanted to acknowledge that I realize that some people hate technology or see it as a distraction, and others feel that they just have no time to figure it out. With the humor of the video, I hoped to create a relaxed environment. The video was on the PowerPoint so there was no fumbling around to pull it up.

During the session, I discussed the whys and hows of using Web Advisor and TaskStream. The difference between wikis and blogs were discussed as well as some creative ideas to incorporate them into a course. I created links to take us directly to one of my class blogs on Blogger and two wikis on PBWorks. We viewed a web game site, Quia that provides a way to reinforce course material in a different and engaging manner. This site has many free games already created by other teachers in just about every discipline. We took a look at some of the great resources available to CMC faculty such as Films on Demand. All of these tools are easily integrated onto BlackBoard so students and teachers have one access point.

Using PowerPoint made it very easy for me to link to all of these web components that I wanted to show the group. I am sharing this PowerPoint and hoping that you might be able to use it as a resource for exploring the many options that can make our classrooms more interesting and engaging. I feel that using technology helps us reach a variety of learning styles. We don’t want it to take over our lives as it did to poor Stan of South Park, but it can be a meaningful learning and teaching tool.

Enhancing your classroom_technology

View more presentations from cskvev.

CoTESOL Conference

By Terry McAnaney

I attended the annual CoTESOl conference in Aurora, Colorado in November. It was a two day conference for teachers of English to students of other languages. In addition to sessions Friday and Saturday mornings and afternoons, various publishing companies were available with sample books. I was able to get several sample copies of ESL books that will be available in the ESL storage room in Breckenridge.

There were many interesting sessions and some not interesting sessions. Two of the best were offered by the same presenters from the English Language Institute at the University of Utah. Two departments have combined forces (ESL and drama) to use acting to help ESL students with pronunciation, sentence and word stress, vocal expression and overcoming the fear of speaking in public in a foreign language.

In one activity they used a contentless scene. They used a general script such as:

"Hi"

"Hi, how are you?

"Fine, I guess"

and so on. . .

After the students read and familiarized themselves with the scene, they were given a situation such as: You are a young married couple. Last night after an argument, B left the apartment and stayed out all night. It is now the following morning. A is fixing breakfast. B returnes.

The students practiced the scene using the necessary stress and inflection dictated by the situation. Each pair was given a different situation. After sufficient practice, the pairs presented their situations to the class.

In another example, they downloaded a scene fron Utube of a portion of a Flash Gordon episode and deleted the sound. The students watched the video. They were divided into groups where they added their own script to the scene by dubbing in their voices using Audacity and Movie Maker. They did a great job!

In the second session by the same presenters, they used puppets to achieve similar objectives to the earlier session. They offered easy tips for making and using puppets. Stuffed animals were unstuffed then cardboard was sewn into the mouths so they could be worked with the hands. Gloves and socks with peepers also make easy puppets. Peepers are eyes connected with a "U" shaped plaxtic so they wrap around one's finger. Peepers can be found at http://www.peepers.com/.

To form a stage, the presenters used PVC pipe and connectors to form a structure on which to hang a curtian. They also suggested a curtain could be hung on chairs turned upside down on a table.

The scripts used were simple. Also used were conversations from the students text books. Students could also write their own scripts. It was great to hear the stress and inflection the students used behind the curtain when it wasn't really them, but rather the puppets talking.

Another very interesting session was a publisher session by McGraw-Hill presented by Pierre Montagan. McGraw-Hill has developed a very innovative online resource for instructors to design an ESL text for a certain class. As Mr. Montagan stated, ESL is different from other disciplines. In academic classes there is a set amount of information that is delivered. All texts for that subject matter have the same material presented, with slight variations, no matter the publisher. With ESL we have students with many different educational levels or no formal education at all. We have students from many cultures and students of various ages. One book does not fit all.
With "Create", a person can register on the McGraw-Hill website(http://www.create.mcgraw-hill.com/). Once registered, you have access to all McGraw-Hill textbooks and other third party materials. One can buy individual chapters from books, essays from third parties, add one's own materials and create a text book designed especially for your class. It is also possible to rearrange chapters or combine chapters from various texts. McGraw-Hill will publish your book with an ISBN number so your students or anyone else can buy it. It can be published as a print textbook or an e-textbook. The only problem I can see, especially in Breckenridge, is we don't generally know the demographics or exact level of our classes until after registration which provides limited time to compose a text.
Another interesting session was given by Lee Shainis and Rachel Fuchs; Teaching what every immigrant needs to know. Lee Shainis wrote a very informative guide of pratical information for immigrants living in the U.S. The language in the guide would be very difficult for levels below high intermediate. A Spanish version is due to come out in several months and he is planning on working on a simplified version in English.
He has developed activities to use with the guide such as doing a scavenger hunt with the table of contents or giving studenta a strip of paper with a question and then having them find the information in the guide. He also has a pdf of activities to use with the guide. You may email him at lee@intercabioweb.org. The website for buying the guide iswww.livingintheus.org.
The other sessions I attended weren't very helpful. Either the presenters didn't seem too interested in presenting or spoke with soft voices which were difficule to hear.
I did attend one last publisher session by Pearson Longman presented by Bill Bliss who is always entertaining. We were all given a copy of "Communication Games and Activity Masters" an activity book which accompanies the Word by Word picture dictionary. It has many great activities a lot of which can be used independently from the picture dictionary. I have already used an information gap activity with a chapter about directions from Side by Side.
In general I felt the conference was very worthwhile. I have attended a couple of CoTESOL conferences in the past, and I will certainly try to attend another in the future.

--Terry McAnaney

Web 2.0 Presents Cultural Tipping Point for Educators

Trent Batson's excellent article about how Cloud computing offers new faculty innovation opportunities, is one of the best written to date, and pinpoints the perils and the promise of IT trends in education today. This is a must-read for any educator who wants to understand the impact of emerging technologies on pedagogical best practices and the corresponding dilemmas faced by IT administrators.

Research has confirmed Batson's claim that, "We are as prisoners who have spent our lives in prison and cannot bear not having four walls around us, or those bars on the windows of our curiosity." Therefore, the mindset – not the machine – is more of a challenge to tech integration today.

Here's the summary breakdown of Batson's report:

• Web 2.0 is a global renaissance of unprecedented flowering knowledge
• Old-think prevents our seeing the opportunities before us as educators
• History proves that faculty took the lead in tech integration historically
• Continuous change (i.e. Web 1.0 to Web 2.0) is both tantalizing and frustrating
• Unlike changes in automobile innovations that took 91 years, Web 1.0 to 2.0 took only five years!
• As a result, IT depts are too busy making admin changes, to help faculty with pedagogical needs

Conclusion: "It is therefore time for faculty and academic leaders to assume permanent, campus-wide, and official leadership to transform higher education to fit the cultural learning trends and opportunities of today."

CoTESOL Convention Nov. '10

This past November I attended the annual CoTESOL (Colorado Teachers of English to Speakers o f Other Languages) Conference. There were many workshops and presentations available to participants. In addition to visiting the publishers’ exhibits, I also attended nine other sessions. Some of these sessions I found very disappointing perhaps because I have high expectation of other teachers to present their materials and findings in fun and engaging ways. Sadly, I found this not to be the case for more than a few sessions. That said, there definitely were some engaging presentations.

I was quite impressed with the presentation by McGraw-Hill’s Pierre Montagan. The new use of technology in the publishing industry is astounding and I felt I had a glimpse into the future of classroom textbooks. McGraw-Hill’s new program called CREATE allows any registered educator to have access to all of Mc-Graw’s materials and lets a teacher cut and paste any relevant chapters, articles, charts, graphs, etc. into their own custom made textbook. If, for example, a teacher normally uses one textbook for their course, but is unhappy with a few chapters and how the material is presented, they can keep their favorites and replace others with chapters they like better. They can design their own textbook with the most current articles, charts, chapters and research and easily update their book each semester with the freshest content. Pretty amazing.

I also really enjoyed two presentations by the same group from the University of Utah. The first session called “Dramatic English –from understudy to star” used great examples and video of ESL students using theater and drama to improve their English. It was enlightening to see the students open up once they were playing a character. Their tone and inflection noticeably changed when their scene was set depending on whether their character was angry, suspicious, guilty, etc. The students were given “contentless scripts”—scripts that were neutral in their words and could be adapted to the situation depending on if the characters were told to be happy, sad, excited, etc. Their second presentation, “Perfecting pronunciation through puppet performance” was similar (using theatre and drama), but rather than having students stand up and perform they used hand puppets to play the character. This appeared to be especially beneficial for the shyer students to try out their acting chops. Since the student is hidden behind a screen they were more apt to try different voices, tone and emphasis that they often don’t try in other classes in front of their peers.

I found that the most engaging sessions—aside from the University of Utah—were hosted by publishers. Their enthusiasm was much more palpable than from many of the teacher-hosted workshops. They were better prepared, engaging and fun, but I suppose that is how you’d need to be if you’re trying to sell something. Hopefully, more teachers will adopt these traits if they really want to “sell” education.