18/11/2014
BY SYLVIA GUINAN
TIMELESS TEACHING TECHNIQUES FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
By Sylvia Guinan
Introduction What do your webtools say about you? List of blanket ‘macrotools’ Transform your coursebook Multi-media story telling Storytelling tools at a glance Comics Mindmapping Animation Interactive posters Social flyers Infographics Quiz tools Blogging Podcasting
Why this ebooklet? Reflective essay & sharing experiences Foundation tools for digitalizing content Transform print & test into multi-media Interactive learning & creativity Storybird Pixton, Comic Life, Bitstrips imind, padlet, mindmaple Goanimate, Voki Glogster Tackk, Storify Piktochart, Easel.Ly, InfoGr.Am ClubEFL, Quizlet, Quia, Google forms Wordpress, Edublogs, Kidblog, PB works Sound cloud, Vocaroo, Voicethread, audioboo
Introduction This ebooklet has been put together to share my experience and insights with teachers around the world who want to work more directly with educational technology. For me it’s not just about new tools and new environments. It’s mostly about new mindsets. How you think and feel about your work, action research, and new projects will shape the evolution of your courses and relationships with students. Technology can bring us back to ourselves in a paradoxically primitive way. You can really zone in on your purpose and rediscover your true values as an educator by choosing the right tools to deliver your message. Contrary to what people may think, building up a specialized app. library will not spark your primitive fires, but choosing simple yet powerful tools will. Why do I say primitive? Well, because no matter how new or fancy you may think your technology is, the creative process is natural and evolutionary. Your best tool is your
own mind and imagination. Tools that help you take your own creativity to higher levels are a great advantage, but every era has its tools. It’s important to put yourself first and know that you will own your technology and not the other way around. This is not as easy as you may think. If you end up choosing the wrong types of educational technology tools, or if you let technology do all the work for you then the extra spark will be lost. What kinds of simple, powerful tools am I referring to? I’m referring to the kinds of tools that give you a blank canvas to create. The kinds of tools that are easy to use. The kinds of tools that feed insights into your creation by virtue of their clever layouts and features. Laterally enhanced design forces new strains of creativity to emerge that you wouldn’t otherwise access. These kinds of tools turn normality on its head for you and then you create new lessons or content in these intuitive or should we say counter-intuitive spaces. The results are content, ideas and products that
will surprise you and your students. Many of my ideas are inspired by teaching exam English or business English but I have experience with literature, secondary schools and primary schools too, so the ideas are for everyone. Tools, environments and teaching ideas. This little ebooklet will introduce you to thoughts, experiences and very practical ideas to get you started off on the right foot with technology enhanced learning. After you have read some of my essays, blogs and related content, you will be in a position to transform your coursebook with the help of your students. What do your web tools say about you? Here are some tools that make a great difference to me: (As seen on my Linkedin publishing page) 1) Prezi
Prezi is the new power point. It's very different from power point in it's lateral design and visualstyle templates. It's a free tool that also comes with an educator licence, so it's completely accessible to teachers. It's already one of the favourite tools used by tech-savvy teachers around the world. What I like about the visual templates is that they are very symbolic and eye-catching. They are metaphors, striking psychological attention grabbers, and they help you to tell your story. The intuitive layout and tools provided within the Prezi interface help you come up with unique concepts and clear messages. It's very easy to use once you get over the initial learning curve, which isn't very steep as there are many video tutorials to help you learn the ropes. It also has flexible embedding options and ways to play with layers of design through zooming and re-sizing which takes you beyond the basic, more linear features of power point. As an online teacher I still use power point a lot as Prezi still cannot play directly from virtual classrooms, but I compromise by mixing and
matching presentation styles. Power points can be imported into Prezi and Prezi styles can be added to power points. Prezi can also be used from your website, blog and for asynchronous courses beyond virtual classrooms. Students projects using Prezi can very, very creative indeed and it's one tool they should be introduced to. Prezi was originally created for the business world, so imagine what kinds of business courses you could teach using Prezi and what kinds of practice run presentations they could make.
2) Present.me I think I first learnt about this from Russell Stannard. This is a very effective tool for self-paced courses as it combines video with power point presentations. It feels as if you're in a virtual classroom when you're creating your talk because as you speak you've got the presentation right beside your video. It's extremely easy to upload the power point, click record and make a lovely presentation. I think that this tool would work magic in the hands of students. Imagine the combinations of power point imagery and video talk they'd come up with. It's like an extension of You Tube as it has both your video and the
presentation running simultaneously. It can't be embedded onto You Tube itself but you can embed your videos onto your website or in a virtual library of your choice such as Pearl Trees or Symbaloo. 3) Pearl Trees, Symbaloo, Listly, Diigo and Tackk Every teacher's tool set must include curation and sharing tools. A place to store and collect your favourite links, videos, lesson plans, blogs and presentations. The five tools above do all of this and more. The added extra is explosive. The extra feature is the social aspect for sharing links or adding to lists collaboratively. They are all similar to each other, yet boast different features. In a way, whichever ones you choose as favourites from the above will also speak volumes about how you like to organise things and how you like to share and communicate. Apart from curating and organising as a teacher, I see these tools as being virtual libraries for courses. For this reason I prefer the interface of Pearl Trees and Symbaloo because they are visual, attractive and can help students to keep
motivated and organised. I use Diigo for more detailed or personal curation but prefer the more attractive layouts of Pearl trees or Symbaloo for creating virtual libraries for students or colleagues.. As for Tackk, I have 50 things to say about that;) I also think that students should learn to use these environments for their own self-organised learning spaces. They can upload their own multi-media projects and share with other students. This could lead to further collaborations, remixes, mash-ups, blog challenges or whatever. Attractive sharing spaces are highly social and highly motivating. I invite readers to try out these different spaces for their own curation and online teaching needs. How we self-organise also tells us a lot about ourselves. We should keep note of what we are doing and if our organisation style helps or hinders us and our students. Self-organisation one of those must-have digital skills that we can all improve upon. 4) Wordpress
This is like saying what your favourite kind of house is. Your website is your online home. Whatever you build or share anywhere on the web usually ends up somewhere inside your home. Wordpress is a user-friendly choice for anyone who wishes to blog or have an online presence. The best thing about Wordpress is the rich array of special plugins that let you do anything you want with your interface to create an interactive website experience. Our blogs and websites say everything about who we are. From the colour scheme, theme and design, to your teaching niche, content, personality, networks, professionalism and teaching values. It's fun, social, creative and inspiring. Teachers can help students to set up their own blogs too. 5) Jing, Camtasia or Camstudio. It's amazing how important screen-capturing is. I use my Jing contantly. It's a little tool that sits like a sticky little yellow blob on the side of your screen and you can drag it across the screen to take snapshots of what's going on - it might be a website or a webinar in action. In our teacher training courses we moderators take screenshots
of webinars - they turn out beautifully with photos of presenters and their creative powerpoint visuals. Then we share the class highlights on our social networks or store them for future scrapbooking or video mash-up projects. There are many video tools out there but it's good to have one power-horse of a tool that can enhance all of your other videos. Camtasia is a screen-capturing tool and a multi-media engine for creating videos with all kinds of special effects. It takes time to learn how to use this one, but it will help you to produce more sophisticated content in the long-run. A free alternative to Camtasia is Camstudio. Camtasia is quite expensive and you should only invest in this if you are serious about sophisticated video being an integral part of your content creation or collaborative work with students. 6) You Tube I know that many of my colleagues would put you Tube above Wordpress, for example, and that would be right for them. You Tube is a global powerhouse for online presence. It's user-friendly and students love creating their own videos with
You Tube too. I have to add it here too for everyone out there who loves You Tube even though I prefer blogging myself. That's a bit like saying for everyone out there who loves television but I prefer reading;) Joking aside, however, You Tube is much more important for us than TV ever was and my only issue with you Tube is my time and not having put any aside for creating a more dedicated teaching channel on you Tube. The main reason for that is getting interrupted by my kids and time management. I know I'd love to perform on You Tube if the conditions were right.
Prezi Present me Pearl Trees Symbaloo Listly Diigo Tackk Wordpress Jing Camtasia Camstudio You Tube
Transform your coursebook: Reframe typical coursebook exercises such as phrasal verbs lists, grammar and lists of confusing/related vocabulary items into brainfriendly multi-media formats. Tool sets: Storytelling, mindmapping, infographics, interactive posters, flyers, blogs, social streams, video-making tools, animation tools. Skills sets: Speaking, listening, writing, use of English, reading. Challenge: Explore and isolate the best tools for you to help you transform course book activities and exercises into digitally enhanced content created by teachers and/or students.
Digital Storytelling. Storytelling has shaped my online teaching work more than anything else for many reasons. It seems to be my communication set point, partly because of my background in literature and partly because I love reading,. But as a professional teacher it goes much deeper than that. The whole truth is that I’ve found storytelling to be the foundation stone of all communication when it comes to language learning. When you work online you leave the world of giant publishers behind. You start to create your own courses and content. This process make you realize what you truly care about as a teacher and where your teaching values lie. I found that humanism was behind all of my beliefs and inspiration. My professional heroes from early teaching days were Mario Rinvolucri and Penny Ur. Psychology has been my study hobby for the past ten years also, and the more I learnt about psychology, my own children, my students and myself, the more significant storytelling became in
practical ways. You can aim to teach vocabulary, grammar, writing, listening and speaking through storytelling. It’s superior to typical forms of published content because it engages the hearts and minds of students and it empowers them to become autonomous and collaborative learners. Here’s a short list of advantages I’ve found for storytelling in ELT. There are so many more to consider, but this is good for starters. 1) Timeless inspiration from leaders in the field. There are many fantastic published books on storytelling in ELT that can inspire new ideas as we transform out story content into digital formats, for example, ‘Once Upon A time by John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri, Telling Tales by Jenny Quintana, and a very new book by David Heath, Delta publishing. 2) Once you start thinking of language and stories through multi-media perspectives, you’ll see that all teaching ideas and objectives become multidimensional, flexible and simple to expand and build-upon.
3) By combining wisdom from pre-digital authors with your own action research and experiments, your own creativity increases by default and this inspires you do so much more than you would have originally envisioned. 4) As you become more creative, you become a role model for students who will want to join you in experimenting with language and multi-media. 5) Once you join forces with students many practical ideas for transforming the flat landscapes of lifeless course books will evolve collectively. 6) In practical terms, any text can become a podcast, a video, a blog, a comic, cartoon, infographic, mindmap, a song or a movie. 7) The bones of any text can come from your teaching objectives and curriculum as laid out in the course book. How many ways can students experiment with phrasal verbs for example? How many ways can you present phrasal verbs? I have presented phrasal verbs in comics, on infographics and in multi-media quizzes. All of thee have been in story format. 8) Whether students are learning phrasal verbs,
huge word lists, grammar or pronunciation, it can be contextualized in story format. 9) The context also provides the social and emotional engagement necessary for students to connect deeply with the content. 10) All of these contexts and multi-media stories can be created by students themselves. 11) Allowing students to create their own content is the greatest gift you can give them. This gift alone is worthy of a separate book on the subject. Let’s just say, for now that you can change their lives by reaching beneath cold language objectives into the true soul of learning through creativity. 12) Mistakes made by students in their multimedia creations become inspiration for creative error-correction techniques and they can be fed into new content. Therefore students are leading the course through their own natural and creative needs analysis. You are constantly in tune with their needs and through recycling, remixing and improving upon their work you create an evolving linguistic reinforcement machine. 13) Psychologically speaking, storytelling shapes
the brain cognitively and emotionally. It aids memory, builds brain muscle and increases empathy and social intelligence. The right focus makes us resilient and inspiring learners as well as leaders. 14) Storytelling integrates different parts of ourselves so we don’t need to worry about tapping into so many different sides of our students’ minds – the storytelling does it for us. 15) ‘Stories lead to stories lead to stories’( Lambert J, Digital storytelling)
Storytelling Tools At A Glance (Some curated from Teacher boot camp by Shelly Terrell) Here’s the link and descriptions as well as her collection of 50 more on Pearl Trees. Storybird Zooburst Little bird tales Simple booklet Story maker by British Council The art of storytelling Dr. Seuss story creator Domo animate Animoto Smilebox
Mindmapping in education Mindmapping has become an integral part of the business world and education. In English language teaching, ideas for language and grammar are being created by teachers all over the world and are even becoming viral on social networks. So, what is it about mindmaps and why do we want to use them? 1) As laterally-designed mapping spaces, mindmaps are powerful visual aids for brainstorming. That’s why they are so popular in business meetings, for example. 2) They work by association. We have one central key word and brainstorm some associated key words, arranging them on key branches. Then we build up more associations and sub branches from the main branch. 3) It builds up into a visual network of associations and ideas that can give us new insights into
problems. These branches are potentially neverending and it gives you the sense that your ideas in infinite. 4) Creating mindmaps for various purposes in education makes teachers and students more organized and more creative at the same time. 5) Mindmaps allow us to see the bigger picture and the smaller details simultaneously. 6) They are perfect tools for planning essays, blog articles or books. 7) They’re great for vocabulary presentations or revision. 8) They can be a visual basis for story-telling. 9) Students can mindmap movies or even podcasts, meeting notes or stories, so they can be used as multi-sensory note-taking devices. 10) They make beautiful displays for grammatical or lexical sets.
11) They train students in cognitive and creative thinking skills. 12) They make learning fun and more enjoyable. 13) The ideas for exploiting mindmaps in language teaching are inexhaustible.
Comics in education Comics are visually appealing storylines of great psychological and educational significance. Digitalised comics are playgrounds for students who are testing out their language skills and embarking on personalised self-expression. They encourage reading as well as writing dialogue and background captions. This is very powerful for language learning. Coursebook exercises can be recreated in comics form by teachers and students. Teachers can turn exam type questions, such as sentence transformations into comic stories by using captions and bubbles to give context. This makes the whole testing situation come to life and could even do away with horrible exam feelings. The ideal thing to do is have a comic chapter per course book unit from lower levels so that students learn transformations and tenses like this without even realizing that one day they’ll
come up on the exam paper. Comics can kill the exam blues with kindness. Many of the storytelling ideas and points made in the previous list also count for comics, as comics are visual forms of storytelling, like songs, music and other types of creative media. The impact of visuals and comic-style media on memory, motivation, creativity and personal development are widely recognized in academia. In fact one academic called Nick Sousanis wrote his whole dissertation in comic form and has inspired many of my ideas for teaching with comics.
Animation Some tools allow for voiceover effects and moviestyle animated productions. The most userfriendly one I’ve found is Goanimate. What I like about this tool is that a movie can be made very quickly and student practice pronunciation, writing, character-building and storytelling. The benefits of animating lessons and transforming books in this way are cognitive, social, emotional and psychological.
Interactive Posters, social flyers and infographics. These are all simply beautiful tools for transforming the coursebook into social, multimedia works of art. They are also simple to use. Students can use their imaginations to depict language through image, video, audio and all kinds of embedded media to recreate what language means to them. They can proudly display their work on class blogs or on teachers platforms like Edmodo. These tools are powerful enough to become something like interactive magazines and pave the way for future blogging and even publishing student-created ebooks.
Quiz tools and blogging I put these together as quizzes can be embedded onto blogs for a multi-media effect or the blog could be a quiz-making platform, such as ClubEFL – a safe learning space where students blog, vlog
(video-blog) and even make their own quizzes. Quizzes are best when students use them to test themselves and try to recreate real exams by creating multi-media questions, fill- in –the gaps, and so on. Multi-media lesson ideas 1) Students learn and revise vocabulary through writing their own short stories and comic strips. 2) Students learn to understand confusing vocabulary sets through comic strips.
3)Students re-write their own stories using confusing word sets. 4)Present phrasal verbs on comic strips or infographics.
5)Students write their own phrasal verbs and stories on comics strips. 6)Students practise speaking, pronunciation and vocabulary by creating story podcasts.
7) Teachers model pronunciation and creative thinking by creating story podcasts for students. 8) Teachers transform story podcasts into interactive quizzes using quiz-making tools. 9) Students make up very short stories through simple video-making tools. 10) Students collaborate on chain story projects using story boarding tools. 11) Teachers take typical grammar rules or exercises and present them visually on infographics. 12) Teachers create blank comic strips and students have to write dialogue in using certain tenses to be practise. 13) Teachers create jumbled comic strip stories for students to sort out, retell & redesign. 13) Teachers use comic strip captions and bubbles to transform exam test sentence stems.
14) Students practice pronunciation by creating stories with animation tools and voice over effects. 15) Create real life task-based activities for exam English by challenging students to create posters and flyers related to global issues such as the environment. 16) Use blogs, forums and flyers like tack with social streams to encourage commentary and citizen journalism. 17) Create infographics for business English vocabulary sets. 18) Create topic based visual boards on Pinterest and use them for speaking practice, and as visuals to aid mindmap building, vocabulary extension and fluency development. 19) Have students transform literature extracts into multi-media projects. 20) Have students create broadcasting newscasts using video and interactive poster designs. 21) Have students build up stories from vocabulary prompts on mindmaps.
22) Students create mindmaps from movie clips 23) Teacher map tenses onto mindmaps and then create blank tense maps for students to fill in.
Here are some of my slideshows and publications to do with creativity, educational technology and teaching ideas.
24) Try these ten ideas for teaching with movies and mindmaps. 25) Try these ten ideas for teaching with poetry and experiment with multi-media & poetry. 26) Check out 50 ideas here for using Tackk for teaching and sharing with technology. 27) Watch this presentation for more interactive storytelling ideas28) Check out more thoughts on teaching with comics here 29)Here’s a detailed look at social and emotional approaches to teaching with technology.
30) Learn about fun online spaces that you can create for students here. ***************************************** ********************************** You can read more at www.sylviaenglishonline and http://www.wiziq.com/teachblog/author/sylvia/
“For each and every storyteller, we are focused on creating a story that feels unique and powerful. Unique in that we hear the author describe the events and issues of the story in a way that is only theirs to provide, that the perspective feels that it emerged from honest self-reflection. Powerful in that we want the stories to give an intimate glance at the struggle the author faced when reacting to events, how the events changed them. Put another way, we want to help storytellers move though a
process of self discovery about the why of their story.� (Lambert, J., Digital Storytelling, capturing lives, creating communities) The End.