How to make your Interactive Whiteboard interactive

Let me, first, rephrase the title of this post, and call it not "How to make your Interactive Whiteboard interactive" but "How to make your students interactive".

In my talk at the annual IH Barcelona ELT Conference, I suggested that we should do the following if we're using an interactive whiteboard (IWB):

• Stop calling it an interactive whiteboard: it isn't interactive!
• Start the class with only minimum materials
• Generate the maximum (interaction) from the minimum (material)
• Don't waste hours looking for and downloading "materials"
• Don't see it as a clever sort of PowerPoint (or photocopier)
• Use it only a little (and use it less than your learners)
• Reduce teacher talk time and student wait time to a minimum
• Have your learners use it to create things
• Use other technology/-ies (blog? wiki? email...?) to do things with what you have created
• Move quickly from the interactive whiteboard to interactive students and an inactive (sic) whiteboard

IWBs are, of course, interactive in the sense that when you use the tools they come with, they respond -- there's an action and response, which is "interaction" in a technological sense; but what we really want as teachers is interaction with and between our learners.

Call it digital whiteboard instead, and I think there's less risk that we're going to kid ourselves that, of its own accord, an IWB is going to lead to proper interaction -- the sort that we want, between engaged and active learners.

Student wait time
I'll post the tasks I suggested in my talk separately but, for the moment, let me just take one of the other points suggested above, what I call "student wait time".

One of the things you want to avoid is having your learners simply sitting there watching someone else (you, or one of the learners) "interact" with the board. People don't learn languages by sitting passively in classrooms watching other people type, they need to be actively engaged in doing things -- and with the tasks I post over the next few days I'll try to illustrate how that can be achieved.

See also Dictogloss: Interactive students, inactive whiteboard

How not to see or use your IWB

We're in Week 2 now of the EVO sessions, in which I'm participating in the Smart Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards event and we're currently doing some background reading from some of the very interesting links provided.

Here's a fairly typical example of what an enthusiastic user of an IWBs says:

Our school has IWBs in every classroom. However, how it is used varies. Some use it as a glorified whiteboard. Others just use it as a projector. A IWB becomes truly useful when it is used a tool. It needs to be integrated into the curriculum. It helps me develop lesson plans and allows me to present my lessons seamlessly. I can have video, links and interactive work. It helps me eliminate props (I teach Spanish). The bells and whistles are nice but when I can have all my lesson plans and many of the materials all in one file to bring up and use on the board, it is priceless.

I'm a fairly enthusiastic user of IWBs myself but I think something fundamental is wrong with what is being said there. Analyse the subjects of the verbs. I make the count "School" (1); the IWB itself (9); the teacher/s (9); and the learners ZERO. What on earth are the learners doing, meanwhile?

If it's not the learners using the technology, perhaps the technology really shouldn't be being used at all...

Can what is described above possibly be good teaching, or good use of an IWB...???

Dogme and Technology

Dogme ELT is a "materials-light" methodology and also a very active discussion group.

The discussion group has got a bit hijacked of late in futile debates between the advocates of technology and its detractors but Graham Stanley now suggests a way forward in his Dogme 2.0 for ELT wiki, with a call for "vows" that would outline technology's place in Dogme ELT... Can you (and how...?) use technology and remain "faithful" to Dogme...?

(In case you wonder, Dogme ELT had "vows" when it was first set up back in 2000, as did Lars von Trier's Dogme 95 film-making, from which it took its name).

Dogme has been defined as being "conversation-driven, materials-light, focused on emergent language"; all of those things strike me as being "right" and the challenge is how to stay with that and still use technology -- without the technology taking over the conversation, and becoming the focus of attention.

One of ways that can be achieved, I think, is that the learners should use technology to create and communicate, not merely to consume... as I've suggested previously.

A similiar definition of Dogme comes from the blurb on a new book on Dogme, Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching (Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury, Delta Publishing, 2009): it's a "materials-light, conversation-driven philosophy of teaching that, above all, focuses on the learner and on emergent language" (my italics).

It's not nearly so well known as some of the ELT publishing giants, but Delta Publishing has got some really great books for English teachers...

Stickers for your kids: print them or make them?

Customisable Mr Men stickers from the TES site...

One of the resources sites I suggested in the technology session on our very young learners course this week was the Times Educational Supplement (TES) site, which has over 30,000 free resources, for all subjects (not principally ELT).

From TES, I took two examples (registration required to view them): a PowerPoint Jeopardy template, and some customisable Mr Men stickers. For very young learners, note that you can edit the text, or eliminate it altogether (see image above).

Both would be huge time-savers: the former would require a minimum amount of prior knowledge of PowerPoint, but would still save you hours of work; the latter not much more than a bit of fiddling about to get them to print out on sticky labels...

But would you actually want to use them...?

That would be a very definite YES!, to judge from the comments about them on TES, but personally I have my doubts. In both cases it would the teacher using the technology, but it surely ought to be the learners doing so. You could, for example, have (older) learners write questions, which would certainly be a start, if you wanted to play Jeopardy.

As for the stickers, personally I'd either create my own (as, see image below, you did at the start of my session) or else I'd get my learners to create the labels for each other...

Mr Personal: it's so easy to make your own!

There's also the question of the time it's going to take: it was so much quicker to produce our own -- and so much more personal!

Sometimes the resources technology offers are in fact not necessarily the best solution...

The worst thing that could happen to a blog

What's the worst thing that could happen to a blog -- or anything else that you were doing with learners and technology?

The worst that I can think of is for the work done all to be lost, perhaps through some failure of the (often free) Web 2.0 service you might be using.

On the Blogs and Blogging course I was teaching in July, I thought that had happened as (right in the middle of the course!) Blogger's automated spam filters suddenly decided to block access to the blog we were using, deciding that we were spammers, possibly (and it's the only reason I can think of) because of the high incidence of the word "blogs". Fortunately, access was restored to it very quickly (though the same thing has since happened to another blog I was using on another course).

One of the problems with free web services (especially small companies) is that they get bought out, or go under, and there is a risk of the worst happening: your students work being lost. Even with services that do survive, things can go wrong (I had a major problem with Podomatic "losing" a lot of audio archives my students had created, a couple of years ago now).

Whatever you do with technology, make back-ups!

Interactive Whiteboards are useless. Discuss.

It's not about the board...

This slideshow by Chris Bletcher I found in a link included in the debate on whether or not "IWBs are useless" on Cardiff Online, the online coverage of the 43rd Annual International IATEFL Conference.

IWBs are not (obviously) useless, provided that you use them well, whatever that means [discussion]. In that sense they're like any other technology.

At IH Barcelona we're at the stage of having got the boards but are still wondering (a) what we're supposed to be doing with them; (b) how to persuade teachers to use them and (c) what training we should be providing.

I'm personally a great believer "learning by quotation", "learning by soundbite" if you prefer, and particularly like the quotation shown in the image, above. It's tough to wade through all the information, the partisan debates and so on. It helps if you can cut out some of the noise.

Learning to use an IWB is a question of "learning by doing"; in attempting to learning to use one well, it probably helps to do some "learning by quotation" first.

See also >> The Interactive Whiteboard Revolution

Technology and interaction

Learners first, technology last

In the technology session I do on the CELTA courses at IH Barcelona, I usually begin by asking people to rank the following in terms of their importance in the language classroom:

• Learners
• Materials
• Teacher
• Technology
• Other(-s)

As you can see in the image above, in Tuesday's session you ranked the learners first (red number "1"s), with technology coming roughly last (4,5...).

It's a rhetorical question, obviously, but I agree with the answer -- the technology itself is probably the least important thing.

Why use technology?
Why bother using technology in that case? I suggested that one of the "other" things that are of importance in the language classroom is interaction between the other elements (learners-learners, learners-materials, etc., the black arrows in the image above) and that technology can enhance that and provide further oppoortunities for interaction -- for example via a class blog.

Another big reason for using technology is face validity [definition]. You may well find yourself teaching digital natives, people who have grown up with technology. You may be a great teacher, but try and teach your learners with a blackboard and chalk and some of them at least will be wondering what cave you live in and, unfairly, not "like" you as a teacher.

As to how to use technology in the language classroom, the posts here on this blog labelled "using technology" address that issue...

Searching without Google

I've been landed a job that looks tough: persuading the teachers and trainers in the school where I work (International House Barcelona) that they should use the 10 eBeam interactive whiteboards (IWBs, or "smartboards") that we've just acquired (image, right, the annotation tool palette).

It looks tough first of all as I don't have a lot of experience actually using an IWB as a teacher; secondly because I've preferred not to, being cynically unable to see the return on investment -- by which I mean the amount of learning produced for the time invested.

So -- obviously -- the first thing I did, this morning, was open my browser... and then I didn't go straight to Google-is-Evil. What I wanted was a few expert opinions on how the technology should be used, how we might increase that return on investment.

Instead, I went to places I already knew and trusted and thought might well have ideas (not something I can say of Google), and used the search options there:

• Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog
• TeachingEnglish.org.uk
• Nik Peachey's Learning Technology Blog and his Quick Shout Blog
  

I did go to Google-is-Evil afterwards to search for "interactive board": the Wikipedia interactive whiteboard entry was first, there were some resources, particularly for UK schools [here and here], but not necessarily for language learning and teaching -- but what I was really looking for, expert opinion, wasn't there, at least not in the hundreds of results for people trying to sell me an IWB.

But that's Google-is-Evil for you... Fortunately there are some excellent alternatives.

Sitcoms: consuming or creating?

Videoing on a mobile phone: making it less intimidating than a video camera

More from the very excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk, this time on exploiting sitcoms...

A lesson...
Besides the likelihood that your learners are going to just love them, there is an awful lot of language you can get out of sitcoms, as the article on building a lesson around a sitcom suggests. When it comes to choosing a sitcom, my own suggestion would be that you don't choose it, but that your learners do. What they already watch (perhaps in their own language) and can tell you about is likely to be more popular than something you pick (unless it's Fawlty Towers, which is always a success!)

An activity...
There is also a Sitcom information activity, which includes a photocopiable worksheet with a gap fill exercise.

I've got my doubts about this one -- not so much about the activity itself as about whether or not that is the way we should be using technology. Photocopying exercises is one use we could make of technology -- the photocopier being part of technology -- but it has the students merely consuming, not creating.

The activity suggests the learners then go to YouTube and watch a clip of one of the sitcoms mentioned in the text; but that's merely consuming too.

If you get your learners to watch and create listening comprehension questions for each other, instead of merely watching, then you've got greater engagement, not merely entertainment.

Actually creating a sitcom...
A third idea on the same site involves actually creating a sitcom; now that's more like it!

I'd suggest that, in this last case, you really want to get your learners to video it -- that's creating, not merely consuming.

To get round the problem of people not wanting to be filmed, you might try filming on mobile phones first, as they appear less intrusive; and always remember that no one should be forced to act but that, if they don't want to, there are other roles such as directing and the actual filming that can engage all the members of a group... You could also record audio only, not video.

My experience of such things is people's inhibitions tend to drop, when they see what fun it can be.

Easy, fun, meaningful tasks with technology

Easy, fun, meaningful...

Welcome to those of you who came to my talk on Easy, fun, meaningful activities with technology at the IH Barcelona ELT Conference today...

The tasks I proposed assumed that at least one, preferably more digital cameras (or mobile phones, or webcams...) were available to your learners, either at school and/or at home. Below, how I defined "easy", "fun" and "meaningful" and, although the tasks suggested involved cameras, I think the same criteria apply to any other technology you might be considering using in the language classroom.

Easy...
The "ease" is particularly the easy and speed of set up -- and the time involved, before and after class. You don't want to be editing images, for example, afterwards -- though, as I suggested in my talk, your learners could be doing that (and I suggested using Picnik).

Having no programs to instal can be important in a school: can you, as a teacher, actually instal programs on your school's network? Probably not.

As much as anything, you want to limit the time you the teacher have to spend on the technology; what you want is a huge return-on-investment, i.e. for the amount of pre- and post-class time you invest, your language learners in- or post-class get a huge return in terms of the language they practise and learn.

Fun...
In my classroom experience, what is creative is fun; and because it's creative and fun it's enjoyable; and if what is created is also shared with other learners, it's motivating and thus more fun. If it is motivating, if learners want to do things, and (provided you ensure that they speak in English doing well-designed tasks maximising interaction) it's also and most importantly, successful in terms of language learning. They learn more, in other words.

And then they are more motivated, and learn more, and have more fun... It's a cycle of success -- and of enjoyment.

Meaningful...
In my talk, I contrasted photographs taken by learners with cloze tests [define]... The picture that my learner has taken (not stolen from Google-is-Evil, note) matters; it's an end-product that you can share and care about.

When did the answers to a cloze test ever really matter to a learner (unless it was on an exam)? When did a learner ever really feel truly proud of a completed cloze test...?

I've been having my learners complete cloze tests for nearly thirty years and I've never, ever, seen a learner enjoy one.

But most importantly...
I've highlighted in my slide (above) how I'm suggesting using technology: to create and share end-products. But that's merely how I'm suggesting using it...

What really matters in language classrooms is that lots of language learning takes place.

That's what is important, the learning, not the technology. The technology is merely the tool that affords opportunities for language learning to occur...

Task #2: Mystery photos on a throw-away camera

Pictures on a throw-away camera: about as simple as technology gets...

The second task that I proposed in my workshop at the IH Barcelona ELT Conference last week was "Mystery photos on a throw-away camera", a task originally suggested by my colleague Susana Ortiz.

As you can see from my slide (above), the tasks has learners working in pairs to take up to 3 "mystery" pictures per pair on a throw-away camera (for costs, see the first "comment" below), and then passing the camera on to the next pair, with the photos being developed when the film runs out.

You could do the same thing with a digital camera, a mobile phone or a webcam, all of which would have advantages over the throw-away camera, most notably the digital image you will get from them (and can thus edit and upload, etc).

The disposable camera, however, is more of a challenge (you can't just go on taking pictures until they come out right) and the mystery of not knowing until the end what photos other people have taken (no "telling" when the camera is passed on to the next pair), and the shared experience are all reasons for considering turning to what I described in my talk as being "the pond scum" of technology -- the lowest of the low.

But learning should be a challenge and it should be an experience, something which is memorable...

See also
On our Formación ELE blog, for Spanish teachers [content in Spanish], you can see some of the pictures of Barcelona taken by students in Susana's class.

Task #3: A photograph of learning actually occurring

Follow the steps and the task isn't as impossible as it might look...

This was the third of the easy, fun, meaningful tasks I suggested in my talk today.

It is easy -- from the technical point of view. All you your learners have to do is point the camera and shoot, and then share it in some digital way (eg. on a blog, or as a PowerPoint presentation, as I suggested).

It is however more of a challenge. Can you actually photograph the actual instant learning occurs, and actually capture it on film? I've been trying for years and never really ever got close to it.

What your learners should aim for is a photograph in which they can then say "What we were trying to capture was...". The end-product is less important than the meaningful interaction that precedes it -- though it is also true that working towards producing an end-product makes that interaction meaningful.

And, as I suggested, discussing the subject of when learning takes place first, before taking out the camera, will make it slightly less of a challenge, as well as creating the opportunity for the interaction to occur.

Stick figure storyboard

The stick figure storyboard (example above) will also help, and is again creative and fun to do...

The interaction -- the use of language -- is what is most important, together with the appropriate language assistance you (reactively) provide. But I think the challenge is what I like about this task: we should be challenging learners in classrooms...

Graffiti creator: would I want to use it?

Editing the letters individually, with greater contrast between them, would have made the word ("create") more legible

Here's one I'm not so sure about: graffiticreator.net...

It's fun, though I'd have liked an un-do button, but maybe that's just me: I've never actually had a go with an aerosol can and reckon true graffiti artists don't, ever, "un-do"... ,-)! But would I actually want to use this with students?

Criteria for using technology
When I'm lesson planning and look at a website or an activity of some sort involving the use of any technology, I ask myself the same questions I suggest in the technology session on our CELTA course:

• Is it a suitable level of difficulty, language and maturity for my learners...?
• Will my learners enjoy doing it...? Will it engage them...?
• How can / must I adapt it...?
• What are the aims...?
• What are the stages...?
• What language is being used, practised and learnt...?
• What are we going to do with what we've found / created...?
• What is the return-on-investment (time spent setting up, in class...)?
  

With graffiticreator.net, my doubt is really over the language that is going to be produced and used: is it merely going to engage my learners at the visual level and absorb them in understanding how the site works, or am I going to be able to create a task that will really produce a lot of meaningful (linguistic) interaction?

Decision time...
On balance, that looks to me like one that will go into my "For the kids" file in my favourites -- for my own kids, that is, they'll like it, but I don't think I'll be using it in the classroom with learners.

Now, on the other hand, if we had a class blog, and I wanted to decorate it, and we had -- say -- a new "graffiti word a week", and the kids wanted to do it in their own time, at home, or when I'd got someone finished all their other work, then I might consider it -- but my aim would not then be a linguistic one.

Technology lesson planning 101

On the excellent Doug Johnson Blue Skunk Blog, there are two recent articles well worth reading: one is Seven brilliant things teachers do with technology, in which I particularly like the idea that we should "use technology's engagement (not entertainment) power" [>> more].

The second is Seven stupid mistakes teachers make with technology, "stupid" being a word he uses with some reservation.

I've got the same reservations myself about "stupid". "Can I ask a stupid question?" people sometimes ask me in technology seminars, meaning a question that might seem stupid to experts, an idea that embarrasses the questioner. But the question never turns out to be stupid: "basic" is perhaps the word being sought.

As regards using technology, let's call it "silly", shall we? To my mind, the silliest mistake you can make as a teacher is not having a Plan B in case the technology goes wrong, as at some point it inevitably will.

"Silly" is a word I hear teachers use: they say, for example, "you just look silly in front of all your students when there's no Internet connection".

But that's the great thing about having a "Plan B": if you do, you won't look silly, on the contrary, you'll look slickly professional, which as a learner is how I like my teacher to look...

Witches and more stuff for Halloween lessons

WhaaaaaaaaaahHHHHHH! Photo: KateT

It's getting round to that time of year again... On the British Council's Learn English Kids site, you have things about witches and wizards -- "things" being songs and jigsaw puzzles and stories and and stuff you can print, a link which I picked up from the Council's excellent ELTeCS list.

Don't print it, make it!
Stuff you can print...? I've always had my doubts about that -- especially if we are talking about young learners. Who was the teacher trainer I once heard say that it broke her heart "to see young learners all with the same photocopied picture"?

You want ideas, not printable activities, I would suggest -- and for pictures, you want to get your young learners to draw them. If you've got a class blog, that's where they should be published.

If we're talking teenagers, for whom drawing witches is undoubtedly not going to be cool, you could get them to take photos of Halloweeny things on their mobile phones -- which again could be great on a class blog.

Don't worry so much about the quality of the images -- just quick snapshots like the one at the top of this post (detail of the decorations at Reception here at school) will produce a great collection.

Creating, not consuming
If you then got your learners to write ghost stories (possibly featuring the creatures they've taken photos, or drawn pictures of), then they'd be creating, not merely consuming -- and that's what technology allows us to do.

In Spanish, here's another idea that makes a great Halloween activity.

Related posts

>> A Halloween project
>> Halloween lessons

Great stuff on YouTube for English teachers

Bruce Springsteen interviewed on the OGWT in 1978

There's a ton of great listening comprehension on YouTube, stuff that's so much more interesting than the things that come on your coursebook CD -- to start with because (especially to kids!) watching a video clip of (say) a song is so much more interesting than a CD...

Getting them to do the work
One of my colleagues suggested having the learners, in pairs, search for a suitable interview with a famous person, and then write listening comprehension questions for another pair. Get them to choose the video -- don't you make the choice.

Doing that means that there is so much more active involvement of the learners, with them wanting to listen, and wanting to listen again. Whether or not they come up with great listening comprehension questions is not important either: what the activity does is make them creators, not merely consumers of content.

Or letting someone else do the work...?
If you prefer someone else to do part of your lesson planning for you, teflclips.com is a site which will interest you.

On yappr.com you have YouTube-like videos conveniently sorted by subject and level of difficulty, many of them with a subtitle option.

In a recent issue of HLT, there were more ideas for exploiting YouTube.

And here's another idea from Nik Peachey's excellent blog...

Twittering in ELT

What are people in ELT twittering about? Is it useful to me and/or my learners...?

According to TIME magazine, "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app..." (as Twitter is proud to proclaim on its home page).

From long experience, I would suggest that a healthy dose of scepticism is always called for whenever the words "next killer app" are used, be it Twitter or Second Life or interactive whiteboards, or any new bit of technology.

"Are my learners actually going to learn more, if I use this?" -- that would be the first question I think you should ask yourself as an English teacher. What are they (as opposed to me, the teacher) actually going to use the technology for, to do what, that will ensure that they learn more...?

If you can't see answers to those questions, I'd suggest you hold on before you jump on the latest digital bandwaggon.

Twitter is big at this moment, whatever people are using it for. They're also Using Twitter as an Education Tool, in a number of ways, says Search Engine Watch, such as using it to set assignments.

I'm not a Twitter user myself, either personally, or for use with my classes: I just can't see the answers to those questions...

>> 7 things you should know about Twitter
>> More on Twitter

Download lessons? Or get ideas...?

Print out, photocopy and cut up... But is that what you really want?

On the support group we have for our CELTA course trainees, someone recently asked where they could find sites from which they could download lesson plans.

You can find such things at sites like TEFL.net, ESL-kids.com and Splendid-Speaking.com.

Some of the publishers also have excellent resources sites, such as OneStopEnglish and BusinessEnglishOnline.net (both from MacMillan)

What would my tutor think...?
Remember, however, that there's an awful lot of rubbish out there in cyberspace. I'd suggest, before you download material, that you should ask yourself (among other questions) what your CELTA course tutor would have thought of it?

You might also consider the source of the material. The publishers give you some guarantee of quality lesson plans, as does the excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk, and the British Council kids site.

Whether or not the site carries Google-is-Evil ads is another consideration I might make. It does? It may be that its primary interest is to make money, not to improve your teaching...

Don't search, have things come to you
Personally, as I prefer to have things come to me, rather than having to search for them, I'd really recommend the free materials by email the ELT publishers will send out to you (in the image above, materials in my mailbox from OUP).

Is it lesson plans you really want...?
My doubt about such things is whether or not downloadable lesson plans are actually what you should be looking for.

It would be nice just to be able to get free, ready-to-print, ready-to-use stuff and not have to think further about the lessons we are teaching. But I think there is -- or there ought to be! -- a lot more to good language teaching than that.

Do you want to print and photocopy vocabulary worksheets -- or is really the ideas, how to teach vocabulary that you really need...?

Change the default start page of your browser

One of the suggestions made in the sessions yesterday on our Celta course was that you could change the default start page on your browser to something more useful to you as a teacher. Among my own default start pages are various sources of texts: with a quick glance, and without having to waste time trawling the Web for them, articles which I might be able to use in class come to me.

Also suggested was that your students should change their home pages on their computers at home/work to something of interest -- a page on which they would stop and read or listen to some English. I liked the idea of that being a class blog, if you have one, and here's another that site that you might recommend, Nik Peachey's Daily English Activities. Designed for students, every day it has "a new simple online activity to help you improve your English".

Personally, I always recommend my learners to set their home page to the BBC World Service; to stop when they get there; to pick the most interesting looking headline; then to spend 2-3 minutes reading (or listening); and -- because a lot of exposure is necessary for learning a language -- to do that every day.

It doesn't have to be the BBC: it could be any site on any topic that interests them. Someone in one of our workshops yesterday argued that if you didn't set them a task or an exercise to do with it, then they wouldn't bother to do it. My counter-argument would be that they don't need more tasks or exercises: what they need, as learners, is to get themselves into good habits.

Technology assistants: help is at hand

Toni Walton Atela (15) tells his sister (12) about a job he's volunteered for at school -- being a "technology assistant".

You're getting hot and sweaty in front of your class, trying to get a PowerPoint presentation to open on the beastly piece of junk that masquerades as a computer (which seems to work fine for other people...)? If you were teaching in my sons's school, help would be sitting there in the classroom next door...

It might not work as well in a language school (with kids there only a couple of hours a week) but, if you work in a "normal" secondary school, it takes some of the pressure off the teacher. You're not that good with technology...? You're afraid it's not going to work...? Get some help...!

And it puts the responsibility on the kids. Now, that's got to be a good thing, too...

Links landing in my mail box

All of the following links came to me via the excellent Developing Teachers.com Monthly Newsletter for July.

• 50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do, which might make a great discussion topic before your learners ever look at the site: Can they brainstorm their own list...? Once they get to the site, How many did they correctly predict...? And once they do get there, they'll find some fascinating reading
  
• The story of Jamie Livingston, who took a polaroid every day until the day he died, which (though you might want to limit it to, say, 30 days) would make a great project if you had a class blog -- get your learners to take the picture, in other words, and publish them together with a suitable, accompanying text describing the picture
  
• I was less impressed by StickyBall.net, which has games, jokes, vocab lists, worksheets and so on, though you might find things you could use.
  

The difference between the first two, above, and StickyBall is an important one, I think: in the first two cases, you would be getting your students to do things. In the latter case, it would be you downloading, printing and photocopying, to a considerable extent. Doing will produce learning, photocopying is much less likely to, if you ask me.

Don't go looking for things on the Internet, I always say: have things come to you. The DT Monthly Newsletter always brings lot...

Mobile phone pix

In the bar: "He was cutting a pineapple"

Here's one that came from the session on our CELTA course, July 24. I sent six of you out with your camera-equipped mobile phones to take pictures of people doing things. My instructions were to ensure that you asked politely for permission to take the photo, and thank the person for their assistance.

My assumptions were that you were teens; that you had such technology in your pockets; that we had been doing either the present or the past progressive; and that we had a class blog on which we could afterwards post the pictures with an appropriate caption (in the example, "He was cutting a pineapple...").

The point of the exercise was to raise the question of how much language would be learnt and/or practised and/or used relative to the amount of time invested in the activity. What is the return on investment, in other words, a question I would always ask myself with technology.

This isn't an idea that I've actually tried out with language learners, but I think I would: when are teens -- or adults -- more likely to learn: "doing" the language via a photocopied exercise or doing an activity in a way that is actually significant to them (and fun!)?

CELTA session, June 9

Hello, and welcome if you've come to today's session...

Your task
I'd like you to rank the items below, from most to least, in terms of how much language learning you think they would produce.

You should justify your decision. If your answer is "it depends", please specify: it depends on what?

Write your answer here on this blog, using the "comments".

Items

1. You finding images to use in some way in class (what way?)
   
2. Persuading your learners to change their default start page to the BBC World Service and to spend 5 minutes there every time they log on (ie. every day), listening or reading
3. A project in which your learners take photographs on their mobile phones of objects of value to their partners; write texts describing their partner's objects; and publish their work on a blog [see another example]
   
4. Using Glogster to create collages which they then describe orally (present) to the rest of the class; also then sharing their work online
5. You writing grammar exercises, posting them (and the answers) on a class blog
   
6. You sharing a blog with teaching colleagues (but not with your learners), on which you share problems and successes and reflect on what happens and what you are doing in class (etc)

Notes

• (2) is being done outside class, at home and/or at work
• (3) to (5) w0uld depend on our sharing a class blog with our learners, and could all be done on the same blog at different times of the term
  
• (6) might indirectly produce more, better language learning by improving the quality of the teaching
• There is, obviously, no right or wrong answer....

See also

• More about blogging
• Where to start if you know nothing about technology
• More basic things you should know
  
• Bibliography
  

Score your own wonder goal!

Gascoigne into space, look at this, Gascoigne: two-nil!

Here's one that I got from the amazing collection of links produced by Larry Ferlazzo -- which might make a great activity when Euro2008 comes round this summer.

Larry's suggestion is to have your learners use Reebook's Sprintfit KFS Replay tool to create a goal and "relive your greatest football moments" (registration required). You've got tutorials and can replay goals like the one Gazza scored against Scotland at Euro96 (picture, above). It's not exactly PlayStation, but it's probably a lot more interesting than the next unit in Headway!

As Larry points out, and as with so many of the things you can do with technology, it's the talking and the reading the tasks will involve as much as the task itself that that are important in the language classroom... We're using the technology to produce that, and the interaction between our learners -- for the sake of that, and not merely for the sake of the technology itself.

You could just watch the YouTube video of the Gazza goal... But isn't it so much better to get the learners to create things themselves...?

Vista, Word 2007 tutorials

The ribbon: understanding it is vital to using Word 2007... See below for explanation

Some of the people I work with are finding it tough to get used to working with Word 2007. If you are similarly challenged, here are some tutorials you might find useful...

If even finding Word is challenging enough, it might be worth starting here, with the basics of Vista 2007.

Two things to start with
There are two important things you need to do to get started. One is to get the hang of using the ribbon.

You use the ribbon to navigate your different tools -- it replaces the drop-down menus you were used to. You need to click the tabs to access the different groups of tools: in the image (above) we're currently in the home tab (red arrow); you need to click the other tabs (black arrows) to access other tools.

The second important thing is to realise that some of the things you want (like "save as") are hidden behind that button, "A" in the image below. Click that, and you do get a drop-down menu ("B"). That's got to be the FAQ I answer most often...

The button: Ah-hah! So that's where it's hidden!

If you'd rather have a text-based tutorial than video, here's one on getting started with Word 2007.

Look on Google and you'll find lots more tutorials...

Somewhere else worth going -- rather than Google -- when you are trying to get your head round technology is YouTube, where you'll find some great tutorials. Here's a very simple one on using the Word 2007 ribbon...

And TeacherTube is another place I'd go... Lots of Word 2007 video tutorials there too.

Go get yourself used to it
Word 2007 is not really that complicated, or so very different -- once you get used to it.

I'd suggest that getting the hang of Word 2007 is a bit like driving a new car, or using a new digital camera: you've got to make just a little bit of effort yourself to get used to it. Get your head round "the ribbon", and you're away...

Finding technology tutorials
How did I find all of these things? See the first comment (below) for some search tips.

Blogging, Storytelling, Video links

Two great sets of links, both of which came from recent additions to Larry Ferlazzo's amazing collection of links:

• Using Blogs to Promote Authentic Learning in the Classroom
• Digital Storytelling

Note also this link, which I discovered by exploring from the second of the above:

• Video in the classroom

How should you use technology in the classroom? Your learners should create things with it. It shouldn't just be you finding and printing stuff for them, or displaying it to them on an interactive whiteboard.

Make your learners creators of content, not merely consumers...

I don't remember who first said that, or where I heard it -- but that's the secret of using technology I believe.

50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story

Another link, suggested by Ana Falcon, that came to my mailbox in the ELTECS Latin America news list -- 50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story.

I think storytelling -- getting your learners to write stories, to tell multimedia stories -- is one of the most interesting things you can do in a language class. Apart from the obvious opportunities for learning and using language that such a project provides, it's the creating things aspect of it that attracts me -- and it's one of the best possible uses we can make of technology, as it takes much fuller advantage of the potential of technology than, say, seeing and using the Internet as a bank of images for use in class.

You want good group dynamics in your class? Get your learners to create and share something together.

The article (or wiki, to give it its proper term), contains lots of useful ideas and links, including links to audio, images and video available under Creative Commons licences -- ie. that you can use without infringing copyright.

The author, Alan Levine, has the commendable rule that "the media files you use in your story have to be ones that are licensed or shared with permission to re-use". However, my suggestion would always be that your learners create their own images, audio files, etc.

The more they create themselves, the less they steal from other websites, the prouder they will be of their work; the "pride in creation" is wonderful for motivation, for wanting to learn...

>> ELTECS news lists
>> More good stuff in your mailbox
>> Creative Commons
>> More on digital storytelling
>> Er... What's Web 2.0?

Videos for learning to use technology

This one came to my mailbox from one of the ELTECS news lists.

It mentioned a post on Nik Peachey's Learning technology teacher development blog for ELT, which referred to the materials on teachertrainingvideos.com.

Teachertrainingvideos.com has lots of things of interest, particularly for ELT, for anyone looking for something to "help them to incorporate technology into their teaching".

A possible alternative would be TeacherTube.com.

Nik Peachey's blog is similarly of interest, covering a wide range of the technologies available to us.

Ungoogle your cats!

Titi the Cat...

Someone asked me the other day whether or not an image of a cat found on Google (not that shown above) was going to print out well for use in class -- on the black-and-white printer they had access to.

As the contrast in the picture was low, I said I thought not and suggested looking for a different one.

And to enlarge it? Possibly the best way to enlarge is by using the photocopier to do it for you.

It was actually for use in a class on our young learners extension course and so I suggested that, rather than using Google, that the young learners themselves should draw the pictures -- and would then be able to describe their cats.

I've got no idea how the lesson eventually went, but I later happened to be in the actual classroom used and noticed the drawings of cats on the walls (see one example above) -- and like to imagine that the lesson meant much more to the kids, that they learnt more because they participated and were more involved in it.

Ungoogle!
I thought I'd just invented the word "ungoogle", but Google itself currently finds around 34,000 results for it.

But, because I think Google-is-Evil, and perhaps sometimes has an adverse effect on the lessons we take into our classrooms, it's one I think teachers should adopt.

There are better places to search than Google, there are better places to find images...

Interactive Whiteboards

We have interactive whiteboards (aka IWBs) here at IH... most of them gathering dust, as they rarely ever get used, other than as glorified data projectors.

I'm yet to be convinced of their value myself -- so much so that, other than playing with them myself, I've yet to use one with students.

TechLearning has a free ebook The Why and How of Interactive Whiteboards, which includes a section on "Tips and Tutorials for Purchase and Use".

I quote:

Give students answers or questions on slips of paper, allowing them to take turns coming up to the [IWB]. This will keep them focused on the lesson as they wait for their turn to come.

Admittedly -- because of my lack of experience with the beasts -- I'm not the best qualified person to say so, but that sounds like how not to use an IWB to me.

Then:

Each student is given a part of a plant to label. When it is time for that part to be labeled, the student comes up to the [IWB] and either writes the name of the part or clicks and drags the name of the part.

That sounds like being slower, not time-saving, which is one thing technology ought to be.

And it also sounds like you (or your kids) could do exactly the same equally well on a normal whiteboard with a marker pen.

Could you do exactly the same without the technology...? Yes...? Then don't use the technology, I would suggest.

Technology (1).... Learning.

At the beginning of a session on our Trainer Training course, I asked the participants to "fill in the blank" in the following sentence with a verb, and then complete the sentence:

Technology [verb] learning if/provided/unless/when...

For example, "Technology enhances learning when the learners create, not merely consume content".

At the end of the session, partly to demonstrate how podcasting could be used for project work, we then recorded the sentences with a digital voice recorder.

The result of the exercise:




I particularly liked the idea that technology should be used in a "judicious, memorable and novel" way but in fact liked many of the other ideas just as much.

My thanks to Amra, Annemarie, Barbara, Carol, Constanza, Iván, Jo, Juliette, Laura, Mariela, Mariyana, Sierra and Vika for their excellent ideas.

Getting the most out of your OHP

Collecting dust in the corridor: ye olde OHP...

I guess chances are your school either long-since abandoned its overhead projectors (aka OHPs) in favour of interactive whiteboards, or else, er... hasn't actually got to the OHP stage of technological evolution yet.

The excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk site has a new article on using OHPs (which it describes as "the most underused and sometimes misused" of classroom technology resources).

Another place where you'll find good ideas on using an OHP (and lots of other resources, too) is Chandler and Stone's The Resourceful English Teacher, one of the titles in a great "Professional Perspective" series from Delta Publishing.

New Year's Resolutions for your PC

Over at the excellent lifehacker.com, one of my favourite RSS feeds, they've got an interesting Seven New Year's Resolutions for your PC.

Things like:

• Regularly backing up your hard drive
• Cleaning out your hard drive
• Organising your hard drive
• And so on...
  

... and links to get you started on the spring cleaning there.

If you've been to the technology session on the CELTA course with me, you might remember that I probably began by asking "What are the five most important things about using technology?" One of the ones I always suggest is making back-up copies of vital documents.

The things listed above aren't things that you should be doing just once a year, of course...

Really stupid technology

$500? For headphones?! Picture: Not the Shure E500PTH...

PC World has just published a list of The 20 Most Innovative Products of the Year...

At number 20, the Shure E500PTH Sound Isolating Earphones (a mere $500, no, that's not a misprint). PC World says the "in-ear, sound-isolating headphones nestle themselves in your ear canal and block 20 dB of outside noise, leaving you with a remarkably quiet listening environment even on a crowded bus or plane. Though that's great for listening to music, it can be a pain if you have to talk to someone for a bit".

I mean, having to talk to someone, why, that's a pain in itself!

However, thanks to technology, Shure has come up with "a unique way around the problem by embedding a small microphone in the cord. Flick a switch on the Push To Hear module, and the outside world is piped in through the headphones -- you have no need to remove them from your ears" (my italics).

Thanks to technology, we can now overcome even common courtesy...

Of course, as with all technology, whether we're using it on a plane or in the classroom, it's not the technology itself that's stupid, it's the use we make of it...

Having fun learning to type, or learning a language...

Being able to touch-type (all fingers, no looking at the keyboard) is a skill you want to learn -- or teach yourself -- if you are going to spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard. It's so much more efficient...

Here's a fun little game for honing your typing skills, which allows you to blast words as they try and sneak up on you. It's not exactly methodical, but it's fun...

Learning to type properly is a bit like learning a language in some ways. Both require hard work to get the basics right. Learning to type "the cat sat on the mat" is a bit like learning "break, broke, broken".

Both should be fun. I think we sometimes jump to the conclusion that using technology is definitely going to be fun. We should plan lessons -- all lessons -- so that they are, but shouldn't just make that assumption. Maybe it's that going to the computer room is more fun than doing Headache Upper-Intermediate.

The game is more fun too, more fun than mindless repetition of "the cat sat on the mat". It's addictive. You want to play.

All lessons should be like that...

What (doesn't) make a good task in the computer room?

Barcelona, as seen on satellite image provided by Google Earth

In a previous post, I provided links to three articles on what makes a good language classroom task.

There ought to be a lot of overlap between that and what makes a good task if you are taking your learners to the computer room, and I think there is.

Here's an example of a task that I think is poor, which comes from the Winter 2006 issue of a magazine I like a lot, iT's for Teachers (which incidentally has a lot of good things online).

The task (the fourth for a lesson plan that began by looking at five aerial photographs of historic sites, including the Great Wall of China):

Get your students to use Google Earth to search for places around the world, including one or more or the places they have seen in the photographs. Can they find an aerial picture of their school or home?

What's wrong with that as a task...?
My doubts are as follows. I provide only questions -- if you want to suggest answers, that's what the "comments" feature is for...

• What is the aim of the task?
• What language are they going to learn or practise in doing the task?
  
• What are they going to do with what they produce?
  
• What's the return on investment?

I'd ask pretty much the same questions of most computer room language tasks, and one of my answers to the third would almost invariably be "Well, I guess they could blog it...!"

Barça's Nou Camp stadium, pictured via Google Earth. Wow...! But what language do they learn from it.

Technical note
Google Earth requires (free, easy) installation: note that you might not be able to do that on your school's PCs.

And -- again, importantly -- does the amount of language they are going to learn from the task really compensate for the time it's going to take to install?

Not exactly Age of Empires

Age of Empires: building yourself an entire world...

One reason teachers take their learners to the computer room is that it's "more exciting", "more interesting" than being in the traditional classroom.

That may be true -- we shouldn't assume that what we ask our learners to do is actually going to be exciting.

It probably isn't, not if you're a kid who's grown up on video games -- like some of the stunning PlayStation football games, or Age of Empires.

Age of Empires lets you start from scratch with just a few villagers, build houses and cultivate crops, hunt wild boar and chop down trees -- and from there go on to build an entire empire, with castles and universities and monasteries...

A HotPotatoes exercise on a computer might be fractionally more motivating than yet another grammar exercise in your Headway coursebook, but it's not exactly Age of Empires...

10 things you shouldn't do online

An article on schoolcio.com that you should read if you use the Internet in any way whatsover: "10 Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online".

They include:

• Clicking on email attachments from unknown senders
• Opening HTML or plain-text messages from unknown senders
• Participating in chat rooms or social networking sites (like MySpace)

Having a geek for a Dad, my daughter got into the Web almost before she could speak any English. I taught her to trash immediately any mail she got from unknown people and one of the first phrases in English I can remember her producing was "Better safe than sorry".

"Grandpa just sent me an attachment," Isabel (now 10) said the other day. "Should I trash it?"

Now there's a savvy Internet user...!

What should teachers know?

Interviewed in the Spring 2006 edition of It's for teachers magazine [website], and asked "What should English teachers know to be good at their jobs?", Melanie Williams answers:

They should know about the language they are teaching, they should know some different ways of teaching language, they should know about learners and how they learn. They need to know about lesson planning and how to manage the classroom to make learning as efficient and effective as possible (...) and they need to know about resources and materials they can use in class.

In the same piece, her colleague Mary Spratt adds:

"Knowing how to have an open mind and a willingness to learn are very important, too."

From many years of experience in English language teaching, I can say that I wholly agree with all of that -- if anything particularly with the addition Mary Spratt makes.

What about technology?
Technology doesn't get a mention -- and I think it should.

Assuming that technology does make your life easier (for example to find materials, to store them...); assuming that it is used to its full potential, in order for your learners to communicate... then I think you should know how to use technology.

It it doesn't, forget it -- let's not bother adding it to the list.

Good practice in hi-tech classrooms

The excellent techlearning.com newsletter [subscribe] brought me this article this morning -- Good Practice, Best Practice.

What is "good practice" when we're using technology with learners? The article (which describes itself merely as "some ideas for discussion"), is maybe not such a great one -- but the question certainly is! And it also leads to other links on the same question...

Of the four quadrants the article mentions, I'd say technology in the classroom should be "low input" (especially in terms of your time), "high impact" (on your students language learning, that is).

"What's the return on investment?" I would always say, before booting up the technology...

Why bother with technology?

All that technology... But is it really worth it?

"Why bother?" It was one of the "muddiest points" from one of the sessions on August 10th (full list of MPs from the session). I assume that what was meant was "Why bother with using technology in the classroom?"

In the first place, it should be said that technology certainly can at times be a hassle -- setting things up, and getting them to work properly and booking equipment out and so on. You certainly do want to have your "Plan B" up your sleeve!

Secondly, I definitely wouldn't bother unless I was sure that my return on investment was going to be high. If, for the time the learners and the teacher spend on the technology, they don't learn more language than they would have otherwise, or develop their language skills more, then I wouldn't use technology.

So why and when would I bother?
First of all, I'd say that it's a question of thinking not "What am I going to do with the technology?" but "What are my learners going to do with the language?". If you've thought about it in those terms, you are off to a good start...

Among the other reasons why I would go to a certain amount of hassle:

• Technology is exciting, especially to anyone below the age of about 25
• Conversely, (course) books -- and teachers! -- are boring to many of the same age group
• Technology allows you to create things, often from nothing -- a podcast or a creative writing project or a PowerPoint presentation
• Things like blogs and podcasts and chat and email allow you to communicate with other people, possibly natives
  

All of the above lead to greater motivation. "We created this!" "We did that!" "We succeeded!" "We talked to real English speakers and they understood us!" Those are powerful motivators -- none of which you normally get with a grammar exercise in a coursebook.

Does technology = more language learning? It's not such a straightforward equation. But if your learners are more motivated, they will learn more.

Portraits of Learning - superb use of technology

The Portraits of Learning project (a contest, actually) requires K-12 students to submit a photograph and "a short description of no more than fifty words about how your photograph reflects your personal universe".

Note the photo tips page, and don't miss the galleries of entries for 2004 and 2005.

Put together a similar project, create a website (or a blog) on which to display them and that's a superb use of technology in the classroom...!

Video storytelling

An article, from the excellent techlearning.com, on using the video in the classroom to get kids to tell stories.

Working with kids who were doing poorly, the author says that:

"... rather than have students silently read essays and short stories, I asked them to read the works in front of the class. Before long I couldn"t get them to stop. This simple act made a huge difference to them. It turned reading into performing"

More ideas on using video in the classroom from the also excellent teachingenglish.org.uk.

Is technology going to lead to more, better learning?

Before you begin to use technology -- either on your own (for your classes) or with your classes -- I think there are at least two key things you should ask yourselves:

1. How much time is it going to take -- before, during and after class?
2. Is that going to be time well spent -- ie will it lead to more, better learning than would have been possible without technology?

Will using technology lead to better learning? "It depends," you are probably thinking. But it depends on what?

Is a particular website suitable for use?

Suggested criteria for whether or not you want to use a website with students Do you actually want to take your learners to a site that you have found?

Considerations include:

1. Is it going to be of interest to your learners?

2. Is the content suitable? Is there any possibility that it might break taboos?

3. Is the language of a suitable level of difficulty? (And is it actually correct English?)

4. Is it time-saving or time-consuming?

5. What interaction is it - and the tasks you set - going to produce? Is it going to get people to talk to each other?

6. How much English is the task you are setting going to produce?

7. What useful language are they going to learn from it?

8. How are you going to organise the task you set - with students working individually, in pairs, in groups...?

9. Could you do exactly the same without making any use of the Internet?

10. Could you do the same more easily without the Internet?

11. Is it attractive to look at?

12. Is it easy (intuitive) to navigate?

13. Is the URL (address) you have for the page current (when was the last time you checked it)?

14. Do all the links work?

15. When was the page last updated?

16. What is your "Plan B" if something goes wrong and you can't access the page – or the Internet at all?

Can you think of any others? Add them, via the "Comment this post" link below.