Intro: A Dinosaur In A New Technologies World

                        

Hi! My name is Sheila and I'm originally from California, though I've lived all over the world (or at least it feels that way!) I'm studying a Master's in Secondary Education at the Public University of Navarre (UPNA), in Pamplona, Spain. Fingers crossed, I'll soon be a high school English teacher!

This blog is a learning diary for one of the courses I'm taking at UPNA about new technologies for language teaching and learning. Here I'll explore what I've learned about working with new technologies and how to take the best advantage of what they have to offer for teaching English to EFL learners.

I half-jokingly titled this introduction A Dinosaur In A New Technologies World because I'm coming to English teaching at a later age than most (well, all!) of my classmates, and sometimes I really do feel like a fish out of water- an ancient soul from a by-gone era. The first time I studied at university hardly anyone even used a computer! And the library was where we got all of the info we needed for our research!

Times have changed, as they say, and obviously things have come a long way since then. I'm excited about learning new skills and different ways that technology can be used to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

In "America", we always refer to Europe as "The Old World," since so many of the first immigrants to arrive to the US came from European countries in order to seek a better life in the new world. Now I'm the new immigrant in this old world, colliding with all of the high speed technologies of a global culture. Thus, my blog's title: New Old World ESL. I'm hoping to combine the best of the new that technology has to offer, while still keeping my feet grounded in the old school wisdom of language teaching and learning. 

Let the fun begin!

Class 3: PowerPoint, Debut, Podcasts- January 26, 2016

                

Today's class was totally packed with information and moved super fast! We learned how to use so many interesting and useful tools, but I really wish we could slow down and have more time to spend with each one! 

To start with, we learned how to download videos and save them as MP4s that could be edited and how to insert them into Power Point. I didn't know that this was something so easy to do, and I'll definitely be using this feature when I want to show a short clip of a video that I've pre-selected from a longer piece.

Another program that we were shown is Debut, which allows you to record everything that happens on your screen. This could be a very good tool to use in order to create tutorials that students could view from home in order to do an assignment. 

We worked with DotSub, a subtitling tool, that would be a good way for students to demonstrate their listening skills. One nice feature of this program is that we were able to simultaneously work on one video as a group, each taking a 30 second chunk to subtitle. This would be a very good activity to do with a class that has access to a computer room, so that everyone can work at the same time and a short video could be subtitled in one session, and shown so that students could get immediate feedback on their work.

Camino showed us how to customize some things on our blogs, that I've already applied, such as setting a date by hand that allows you to control the posting order. We also learned about creating links and labels.

The main lesson in class today that I felt most interested in was about creating podcasts. I'm really excited about the possibility of working with audio recordings as a way for students to practice their pronunciation and self expression in English, and podcasts are a really fun and accessible way to create and share audio. We worked with podomatic which seems like a simple program, and have an assignment to create a podcast for our class portfolio.

Finally, Camino showed us Quandary, a program for creating web-based action mazes, and we looked at an example- the Malta Experience- that demonstrated how you can create an interactive experience that will change depending on the choices you make (for example, to go to the beach, or to go shopping.) I liked the activity, but must admit that as a teacher it seems like it could be really time-consuming to create mazes using this program. Again, it moved so fast, so I will need to revisit it one day to see if I would use it or not. In any case, it could be a great tool for students to create something like a guided tour of a city that they need to research. 

Class 4: Lyrics Training, Interactive White Boards, Animoto, Story Jumper, Pow Toon & Moovly- February 2, 2016

                

If last week's class was jam packed, today's was even more so! Class started with a lesson about Lyrics Training, a program which helps students improve their listening skills by filling in gap words while listening to a song and watching a video.  It has 4 different levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert. I tried the intermediate level with a song, and even had a challenge with a few of the words, so I can imagine how hard it can be for students! This is a program that I will certainly use with secondary school students, as kids like and connect with music so much, and it's a great way of getting them interested in improving their English! There are more than 30 different genres to choose from- everything from folk to hip-hop to country or punk. I had a lot of fun with it and want to try more songs!

Camino gave us an introduction to interactive white boards, giving us some good advice, asking "What is the advantage of using the technology?" She added that anytime you introduce a new technology it's more work, so it needs to have an advantage, and that the advantage of white boards is movement, and that we should take advantage of this feature. She also showed us how we could use Debut to record everything done on the whiteboard, which could be useful for reviewing lessons or evaluating students' work. 

At UPNA the program used for creating white board lessons is E-beam, and we learned how to use that tool so that we can create a lesson in groups for the next class. We had time to practice with the white board and I must say that it's super fun to use and seems to offer a lot of possibilities for creating dynamic activities.

Next we quickly moved through several programs- Animoto, Story Jumper, Pow Toon, and Moovly- for creating animated videos and story books. I find these programs to be super appealing, but also think that they are incredibly time-consuming! I imagine myself spending 20 hours just to create an animated video! And although that's probably not necessary, I'm almost certain that I would invest way too much time and effort, especially with Moovly and Pow Toon. On the other hand, I think students would be super enthusiastic to use these programs, and I can see their application in the classroom as introducing something fun and creative that encourages students' self-expression.

Class 5: Interactive Whiteboards, Excel For Grading, Edmodo, Encuesta Facíl, Survey Monkey-February 8, 2016

Another intense class, but I can see that things are winding down. We started out today's session with showing our white board activities, and it was really great to see what everyone had done and how they'd taken advantage of the best points of this tool. One group created a CLIL type lesson about weather and they had an activity in which students had to create weather maps and then do a news-style weather report. I can really see how fun this technology can be to use in class. Another group cut up different fashion or celebrity images so that students had to unscramble them and put them in the right order. It was designed to review adjectives and clothing vocabulary. The third group created a crossword puzzle and word search, which was fun to use in this format. And finally, my group made an activity about a recipe that started with a listening taken from BBC English. Students then had to choose the photos of the ingredients and utensils used in the recipe, and finally they filled in missing words to complete the recipe. I thought all of the activities were clever and effective uses of white board technology, but the main question that arose was how to engage the whole class at the same time. What do the students who don't have the white board pen do while only one or 2 are at the board? All in all, I think I'd love to work with a white board in a classroom setting, keeping in mind which activities can benefit from it's movement feature. 

Next we worked with Excel to create a grading sheet. Oh Excel, you make me dizzy! Camino assured us that it's really easy once you understand, but I have yet to experience an epiphany when it comes to using this tool.

We also learned about different digital classroom and learning platforms and ways of creating online quizzes and surveys (Edmodo, encuesta facil, and survey monkey). These tools seem really incredible, once you get the hang of it, and I'm sure teachers and students will be using them more, flip-classroom style, in the future. 

My favorite activity from today was seeing my classmates' whiteboard activities. I definitely learn by example. Really inspiring!