The Talkin' Teachin' Show!

I listen to A LOT of podcasts, so the idea of using them to teach was very intriguing to me, but the podcasts I listen to are mostly based around comedy and wouldn't really be appropriate for a classroom. So, I looked at the podcasts I listen to that aren't comedy based and tried to think if any of them could be used to teach, and the one I think could be most useful is called Stuff You Missed in History Class, and I think it could be used in many ways to help ESL students. 

The podcast is about lesser known stories from world history, and while I think in general it would be good practice for upper intermediate or higher students that were interested in it to listen to it for practice. If I were going to design a lesson, I think a good idea would be to use an episode like a recent one called, "The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable." For the lesson I would take the podcast and divide the audio into four pieces, and have the students listen to only their section in groups. Then after the group had listen and summarized their segment of the audio they would have to talk with the other groups to put the segments in the right order to tell the story. 
This exercise would be good for helping student to improve their listening skills when listening to and summarizing the audio, as well as their speaking and cooperation skills when ordering the audio pieces. Of course this could be done with other episodes of this podcast or even with other podcasts that have some sort of a narrative form to them. I do realize that you would have to do this with upper level students, but I think the exposure to authentic language would be good for them.

Tell Me a Video Story

I chose to create a video using Animoto. I was a little intimidated at first since I don't have too much experience with video creation, but once I got started it was pretty simple and intuitive. 
The lesson I made on demonyms could be part of a flipped classroom experience where students studied the demonyms at home and then discussed them in class.

I don't think it would be very difficult at all to have students use this site to create videos of their own. One idea I had was the have students create their own short flipped lessons, much like the video I created, then have a classmate or classmates do the lesson. This would be a good way for students to demonstrate both a grasp of the content knowledge but also their ability to both follow and give instructions. Such is in the learning indicator that reads, "Students follow oral and written directions to participate in classroom activities, and provide directions to peers in selected interactions." ( ESL.C.9-12.4.1.7) I could assess these points in a few ways, how well the student created the video, the video's content, and was the lesson successful with the peer who completed it.

Talkin' Ted-Ed Teachin'

The lesson I created would be for adult students to test language associated with a history content course. My language objectives would be to make sure students could understand a historical narrative, and discuss it's implications.

I could test to see if these objectives were met by first having the students rewatch the video and then try to retell the Reagan story in their own words. Then as groups I would have the students choose an even from their countries history and write a short narrative that they could share with the class.

Chat Twitter Chat

Regretfully I was not able to attend a Twitter chat live in person in time for me to write this post. Since I still wanted to find out more about the chats I decided to check out the hashtag #ELTChat anyways to see what people were talking about. I realize it's not the same as participating live, but I still got a good feel for how the discussion worked.
This weeks discussion for #ELTChat on Twitter was pronunciation and how to make teachers comfortable teaching it.  Looking through the tweets I could see that there was a lot of people participating and it was a little bit difficult to parse through it all, however I think I was still able to find some good advice and interesting resources.One resource that I found was an interesting website that offered an array of warm-up activities that may help with pronunciation.
Of course I think the most helpful thing was just seeing the short but useful pieces of advice people would give about teaching pronunciation.  For example one user had three short tweets that talked about teaching how we stress words when speaking which was an aspect of pronunciation that I really hadn't considered much.
The only aspect of this Twitter chat that I wasn't particularly fond of was that it seemed to be made up mostly of British English language teachers so they were talking a lot about certifications and tests that I had no reference for.  That being said I can see how this would be a very useful tool and I hope that I have the chance to actually participate in one in the future.

Connectivism and the Modern Student

            

  The modern student is very much like the modern bank customer. If we look at knowledge as currency like George Siemens does in his article, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age we can think of learners as bank customers who are able to withdraw knowledge from computers and networks all over the world in the same way that people who need money can withdraw it from any ATM in the world.  The same can be said for the way customers put money into a bank, as Siemens says, "Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual." In the same way that knowledge is fed into a network, people put money into a bank, and that money goes on to be dispersed among all of the customers but can also be retrieved when the original depositor needs it. 

What’s important about this analogy is that it changes how we look at education, where students are no longer just expected to just take in knowledge. As Siemens also says in the video, The Conflict of Learning Theories with Human Nature, "As human beings we desire to externalize what's in our head." I think this is an important idea to take away from Connectivism, that we must let students put their knowledge back into the network and make sure that we are not only dishing out knowledge, but we give students the tools to find knowledge for themselves and express their interpretations of that knowledge.