An extraordinary mixture

As we have mentioned in previous posts, teenagers (and even children) are referred to as "digital natives" since they belong to a new generation that is growing up surrounded by the latest technologies (Prensky, 2001). They have fun, learn and entertain themselves using different technological devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and so on. Since the use of them is considered a mean to get students involved and motivated during the learning process, one of the main challenges for today’s teachers is to start including technology to the classroom.

From: elearningindustry.com

Blended learning is a term utilized to refer to “a mix of face-to-face learning and online instruction. The key is to get them right mixed for you and your students” (Its learning market, 2013).

Nevertheless, as Sophie Partarrieu (2015) claims in the article Why we still need face-to-face teaching in the digital age, “face-to-face teaching and technology can work together”. The key for a successful blended learning is to know how to mix the traditional teaching methods with an appropriate use of technology. Many teachers choose to provide materials such as videos, articles, pictures, mind-maps online in order to get students engaged and keep on learning outside the school.
It is important to know that the use of technology in learning would not replace the teacher in the classroom. The teacher is the only one that can perceive many aspects that technological devices can’t, such as learners’ needs and pace of learning, multiple intelligences and affective factors. Although many innovations have been included to the teaching and learning processes, the teacher still plays an important role in the students’ academic engagement and progress (Partarrieu, 2015).

From: www.upsidelearning.com/blog

There many sources available online that foster communication among the students and the teacher outside the classroom. One of them is Edmodo which is a free online networking application for teachers and students. It is primarily a tool for within-class communication, but it also provides several ways for teachers to connect with other teachers (edmodoteacherhub.wikispaces.com). Another useful free online networking is EDU 2.0. It is cloud-hosted, easy to use, and well designed and includes features for students, parents, teachers and administrators. Teachers can share class resources and more with their students and other teachers (educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com.ar).

To summarize, there are many alternatives to choose at the moment of planning lessons. The main responsibility for teachers is to distinguish what, how and when to include technology in their teaching while providing guidance and emotional support (Sophie Partarrieu, 2015).

Introducing Mobile Learning into our teaching

Nowadays, due to the fact that technology is part of students' everyday life, it is expected they carry cell phones to school and use them during lessons.

How could teachers profit from this situation in the classroom?

Nicky Hockly, an educator in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987, and the Director of Pedagogy of an online training and development organisation called The Consultants-E www.emoderationskills.com helped us to think about this question in her speech about Going Mobile delivered last October 28th.

Nicky Hockly at "Going Mobile" speech.

Photo taken by Julieta Grassino Oliva.

Firstly, she conceptualized Mobile Learning saying it is “learning that takes place via portable, often Wi-Fi enabled, handheld devices” (Hockly, 2015) such as cell phones and laptops.

Nicky Hockly at "Going Mobile" speech.
Photo taken by Julieta Grassino Oliva.

Secondly, she showed us different ways of introducing the use of cell phones into our lessons. She presented activities learners can do either to consume content or to produce it. The former, includes listening to podcasts or using flashcards for or to review vocabulary. The latter, refers to activities like audio recording themselves doing class tasks or taking photos following on certain topic.

If you are interested in including technology into your teaching we invite you to read Mobile Learning: what is it and why should you care? by Nicky Hockly

This will surely be interesting and useful to help you make your own decisions.

We hope it helps you to start dealing creatively with technology in your lessons!

Teaching with web 2.0 technologies

According to the information given in the website www.webopedia.com , Web 2.0 is the term given to describe a second generation of the world wide web that is focused on the ability for people to collaborate and share information on line. Moreover, it emphasizes user-generated content, usability, and interoperability. In connection to education, web 2.0 promotes students communicate, collaborate and share work in a variety of practical ways. Though challenging, teachers and students can master many of its tools easily and creatively.(web2014.discoveryeducation.com)
If you visit edjudo.com you will find a useful list of websites that provides a variety of digital tools you can use for learning purposes. One of them is bubbl.us which allows teachers and learners to create mind-maps individually or with others. An important advantage is that the final product can be saved, shared and printed.

From bubl.us

It can be used to show students the relation among different words so that they can associate their meanings. For example, to teach vocabulary, word classes (word families, adjectives, adverbs, phrasal verbs) and processes. Learners can profit from this website because it presents a suitable way to organize their ideas, helps them to improve their study skills and to remember the concepts easily.It is a tool they can benefit from in any subject. Here is an example of what we did according to the topic we dealt with in a previous entry Using-technology-in-classroom-wisely, related to the vocabulary of house and furniture:

Another practical and entertaining website is www.bitstrips.com in which you can create your own personal avatar to use it in different social networks to communicate with others. This tool can be used in an English classroom when dealing with fixed expressions such as, greetings, agreeing, disagreeing, and expressing feelings and emotions.  The good thing about this website is that most students enjoy working with technology especially when it is related to the webs they regularly visit.
This personal “emoji” can be used to chat in famous webpages such as gmail, messenger, facebook and twitter. What is more, a Bitstrip app is now available to download in mobile phones! 
This is the avatar we created; her name is Mika and she has a sign with the slang BFF (Best Friends Forever):

To sum up, there is a variety of innovative websites available that can help teachers and students (from kindergarten to high school!) to facilitate learning and make it more entertaining. Web 2.0 could be an original way to work with students and provide them with the opportunity to design, imagine and create amazing final products. Furthermore, it encourages individual work as well as collaborative ones. Now is your turn, why don’t you give web 2.0 a try? ;) 

Moving forward

How many digital tools do you know? These days, there are plenty of useful websites that not only guide teachers to plan and organize lessons but also help students to learn, practice and study. The examples we will show below are just an advance of the topic we are going to describe in great depth in the next entry.

On the one hand, we will present Voki which is a website that allows students to create a personalized avatar and make a speech of no more than 60 seconds. They can record themselves so as to give the voki a voice, and thus improve their speaking and listening skills. It can be used to describe a word or to tell a short story, for example. Here is the voki we created (recording ourselves!) with a description of this enjoyable tool: 

On the other hand, we have a more well-known tool called word clouds. When surfing on the net you have probably seen images with a lot of colourful related words arranged in a certain way. They are known as word clouds and can be designed in websites such as tagul , wordle or tagxedo.

A word cloud makes a piece of information more visually attractive for students. It can be used to teach related vocabulary, word families, and phrasal verbs among others. Students can design their own word cloud and share it with their classmates through social networks such as facebook, twitter or Instagram. Here goes our own word cloud. Can you guess the word it describes? 

Answer: uoıʇɐɔılddɐ

Using technology in the classroom wisely

Nowadays, many students spend most of their time using different modern devices such as, computers, cell phones, videogames, video cams, digital music players among others. In order to catch up with them, teachers of the 21^st century face the challenge of having to integrate these tools into the classroom and show the students how they can profit from them in learning.

One way of including technology in the classroom is to present students a videogame with which they could not only play and have fun but also learn meaningfully.

From prezi presentation "My house"

 As an example, in the project we designed, “Creating your own house”, the learners will play with the game “The Sims” in which they have to create an imaginary house in groups of four. They have to prepare a final presentation to share it with the rest of their classmates using an LCD projector. They are expected to describe the house using the “existential there” and vocabulary related to parts of the house and furniture.

From https://twitter.com/hashtag/tpack

This project is carried out following the TPACK model which stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. It is more than simply adding ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to traditional approaches. It depends upon deep knowledge of how ICT can be used to access and process subject matter (TCK) and understanding how ICT can support and enhance learning (TPK) in combination with PCK. (more info about TPACK here).
What we decided to do is to relate the content we had to teach (parts of the house and furniture and There is/are), using a technological device (in this case, the students' computers), to the final task of our project (pedagogical knowledge), which consisted of a final presentation of the house to the rest of the groups. 

Since one of the objectives of this project is that students will be able to describe a house at the end of the task, we thought that the famous videogame “The Sims” was a suitable option to fulfil it. First of all, it helps students activate schemata relating the new subject matter with previous knowledge and infer the main topic; it serves as a visual aid while doing a listening activity about the new vocabulary, and also it shows students a model of how their final presentation could be. Then, doing collaborative work they have to decide how their ideal house would be discussing about the parts of the house they want to design, the type of furniture, number of rooms, and so on.

From prezi presentation "My house"

What is amazing in this game is that, while designing their own house, students will discover more words and concepts related to house and furniture enlarging their vocabulary. Therefore, they have to look them up in paper or online dictionaries and learn their use so as to include them in the description of the house.

Another advantage is that “The Sims” facilitates the students’ work when designing the house. It saves time, provides the necessary tools and all the members of the group can take turns to share the work and play fairly. Doing it on paper might have turned the activity tougher and boring. Besides, using this videogame can result in the creation of different types of houses that shows the diversity of ideas and students’ likes and dislikes.

All in all, technology should be considered as a tool that can be integrated in the teacher’s lesson plan not only to be used to entertain learners and be more innovative but mainly to support the learning teaching process helping to fulfil the objectives meaningfully.

Challenging the use of coursebooks in the classroom

“Despite the current rich array of English language teaching materials commercially available, many teachers continue to produce their own materials for classroom use” (Howard and Major, 2005, p. 101).

Why is it that sometimes teachers leave aside coursebooks to work with the materials they design?

From waddleeahchaa.com/teaching-supplies

According to Howard and Major (2005) designing your own materials has advantages and disadvantages. Our purpose is to share the advantages that may help you to rely on the use of teacher-produced materials:

·Contextualization: designing or adapting materials according to the specific group of learners and cultural or educational context of the particular learning environment. Therefore, teachers can “overcome the lack of “fit” of the coursebook.” (Howard et al., 2005).

·Individual needs: refers to the heterogeneity inherent in the classroom. The teacher designs materials taking into account the learners’ first languages and cultures, their learning needs and their experiences.

·Timeliness: when teachers produce materials they can choose current events or topics so as to be relevant to the students.

·Personalization: following Block’s idea (1991), “home-made” materials not only add a personal touch to teaching but also are appreciated by students.

In our opinion, the last one is particularly important because in designing his or her own materials the teacher has a more active role since he/she “avoids ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of most commercial materials” (Howard, et al., 2005) and contemplates individualities.

In his talk “How to escape Education’s death valley” (shown below), the British educator Ken Robinson (2013) describes three principles that are contradicted by the current culture of education:  human beings are naturally different and diverse; children are curious and teaching is a creative profession.

 We find that Teaching is a creative profession principle is closely related to the fact that when teachers design their own materials there is a process of personalization carried out. Depending on leaners needs, diversity and experiences the teacher can make more informed decisions using imagination and creativity to foster motivation and learning.

Robinson (2013) says that teaching is a creative profession and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. He concludes, “Education is not a mechanistic system but a human system”. In many instances, the use of the coursebook has this effect of mechanization; the students are seen as machines that have to work following a routine and not as individuals that have specific needs, differences and particularities. We believe this is vitally important for teachers not to forget.

 Hope you enjoy this interesting video!

Tips to evaluate and select websites for your academic work

Do you trust all the websites you visit? Are they reliable or not? It is highly important to be aware of certain aspects to analyze at the moment of looking for information online.
After a detailed analysis we did of two useful websites for teachers (http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish and http://www.eslkidstuff.com/) we consider that among the criteria the British Council suggests to follow when selecting websites, there are four of them which are the most important ones (images taken from eslkidstuff website):

1.  Reliability: it refers to the authors of the websites. Information about who they are, what they do, their experiences and a way to get in contact with them. This information will tell you how serious and reliable the web could be.
   
2.  Currency: up-to-date information is a key factor when evaluating a website. Looking for dates when any new link or content was uploaded will make sure you are working with the latest information.
   
3.   Clarity: the information presented should be clear. The texts should be legible and well formatted for easy reading and graphics have to be related to them.  There should not be mistakes in spelling and word usage. This will tell you that authors pay attention to the texts or any other written or spoken information they share in the website.
   
4.  Purpose: if you want a web page with an educational purpose, look for those which make an explicit reference to it and evaluate if the content is coherent with it.
   

Hoaxes present a major challenge for evaluating information of websites so you have to be very careful!

We hope these tips help you to avoid using fake web sites.

Camila and Ma. Laura

The Challenge of facing "native speakers" of the digital language

From www.smokingcoolcat.blogspot.com.ar

We think that teachers have to be aware of the challenge that Marc Prensky states as the biggest problem that education has to face nowadays: "Our  digital Immigrants instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language". (If you want to read the article, click here).

It is a challenge because we are identified more with the concept of Digital Immigrants than with that of Digital Natives. We were taught at school using traditional books, diskettes, we listened to cassettes and CD's; whereas today, students are accustomed to using digital technology to learn, such as, computers, mobile phones, tablets, i-pads, e-books, and so on.

Among the characteristics that Prensky gives of Digital Natives are: “those who

From http://noticiascambridgeenglish.org

are used to receiving information really fast; those who like to parallel process and multi-task; they prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite; they prefer games to serious work”. As regards the two last descriptions we partially agree with the author. It is probably certain that they prefer pictures rather than texts but it’s important that we encourage them not only to work with visual aids but also with more demanding activities, such as, reading a text, producing a piece of writing on their own, doing reading comprehension activities so as to make their cognitive system activate and work productively. On the other hand, it is likely that they enjoy more playing games than doing some of the tasks previously mentioned, but our role as teachers is to show them that other kind of activities can be done and that they can be as fun as playing a game! We should also teach them that learning is not only about having fun but also that serious work can be an interesting and pleasurable process which they will find totally rewarding. 

From http://www.thelanguagetrainingco.com/

As regards methodology, Prensky says “it does mean going faster, less step by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things”. We think that this sounds deterministic and consider that applying a methodology with these characteristics will depend on many other factors such as what to teach, students characteristics, group characteristics, social background and so on. Methodology should be contextualized. Apart from this, we ask ourselves what is that helps students to learn? Does going faster help them to learn? Don't we need sometimes going step by step? Do any of these characteristics have a disadvantage?

Welcome!

This blog belongs to Camila Kinen and Maria Laura Fontana. Here we will share activities, ideas, productions, and thoughts in relation to the design of English teaching materials. The aims that guide us are to record our experience, to develop critical thinking or the development of a questioning attitude, to enhance professional development and self-empowerment, to enhance creativity and to foster communication with our classmates and mutual learning. We hope this blog serves us to fulfill these objectives and help others to achieve them.