Faculty Academy has had a huge warm spot in my heart…Prior to attending in 2008 I had never been to a meet up where there was so much joy coupled with wildly creative and yet blissfully simple uses of technology for teaching and learning.   I worried that I had overly romanticized FacAcad to Ma’ayan  (What if things had changed? What if I had remembered it differently than what the reality would be?  What if what was then  had been  replaced by a horrible new now?)

My worries were unfounded.  Delightfully so…. Faculty Academy continues to be one of the most inspiring, unpretentious, open, fun, creative academic technology events celebrations I have ever attended. And it is free. Yes, FREE…as in free lunch (and you get a couple of those too!!!)

In fact, last week, and thanks to Faculty Academy, I got my sanity back.  Not to mention my wayward language tech mojo: I now haz a renewed desire to create, discover, explore what’s possible in edtech and languages.

What sets FacAcad apart is the fact that people are eager to share, eager to collaborate, eager to show you how it is done and even help you do it..  They are genuinely joyful about the things they create and the work their students and colleagues have done.  These are folks who work hard, wicked hard, but they all also plaaaaay equally hard.  I also love the fact that the DTLT folks (Martha , Jim, Tim, Andy and Alan…an awesomely talented lineup of people) seem to live with the motto that anything and everything  is possible… and as soon as they have figured it out then everyone (and I mean everyone) is invited to come in and join the fun.  What can we share with you? How can we help you make that happen?

Ma’ayan summarized Faculty Academy perfectly:

Faculty Academy is much like improv: it’s all about “Yes, and?” rather than “Yes, but…”

Being there also solidified my commitment to seeing how I  can learn from UMW’s ds106 online open experience and apply it to the teaching of languages.  Yerp.  As I gear up to teach the second semester of the intermediate Spanish language sequence next fall, and as I attempt to make useful and current yet another dry, tedious, horridly expensive textbook (and its online mega “interactive” course blah dee blah), things like the amazing ds106 assignment bank  are a welcome, thrilling change of course.  Anyone else wanna play along?

MOOC love

 Foto by Ma’ayan Plaut on Instagram

I’m feeling the Faculty Academy Love, indeed, and  am looking forward to a wonderful summer of what if’s? and why not’s!

Thank you Martha, Jim, Tim, Andy and Alan…for yet another amazing event!

Well lookee there.  We have been nominated for the bab.la/ Lexiophiles Language Lovers Top 100 blogs, under the category of Language Learning blogs.

Yes, we have been nominated before, and yes blogs with much greater traffic have made it to the top 100.

But who knows…maybe this will be our year.  Feel free to click on the icon above and cast your vote!

The Class Blogs. Yours for the taking

For the past 5 years, I have had the extraordinary good fortune to work  with  creative and talented people who value not only the need to create tools that facilitate learning, but tools that also are open, available for sharing, and heck, are danged good looking too.  And for those of you who have followed LLU and the Teaching Transparently tag/thread here, you will know that creating a class blogging tool has been a work in progress.

Until now.

My colleague Justin ,  a man of many extraordinary talents, is an accomplished musician and photographer and programmer. He has added to that list of talents “WordPress Wrangler” and as such has developed The Class Blogs Plugin.  What is nice about this tool is that it creates a front page “mother” blog as an aggregator of the student generated content (each student has hs or her blog as part of this package as well).  Unlike most blogs that display posts horizontally (the newest one at the top and pushing the older posts down…) this tool takes feeds from the students blogs, and pulls them to the front page such that the most recent post is in the upper left corner of the page…with all of the other posts still being displayed, albeit shifted slightly  to the right and down.    The effect is that of a newspaper, I think.  Also any images posted on the students’ blogs percolate up to the sidebar in the “mother” blog (with links back to the posts).

The tool is free and available for download off of the plugin page on the WordPress.org site.  Please download it, check it out, try it out, and let us know (and others!) what you think.  I would love to collaborate with others using this tool, with the hopes of thinking new and fun ways of using it for learning.

Happy Blogging!

Gelati. Yum.

Last month, I had the extraordinarily good fortune to be able attend the EUROCALL Open Educational Resources SIG Conference hosted by the  Centro Interfacoltà di Linguisitica Teorica ed Applicata (CILTA) at the University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy).  The title of the conference was “Learning Through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication.”

The venue was incredible, to be sure.  But what made this conference possibly one of the best meetings I have attended anywhere was the simple fact that the organizers were determined to do something different and to make the meeting more interactive.  Everyone who attended had written a paper and therefore was presenting a paper.  All of the participants’ papers were released to the group  a month before the meeting, with the expectation that we would read them BEFORE we came to the conference,  and certainly before we attended a session.

In the conference program it stated:

Authors will be given 45-minute slots in which two or three related papers will be discussed together. The authors of the papers will be given 5 minutes each to summarise the main issues discussed in their papers (which all the participants should have read beforehand). This will be followed by a 30 minute discussion.  It is hoped that this format will encourage deeper reflection and discussion, and provide authors with valuable feedback on their work.

And guess what?  IT WORKED.  The session moderators kept the presenters (as best they could, because yes some people just can’t limit themselves, oh well) to the 2-4 minute limit for presenting a synopsis of their work.  After about 10 minutes of that, the rest of the session (35 minutes or so) was filled with questions from the audience and conversations in and amongst all  of the people in the room.

Oh and the other thing? This was a NO POWERPOINT conference. So as a presenter, you did not need to fuss about slides and all of that…just summarize your work and be ready to ask and receive questions.  Brilliant!

While it might have been argued that the two keynotes could have been flipped as well, the final closing “plenary roundtable” made up for that.  Using  Today’s Meet , people were put into small groups and asked to post thoughts about ideas, innovations, questions that were  presented during the conference.  It struck me as a GREAT way to pull together the themes and ideas of a meeting using a variety of perspectives.  To see the archive of what we all pulled together about the conference, click here.

So, for all of you out there who think conferences can’t be flipped, I beg to differ. My new colleagues here in Italy have shown us all that it can be done.

Felicitazioni!

Fred Astaire, "Royal Wedding," (1951)

A few weeks back I spent some time catching up on my blog reading, and was happy to see that Alan Levine was writing about the need to flip more than classrooms.   Indeed.  People all around the internet  have been talking for awhile about flipped classrooms and the need to make teaching less teacher-centric and more student/learner-centric.  Educators like Salman Khan of  Khan Academy have been practicing this idea for years.

But as Alan reminds us, one of the major places where flipping needs to happen is professional conferences. He writes:

“the best interactions [at conferences] happen in the breaks and the evening socials, the stuff that is not part of the agenda….” and not at the events where there are “lecterns, screens full o’ powerpoint, partially full of passive [or under caffeinated] participants [who might be]  reading email or facebooking.”

His comments resonated with me as I prepared to do a keynote presentation for SWALLT at ASU.  Maybe resonated isn’t the word.  Maybe the words were “stopped me dead in my tracks and made me rethink the whole idea of doing a keynote.”  Yeah, that would be more like it.

The time was getting short and I knew that  if I were truly going to flip the keynote, I would have to have prepared everything in advance, distributed it to all of the participants, and then hoped they would have read it prior to the event.  Ugh.  And yet, I didn’t want to stand and talk at people for an hour either.

The title of the talk was “language learning in liminal spaces,” that is, the extraordinarily innovative things that language students are doing as part of their learning in our schools, learning that is not as visible  as it could or should be. What would happen if we made that learning more visible to others?  What would happen if we could assess the value of our language programs not by the number of bottoms in seats or majors per department, but by what the students were able to DO with the skills they learned in a language? Would talking about learning outcomes perhaps be more effective than talking about learning outputs?   I knew that within the audience there were extraordinary stories and amazing ideas to share… it seemed ridiculous to have me monopolize time by yabbering when they could be sharing with each other.

Enter the happy medium.  Instead of flipping the keynote, I tilted it. I spoke for 20 minutes, gave the group a series of questions, asked them to work in small groups, and then had them report back at the end.  People shared ideas, commiserated over common woes and concerns, brainstormed.

Here were the questions:

• Think of an example of one successful, innovative learning practice on your campus
• What is its intended learning outcome
• How could you make that practice (and the learning it elicits) more visible on your campus?

Here is an example of at outcome from one group:

If I am asked to do a talk again, I will not be going back to the speaker-centric keynote model.  And I hope in some small way what I did here at ASU can be an example for others.  The talking head needs to be replaced with more interaction, ideas, conversation, and debate.

That’s why we go to conferences, after all…to meet other people, to share and to learn.

What Google Reader told me this morning. Gee, thanks.

It is the last day of the winter break and grades are due tomorrow.  Which means, of course, that I am doing everything BUT posting my grades.  It’s not that I haven’t finished reviewing my students work and their self evaluations…I have, that’s done (and I will be blogging about that soon).  It’s just the finality of it all… and the fact that I don’t know when/if I will be teaching that course again (more on that later).

So, when in doubt…clean.  I decided to try and clean up and maybe even use my Google Reader page.  It had been a while since I last checked in.  Several of my friends’ blogs had changed domain names (whoops).  Bitch PhD (whom I followed) long ago quit her job and went into the Private sector (double whoops).  Yeah, my Google Reader feeds were a mess.  So I tried to clean it up and re subscribe to things.

The problem is that Google Reader’s interface is SO TERRIBLE that once I got things set up (sort of)  I just wanted to lay down and take a nap out of exhaustion.  And not read any of the feeds.  Which, of course, defies the purpose altogether now dunnit?

After chatting/complaining/whining with Ryan (who shares this opinion), I asked him how he got his updates on people’s blogs etc.  Simple: Twitter.  (slap to forehead)  Oh and Reddit (aka “The Front Page of the Internet”). Which I don’t know anything about and now need to learn.  (Poke poke poke to Ryan… hoping for a comment with info on how to use Reddit below).

So back to Twitter I go.  Huzzah.

In the meantime if any of you LLU readers have any language/ language-tech/ tech  related bloggers/twitterers you think are worthy of following please comment below.

Hmmm, now that’s done…off to clean the kitchen, I guess…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neb31/6604485775

It is that wonderful time at the end of the calendar year when businesses and schools are closed and family members are home, together.  Here at our house,  in between the Scrabble  board game smack downs and the Sudoku marathons, interspersed  between the hours of sleeping, cooking and eating, I have been trying to catch up on my twitter feeds and the blogs I follow.

I discovered this gem, made by the CogDog  (Alan Levine).  Being the foreign language nerd that I am, I have no idea how this site escaped my attention until now, but here it is:  “Words with No English Translation”

Jim Groom blogged about the site here and also linked to a ds106 exercise that used the words from “No English Translation” as a create-an-image-that-portrays this word exercise prompt.  I am wondering aloud about the possibility of asking my future students to do something similar with these words, but in a much more low tech fashion.

Maybe they could choose a word and draw it as we did in for exercise last semester  (images here). The prompt was “draw something that happened last week and then give the drawing to your partner and ask him/her to interpret it.”

Or maybe choose a word and build its representation out of Legos® (along the lines of an exercise I had my class do here).

Hmmm.  Time for more pie.

And when/if  you are done with reviewing the non English words, there is always the fun game of asking your students how to explain /find an equivalent in a second language for English words like “awkward”

Happy New Year to all.

#1:  To my colleague Justin, the class blogging tool he has created:

Justin created a class blog package using WordPress and several custom made plug ins in response to my many years of teaching with blogs, and my desire to keep tweeking the tools to best suit the learning outcomes of my class.

Justin explains on the project page for our center:  “Our class blogs package consists of a group of plugins, packaged as an easy-to-use single MU plugin, that provides features that are commonly used by classes, such as word counting, automatic approval of student comments, an auto-updating YouTube class playlist and, most importantly, aggregation of student posts, comments and tags.”

What I really love about it is the newspaper-like feel to the central mother blog, and how all of the participants’ posts show up together on the front page. (Each student has his or her own blog.. but this front page aggregates everything here)  The only  shifting that happens is that the most recent post lands in the upper left hand corner of the front page. The other posts get pushed to the right and down (but they do not disappear).

Also, if you look closely at the “header” for each of the columns you will see some numbers:

The blog counts not only the number of posts that each student has contributed (via his or her own blog) but also the number of comments s/he has made on other people’s blogs within the class. Since blogging is about creating community and sharing, their comments (at least in my class) are as important as their posts.

Also, despite what that Digital Native-Digital Immigrant balderdash you might have been led to believe, the students I teach  don’t take to technology willingly and fearlessly.  So the bloghas a way to allow students to assume another name should they not wish to be known by their own out there in the big ole blogosphere.  Like so:

(look at the number of comments vs the number of posts…whoa)

Okay so the best news evah? You can have the blog package for your very own:  Yep.  Download it and use it…for free.  Click here to find out more.

All I ask is that you acknowledge Justin’s hard work when you use  it (i.e. don’t claim it to be your own)  AND that you tell us how you are using it.  I would love, love,  love  to create a community of teachers and classes (language and otherwise!) that are using this tool so we could share our ideas and our experiences.  Interested? I hope so.

#2: To Todd Bryant  and his amazing tool The Mixxer:

The  Mixxer has, every semester, taken the messiness and the headache out of finding language exchange partners for my students in Spanish, not to mention more than several dozen people willing to drop everything on a Friday morning just to chat with my students in Spanish on Skype.

The community here is wonderful, and Todd does a great job of keeping the site current and free from sketchy folks. He is always willing to help the language teacher create contacts and connections as well as meetups for classes.  The site has a blogging tool as well.  I understand that there will be updates made to the site very soon, so stay tuned.

Bravo to Todd and this site.  The Mixxer has created more friendships between my students and “strangers” than I can count, and provides language learners with a flexible way to keep practicing the languages they are studying even after the semester is over.

#3 To the Cog Dog (Alan Levine) and his site Five Card Flickr

I just love this site.  Five Card Flickr allows the user to create a visual story using random  images that the class can choose  (pics come from individual’s Flickr collections  and have been tagged “5cardflickr”).  The site then allows the user to give the story a title and perhaps some text to go along with it.

CogDog was kind enough to allow my class to have its very own 5 Card Flickr page, so when they tagged their Flickr photos as “Hisp205″ they showed up here.

Don’t despair.  You can use the 5 card Flickr site as is for your class, or you can  access the source code here. Either way, you need to praise Alan to the heavens and be sure to credit him for his amazing work.  If you have a blog, blog about it.  Share the love. woof.

#4 Finally: where would I be without Voicethread. ?

I love this tool.  I love the fact that students can create content together, share ideas, comment on each others comments, draw…all of it.  For my final “exam” this semester, my students are taking screen shots of what they consider to be significant learning moments that happened on their class blogs (be it a post, a comment, whatever) and making a Voicethread narration (in Spanish) of those moments.  (note: using 5 card flickr to help them warm up to this task was awesome).

I also love the fact that my having an educators license for the tool, we easily encourage other faculty to come and use it too.  Thanks to Voicethread, those “make a movie of yourself speaking an email it to me” nightmares are over.  Now it is:  make a Voicethread and share it with others, and then respond to their comments.  Everybody participates, everybody learns.

Have a tool you would like to share? Please add it to our comment stream.

Wishing each of you a restful and rejuvenating end of the year break!

]]> http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/12/14/a-few-shout-outs-and-a-woof/feed/ 2 http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/11/02/mid-semester-evaluation-do-it/ http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/11/02/mid-semester-evaluation-do-it/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:06:30 +0000 Barbara http://languagelabunleashed.org/?p=3545

http://thisisindexed.com/2011/08/keep-calm-and-carry-on/

We are at the 1/2 way spot in our semester. It’s midterm grading time (here the grades at midterm are pretty simple: Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, Really Unsatisfactory and Never Seen This Person).  It is also a perfect time to ask the students to evaluate the teacher and the class.

Bring on the informal evaluation.

Here is how it works: Give the students 15 minutes at the end of class. They can answer some all or none of the questions. It is anonymous. The questions are any variation of the following:

What should START doing in this class?

What should STOP doing in this class?

What should we KEEP doing in this class?

What can the teacher do to help you improve your learning in this class?

What can your classmates do to help you improve your learning in this class?

Collate the answers, review them with the students the VERY NEXT class period. Put them in small groups and ask for comments, suggestions, next steps. And here is the most important thing: if the consensus is that a specific change needs to be made in order to improve the learning experience of many, then make it  happen.   Ahora. Ya.

Often the changes are very simple. For example, the results of my informal evaluation showed that the students liked small group/pair work. One student in the class, however, went a step further and explained in his/her survey that working in groups of three was better than paired work because it was a little less awkward and people could alternate speaking more easily. Done. A few people mentioned that they really liked spending the first 5 minutes of class with people “checking in” and talking about things on campus, events, stuff they did over the weekend, etc. Done.  A few people mentioned they might like to have caffeine.  I brought in a pot of coffee and hot water for the tea drinkers. Done.

The important thing is that if it can happen, you need to try your best to make it happen. Of course you can’t please everyone, nor should you try. But if tweaking things here and there is all that is needed…do it.

You might also be happily surprised by the results. Prior to giving out my survey, I found myself dreading the answers. The energy in the class was low, not many people talked, and I felt as if I was dominating the conversation. I was expecting the worst. Turns out, the consensus was that the teacher was doing fine, but the class needed to step up and take some risks and not be so passive. As one student put it “Speak more! We all will be pushed to get better if everyone has las ganas.”

My point is this: Don’t wait until the end of the term to ask how you could do  things better in the future. Ask NOW. And act on it. And then in a couple of weeks, ask again.

Remember: What we do in the classroom  is about their learning… it is not always about our teaching.  Informal evaluations make it possible for those two things to mutually support each  other  vs being at odds with one another.

Questions? Comments? Let me know.

This sign was on the door to my building the first week of class. I took the picture, I chuckled, and I stayed calm…I just forgot to post it here

More to come.