While not finding the spectacle of Barca's players play-acting particularly edifying in Champions' League 1st leg in Madrid, I seem to recall no football whatsoever taking place at the end of the Copa del Rey, once Madrid had (of course) gone in front. Minimal contact from Barca players was greeted by various Madrid players rolling around as if snipered. In fact Chelsea under Jose Mourinho when 1-0 up frequently saw Drogba more in the horizontal than the vertical come the endgame.
Perhaps the problem in Spain is Jose's team has rarely been leading 1-0 in big games going into the last 10 minutes and he rather misses being able to instruct Drogba etc to lie down & kill the game.
Thankfully Mourinho doesn't work for Barca any more as rather than witnessing the "spectacle" of parking the bus on going 1-0 up, we got Leo Messi's Maradona moment.
As in the world cup final, when the tactic of one team is simply to foul the other, the fouled team is of course going to exaggerate any contact. On a final note, Adebayor's "It's a man's game" comments made me laugh as in rugby (a man's game) the "totting-up" approach to niggly fouls would have seen most of the Madrid players in the bin for 10 minutes. And possibly deciding to play football instead of stopping football???While not finding the spectacle of Barca's players play-acting particularly edifying in Champions' League 1st leg in Madrid, I seem to recall no football whatsoever taking place at the end of the Copa del Rey, once Madrid had (of course) gone in front. Minimal contact from Barca players was greeted by various Madrid players rolling around as if snipered. In fact Chelsea under Jose Mourinho when 1-0 up frequently saw Drogba more in the horizontal than the vertical come the endgame.
Perhaps the problem in Spain is Jose's team has rarely been leading 1-0 in big games going into the last 10 minutes and he rather misses being able to instruct Drogba etc to lie down & kill the game.
Thankfully Mourinho doesn't work for Barca any more as rather than witnessing the "spectacle" of parking the bus on going 1-0 up, we got Leo Messi's Maradona moment.
As in the world cup final, when the tactic of one team is simply to foul the other, the fouled team is of course going to exaggerate any contact. On a final note, Adebayor's "It's a man's game" comments made me laugh as in rugby (a man's game) the "totting-up" approach to niggly fouls would have seen most of the Madrid players in the bin for 10 minutes. And possibly deciding to play football instead of stopping football???
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
Saturday, 14 May 2011
Zimmer Twins - students create animations & add dialogue
Saw this recently - reminds me of DVolver - but has different choices & possibilities:
http://www.zimmertwins.com/movie/create
I would advise students to prepare dialogues away from the computers first or I could see any pretence at a language lesson disappearing fast!
Could be used to liven up homework too.
http://www.zimmertwins.com/movie/create
I would advise students to prepare dialogues away from the computers first or I could see any pretence at a language lesson disappearing fast!
Could be used to liven up homework too.
Learning Curves - teacher training @ OCVC
OCVCLearningCurves 13/05/11
Using Technology in ELT
Lake School Oxford http://www.englishinoxford.com/courses/professional-development/learning-curves/ hosted a group of colleagues from several different countries this week for an intensive ILT / ELT course.
Final session was held @ OCVC & delivered by me so I took the opportunity to try out a few things I'd seen or heard . . . or been tweeted . . . or retweeted . . .
We kicked off by looking at http://todaysmeet.com/ which is a great 'back channelling' website. I wanted just to use it as a bit of a warmer / icebreaker to get a bit of info about the group as I hadn't actually met them before, but also wanted to show them a few tools to make the interactive whiteboard (IWB) a little more interactive. Within a minute or two, 'my' IWB was covered with 'their' writing & the theme of technology being used to facilitate collaboration had begun.
We had a whistle stop tour through the OCVC Moodle site & I showed them one or two of the features which I like to use. Something I regularly harp on about is the fact that Moodle sites can become a bit of a graveyard for Word & PowerPoint docs and little else. So we looked at the forums and in particular at the collaborative discussion tasks I blogged about in 'Using Moodle Forums in Creative Writing Class' & we talked about the different applications of this - whether it works best when started in class or not (I think it does) . . .
As I only saw them for an afternoon, it didn't seem worthwhile to build a specific Moodle site for the teachers, so I 'piggy-backed' the activities / websites I wanted them to look at on one of my existing sites & just 'hid' & 'revealed' it as and when it was required. Although if any of my level 2 Pre-access diploma group *had* been on the VLE late on a Friday afternoon (unlikely, but not unheard of) they may have been surprised by the presence of interlopers . . . . and possibly very alarmed at what may have look like a very unusual set of new modules to be studied so late in the year. Fortunately, now everything is 'hidden' again and it looks as if we had never been there.
Again because I was only seeing them for a one-off, I succumbed to the danger of demoing a list of my favourite resources & then letting participants get on with it. Mind you, if you can't fall into a few 'lazy teaching' habits on a Friday afternoon, when can you?
As ever with ILT sessions like this, it's the stuff I found out preparing / researching the session as well as the contributions from the group (still available - for one week only - on http://todaysmeet.com/ocvclearningcurves ).
In an earlier blog post I mentioned the difficulty I have processing the sheer wealth of what is out there on t'internet & in the 'cloud' & we discussed yesterday fears about what would happen if, for some reason, the cloud blew away. I got the feeling that their technology was a lot less reliable than what we have @ OCVC, although apart from our Moodle, everything else we looked at was free. But it was more that they might have dodgy LANs or Internet connections or just the fear that 'it might not work'.
We also discussed the balance you strike at at big college like OCVC where although the facilities can be impressive, adding resources to the network can be a long drawn out process where different departments need to talk to each other - not always as quickly as we might like. In fact, we were in a different room than originally planned for because the 'showcase' ILT room wasn't running flash (really!) and while most of the participants would have been able to download in their organisations in a (er) 'flash' (*cough*) that's something we would need to get permissions for & different members of staff would need to become involved, it would begin to,take time (and cost money) and in the end we decided to change the room . . . .
Finishing off on the idea of having trouble processing the amount of new material 'out there' & also the speed at which the list is being added to, we discussed how google/reader, blogger (of course!) & Twitter ( http://twitter.com/neobadwolfone ) could help provide strategies for coping with all the different threads of C21st Learning & how colleagues from all over the world are such an active resource.
It does seem a little paradoxical that certain paranoias about cyber-geekery can exist hand-in-hand with the wonderfully humanistic global collaboration & sharing of ideas. Paradoxical, but cool.
So I have vowed to trawl the feeds more carefully and with more purpose. To continue to let the general amazingness on learning technology wash over me in a wave of blog posts, tweets & retweets, but also doing something about it - the very wonderful Shelly Terrell http://twitter.com/#!/shellterrell has blogged extensively about several different projects one can participate in - which for me would be great and offer a bit of direction in my (admittedly enjoyable) sea of driftingness - interesting that I keep using sea analogies - clearly the 'Water, water' post hasn't gone away yet.
Now I just need to go away and think carefully about which particular project might work for me . . . . and also the focus . . .
1. Learners voices - listening to them & helping learners make their own voices more persuasive
2. Keeping up to date / worldwide collaboration / webinars & tweetings etc
3. Organising resources - this year everything feels like it's everywhere - laptop, iPad, google.docs, hotmail, work mail, USB stick etcetcetc
4. Projects. projects everywhere - not a mo to think . . . .
Using Technology in ELT
Lake School Oxford http://www.englishinoxford.com/courses/professional-development/learning-curves/ hosted a group of colleagues from several different countries this week for an intensive ILT / ELT course.
Final session was held @ OCVC & delivered by me so I took the opportunity to try out a few things I'd seen or heard . . . or been tweeted . . . or retweeted . . .
We kicked off by looking at http://todaysmeet.com/ which is a great 'back channelling' website. I wanted just to use it as a bit of a warmer / icebreaker to get a bit of info about the group as I hadn't actually met them before, but also wanted to show them a few tools to make the interactive whiteboard (IWB) a little more interactive. Within a minute or two, 'my' IWB was covered with 'their' writing & the theme of technology being used to facilitate collaboration had begun.
We had a whistle stop tour through the OCVC Moodle site & I showed them one or two of the features which I like to use. Something I regularly harp on about is the fact that Moodle sites can become a bit of a graveyard for Word & PowerPoint docs and little else. So we looked at the forums and in particular at the collaborative discussion tasks I blogged about in 'Using Moodle Forums in Creative Writing Class' & we talked about the different applications of this - whether it works best when started in class or not (I think it does) . . .
As I only saw them for an afternoon, it didn't seem worthwhile to build a specific Moodle site for the teachers, so I 'piggy-backed' the activities / websites I wanted them to look at on one of my existing sites & just 'hid' & 'revealed' it as and when it was required. Although if any of my level 2 Pre-access diploma group *had* been on the VLE late on a Friday afternoon (unlikely, but not unheard of) they may have been surprised by the presence of interlopers . . . . and possibly very alarmed at what may have look like a very unusual set of new modules to be studied so late in the year. Fortunately, now everything is 'hidden' again and it looks as if we had never been there.
Again because I was only seeing them for a one-off, I succumbed to the danger of demoing a list of my favourite resources & then letting participants get on with it. Mind you, if you can't fall into a few 'lazy teaching' habits on a Friday afternoon, when can you?
As ever with ILT sessions like this, it's the stuff I found out preparing / researching the session as well as the contributions from the group (still available - for one week only - on http://todaysmeet.com/ocvclearningcurves ).
In an earlier blog post I mentioned the difficulty I have processing the sheer wealth of what is out there on t'internet & in the 'cloud' & we discussed yesterday fears about what would happen if, for some reason, the cloud blew away. I got the feeling that their technology was a lot less reliable than what we have @ OCVC, although apart from our Moodle, everything else we looked at was free. But it was more that they might have dodgy LANs or Internet connections or just the fear that 'it might not work'.
We also discussed the balance you strike at at big college like OCVC where although the facilities can be impressive, adding resources to the network can be a long drawn out process where different departments need to talk to each other - not always as quickly as we might like. In fact, we were in a different room than originally planned for because the 'showcase' ILT room wasn't running flash (really!) and while most of the participants would have been able to download in their organisations in a (er) 'flash' (*cough*) that's something we would need to get permissions for & different members of staff would need to become involved, it would begin to,take time (and cost money) and in the end we decided to change the room . . . .
Finishing off on the idea of having trouble processing the amount of new material 'out there' & also the speed at which the list is being added to, we discussed how google/reader, blogger (of course!) & Twitter ( http://twitter.com/neobadwolfone ) could help provide strategies for coping with all the different threads of C21st Learning & how colleagues from all over the world are such an active resource.
It does seem a little paradoxical that certain paranoias about cyber-geekery can exist hand-in-hand with the wonderfully humanistic global collaboration & sharing of ideas. Paradoxical, but cool.
So I have vowed to trawl the feeds more carefully and with more purpose. To continue to let the general amazingness on learning technology wash over me in a wave of blog posts, tweets & retweets, but also doing something about it - the very wonderful Shelly Terrell http://twitter.com/#!/shellterrell has blogged extensively about several different projects one can participate in - which for me would be great and offer a bit of direction in my (admittedly enjoyable) sea of driftingness - interesting that I keep using sea analogies - clearly the 'Water, water' post hasn't gone away yet.
Now I just need to go away and think carefully about which particular project might work for me . . . . and also the focus . . .
1. Learners voices - listening to them & helping learners make their own voices more persuasive
2. Keeping up to date / worldwide collaboration / webinars & tweetings etc
3. Organising resources - this year everything feels like it's everywhere - laptop, iPad, google.docs, hotmail, work mail, USB stick etcetcetc
4. Projects. projects everywhere - not a mo to think . . . .
Saturday, 5 February 2011
Water, water, everywhere . . . And all the boards did shrink . . .
OK - so I'm, at heart, always (and forever)an English teacher . . . And I KNOW Coleridge wasn't talking about WHITEboards (interactive or other) but I must confess to being pretty overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what's out there in terms of Information & Learning Technology. Water, water indeed . . . . .
In fact, that's not really it anymore . . . I've moved on . . . Now it's more that I'm pretty overwhelmed by how (on earth!) I'm going to organise & attempt to categorise what's out there. Suddenly 'surfing' doesn't seem an appropriate word any more - I'm not even sure that there IS a verb that conveys the feeling of being 'lost in a gigantic maze with an attack of the tangential connections' but I think we may need to coin one soon!
So my task - started this week - is to try to 'organise' ILT into roughly different categories. I've managed to cut down the click, click, click of high-speed surfing that leaves me in a bit of a head spin - inspired but confused in equal measures - by deciding to 'follow' a few famous ILT experts. One of the features of "Blogger" that I really like is being able to 'follow' the blogs of others as it feels like Blogger is doing the hard work - Blogger waits until they publish a new post & then reminds me when I log in. If after a few weeks it's not my cup of tea then I can unsubscribe without worrying that I may have missed the good bits. So, I'm feeling up-to-date (relatively) without having to venture out into the darkest depths of Internet-world as, for now at any rate, there is enough interesting stuff arriving via Blogger for me to focus on other aspects of organising ILT.
God bless "Blogger" . . . Seriously though - I know people who view computers with an equal measure of fear and loathing - I believe that's because they haven't made it 'work for THEM' yet - the point of the things is that they are supposed to make things easier, quicker etcetc - once you do something that used to take an hour in 5 minutes. . . . Then you're sold - so thanks again "Blogger" :-)
So here is a vague list to begin with - of categories / headings under which I am going to try to file & order what I am finding / looking for. Interestingly ( or not), in thinking about what to include in the list, I actually thought of a few areas that I hadn't naturally come across through my somewhat random surfing from link to link to link . . .
1. One or two "readable" methodologies - ideally written in the style of Geoff Petty and even more ideally, following the structure of a Jeremy Harmer or a Jim Scrivener with initial methodology followed up by practical activities for students to do in the classroom (or, in the case of ILT - probably not 'just' in the classroom).
2. how blended learning courses are funded - not very exciting-sounding, I know - but if blended learning really is to be effective, it can't have at it's heart some poor teacher who has just crawled out of the classroom & logged onto their computer to do a bit of admin only to find a maelstrom of blog updates, student forum posts & assignments uploaded to Moodle - surely this is teaching? Contact teaching? And needs to be counted as such?
3. Activities which promote interactive student use of VLEs during induction - and I DO mean interactive - not just looking at a photo or two and a load of word docs and power points - I've found that student use of forums tends to work best when they are introduced at the very beginning of the course as an actual learning activity rather than telling them - "here's Moodle - we'll use it later"
4. Mobile technology
5. Clouds & 'Delicious'
6. Developing the use of Apps - I think I read somewhere that the billionth app was recently downloaded - in just a couple of years . . .
7. Already available online activities that students could do in the classrooom as most or part of a 'normal' lesson.
8. Already available online activities that students could do OUTSIDE the classroom.
9. Engaging learners through multi-media
10. Practical skills I can develop to become a more rounded classroom practitioner - I saw a link to a book written by Pete Sharma, who did a bit of teaching for OCVC when I started in 2003, called something like "400 ways to make an interactive whiteboard interactive" and I thought "400!! I think I only know 6!" . . . . Then I thought about it and realised it was more like 4 :( definitely not lolling out loud . . .
So that's 10 areas that could help subdivide & help organise & help make sense of what's already 'out there' and I have already thought of a few more . . . I think in the spirit of EFL guru Scott Thornbury , I'm going to come back to this post & keep adding until I come up with a definitive list of categories . . . . More than 10 definitely . . . . But I don't want it to be TOO more than 10 or I'll start to feel like I'm rewriting the Internet . . . And I definitely DON'T want to do THAT! I'm definitely 'waving & NOT drowning'.
Although if THAT was really true, I'd probably go:
1. Student activities (inside class)
2. Student activities (outside class)
3. Teachers - developing confidence & proficiency in ILT
4. Colleagues - CPD - googledocs & wikis
5. VLEs - why, what & how?
6. Experts - methodologies, blogs & 'following'
7. Mobile technology
8. Multi-media
9. Searching - building research & study skills for the 21st Century
10. Safety
In fact, that's not really it anymore . . . I've moved on . . . Now it's more that I'm pretty overwhelmed by how (on earth!) I'm going to organise & attempt to categorise what's out there. Suddenly 'surfing' doesn't seem an appropriate word any more - I'm not even sure that there IS a verb that conveys the feeling of being 'lost in a gigantic maze with an attack of the tangential connections' but I think we may need to coin one soon!
So my task - started this week - is to try to 'organise' ILT into roughly different categories. I've managed to cut down the click, click, click of high-speed surfing that leaves me in a bit of a head spin - inspired but confused in equal measures - by deciding to 'follow' a few famous ILT experts. One of the features of "Blogger" that I really like is being able to 'follow' the blogs of others as it feels like Blogger is doing the hard work - Blogger waits until they publish a new post & then reminds me when I log in. If after a few weeks it's not my cup of tea then I can unsubscribe without worrying that I may have missed the good bits. So, I'm feeling up-to-date (relatively) without having to venture out into the darkest depths of Internet-world as, for now at any rate, there is enough interesting stuff arriving via Blogger for me to focus on other aspects of organising ILT.
God bless "Blogger" . . . Seriously though - I know people who view computers with an equal measure of fear and loathing - I believe that's because they haven't made it 'work for THEM' yet - the point of the things is that they are supposed to make things easier, quicker etcetc - once you do something that used to take an hour in 5 minutes. . . . Then you're sold - so thanks again "Blogger" :-)
So here is a vague list to begin with - of categories / headings under which I am going to try to file & order what I am finding / looking for. Interestingly ( or not), in thinking about what to include in the list, I actually thought of a few areas that I hadn't naturally come across through my somewhat random surfing from link to link to link . . .
1. One or two "readable" methodologies - ideally written in the style of Geoff Petty and even more ideally, following the structure of a Jeremy Harmer or a Jim Scrivener with initial methodology followed up by practical activities for students to do in the classroom (or, in the case of ILT - probably not 'just' in the classroom).
2. how blended learning courses are funded - not very exciting-sounding, I know - but if blended learning really is to be effective, it can't have at it's heart some poor teacher who has just crawled out of the classroom & logged onto their computer to do a bit of admin only to find a maelstrom of blog updates, student forum posts & assignments uploaded to Moodle - surely this is teaching? Contact teaching? And needs to be counted as such?
3. Activities which promote interactive student use of VLEs during induction - and I DO mean interactive - not just looking at a photo or two and a load of word docs and power points - I've found that student use of forums tends to work best when they are introduced at the very beginning of the course as an actual learning activity rather than telling them - "here's Moodle - we'll use it later"
4. Mobile technology
5. Clouds & 'Delicious'
6. Developing the use of Apps - I think I read somewhere that the billionth app was recently downloaded - in just a couple of years . . .
7. Already available online activities that students could do in the classrooom as most or part of a 'normal' lesson.
8. Already available online activities that students could do OUTSIDE the classroom.
9. Engaging learners through multi-media
10. Practical skills I can develop to become a more rounded classroom practitioner - I saw a link to a book written by Pete Sharma, who did a bit of teaching for OCVC when I started in 2003, called something like "400 ways to make an interactive whiteboard interactive" and I thought "400!! I think I only know 6!" . . . . Then I thought about it and realised it was more like 4 :( definitely not lolling out loud . . .
So that's 10 areas that could help subdivide & help organise & help make sense of what's already 'out there' and I have already thought of a few more . . . I think in the spirit of EFL guru Scott Thornbury , I'm going to come back to this post & keep adding until I come up with a definitive list of categories . . . . More than 10 definitely . . . . But I don't want it to be TOO more than 10 or I'll start to feel like I'm rewriting the Internet . . . And I definitely DON'T want to do THAT! I'm definitely 'waving & NOT drowning'.
Although if THAT was really true, I'd probably go:
1. Student activities (inside class)
2. Student activities (outside class)
3. Teachers - developing confidence & proficiency in ILT
4. Colleagues - CPD - googledocs & wikis
5. VLEs - why, what & how?
6. Experts - methodologies, blogs & 'following'
7. Mobile technology
8. Multi-media
9. Searching - building research & study skills for the 21st Century
10. Safety
Saturday, 15 January 2011
Using Moodle Forums in Creative Writing Class
Background:
I did this with a group who are studying on our L2 Pre-Access Diploma in Progression, a new course which we are piloting aimed at students who were diagnosed as requiring a foundation year prior to studying @ L3. We had been working on planning and drafting a piece of creative writing and this was pretty much complete with some excellent work from the students. Definitely not for the faint-hearted as their stories range from civil war in East Timor, to experiencing the Rwandan genocide as a child - but well-written & so, so compelling.
Using the Moodle Forums
So the writing was finished & I was wondering what we could do with it as the students had put so much into it. I had used Moodle forums before for online discussion but not for showcasing student work & peer commentary and I thought this might be a good opportunity.
The first thing I did, before the class was to set up a forum on Moodle entitled "My Story" with very clear instructions / prompts for students. My experience of using Moodle forums before has been that starting them off in class makes it more likely that they will access it outside the classroom.
In class, students clicked on 'reply' and then copied & pasted their stories into the reply. So we ended up with a linear collection of threads - each one containing a story.
The instructions then asked students to read and comment on at least 2 other stories & ask at least 2 questions. I became involved at this point, asking questions of the first students to post, just to get the ball rolling. Once learners had commented on at least 2 other posts & asked a couple of questions, the idea was that they went back to their own post and replied to the questions other students had posted. I had already posted a few comments and questions just in case any student hadn't had their story visited. So the forum threads which started off looking very linear began to look a bit more like a spider's web with comments & questions sprouting out of each thread & linking the stories together.
This final part didn't really happen in as much detail as I would have liked as we ran out of time, but I have encouraged students to do it at home and we will revisit for at least a hour in class next week so they can become more comfortable & confident using the forums, and also so they gain practice of sensitively giving peer feedback and of forming and asking perceptive questions.
Once students do get more familiar with this practice, I will use it again. It is simple to set up, students enjoyed it, they were able to work collaboratively & get ideas from the questions posted by their peers and the Moodle threads can be used as evidence for the External Verifier (EV) of working together etc. Also, I think if they get into the habit of adding to forum posts outside the class they will become more involved in the course in general and also create a strong group dynamic. Other advantages would include being able to access from home if learners are unwell - not just accessing the materials & handouts, but also actually joining in class discussion & interacting with their peers. It also makes their Moodle site feel 'alive' rather than just being a repository for handouts & power points.
Even though this is a mature group of learners without any 'trouble-makers', we still had a group discussion at the very beginning about the importance of respecting each other's work, of constructive, positive criticism & I think this is crucial with this sort of activity. "Think before you post!", being very much the motto!
I'm looking forward to continuing it next week & hopefully when we return to it I will remember to allocate more class time to it!
I did this with a group who are studying on our L2 Pre-Access Diploma in Progression, a new course which we are piloting aimed at students who were diagnosed as requiring a foundation year prior to studying @ L3. We had been working on planning and drafting a piece of creative writing and this was pretty much complete with some excellent work from the students. Definitely not for the faint-hearted as their stories range from civil war in East Timor, to experiencing the Rwandan genocide as a child - but well-written & so, so compelling.
Using the Moodle Forums
So the writing was finished & I was wondering what we could do with it as the students had put so much into it. I had used Moodle forums before for online discussion but not for showcasing student work & peer commentary and I thought this might be a good opportunity.
The first thing I did, before the class was to set up a forum on Moodle entitled "My Story" with very clear instructions / prompts for students. My experience of using Moodle forums before has been that starting them off in class makes it more likely that they will access it outside the classroom.
In class, students clicked on 'reply' and then copied & pasted their stories into the reply. So we ended up with a linear collection of threads - each one containing a story.
The instructions then asked students to read and comment on at least 2 other stories & ask at least 2 questions. I became involved at this point, asking questions of the first students to post, just to get the ball rolling. Once learners had commented on at least 2 other posts & asked a couple of questions, the idea was that they went back to their own post and replied to the questions other students had posted. I had already posted a few comments and questions just in case any student hadn't had their story visited. So the forum threads which started off looking very linear began to look a bit more like a spider's web with comments & questions sprouting out of each thread & linking the stories together.
This final part didn't really happen in as much detail as I would have liked as we ran out of time, but I have encouraged students to do it at home and we will revisit for at least a hour in class next week so they can become more comfortable & confident using the forums, and also so they gain practice of sensitively giving peer feedback and of forming and asking perceptive questions.
Once students do get more familiar with this practice, I will use it again. It is simple to set up, students enjoyed it, they were able to work collaboratively & get ideas from the questions posted by their peers and the Moodle threads can be used as evidence for the External Verifier (EV) of working together etc. Also, I think if they get into the habit of adding to forum posts outside the class they will become more involved in the course in general and also create a strong group dynamic. Other advantages would include being able to access from home if learners are unwell - not just accessing the materials & handouts, but also actually joining in class discussion & interacting with their peers. It also makes their Moodle site feel 'alive' rather than just being a repository for handouts & power points.
Even though this is a mature group of learners without any 'trouble-makers', we still had a group discussion at the very beginning about the importance of respecting each other's work, of constructive, positive criticism & I think this is crucial with this sort of activity. "Think before you post!", being very much the motto!
I'm looking forward to continuing it next week & hopefully when we return to it I will remember to allocate more class time to it!
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Sick Note
So this is my first blog . . . And it feels a bit strange . . .
Background: I am a teacher. English of many different varieties (Lang. Lit. ESOL / EFL). I teach in Oxford at the College of Further Education. I'm also a teacher trainer and I am about to start teaching on a new University Diploma in ILT and we are asking the teachers on the course to record their professional development & reflections on a blog. There have been some reservations about the idea of "going public", so I thought the least I could do was take part in the same way as all the others.
So this is me. Going "public". I suppose I should have a sort of mission statement about what I hope to get from this experiment . . . although I'm not exactly sure yet. Certainly, being able to discuss the technical ins and outs with t.he rest of the course is the main idea at the moment . . . but I do hope that in some sense this will be the tiny acorn from which a great oak of some description springs forth.
Why "sick note"? Why indeed . . .
Earlier this week, I had my second and third days off sick in 8 years of working at the college. A murderously bad flu. So I found myself at home on a Monday (but not on holiday) for maybe the first time in my life and thought it might just be the ideal time to do some low impact work. I've had a word document with various weblinks & thoughts relating to ILT / multimedia & general use of IT to enhance learning for several years now. And I add to it at least once a week - often more frequently than that & occasionally a little less frequently. But its always there. Being added to. But never actually used. I tell myself at work that I must make time to reflect & explore and it's terrible lying to yourself so I though this week - off sick - not at work, but not on holiday - it was time to stop adding to the list and time to start reading it. Time to join the dots - or at least the disparate array of links and half-thoughts - into something that makes sense.
So this is me. Starting small . . . armed only with a blog and good thoughts . . . with no particular direction home . . . and certainly in blogworld (for now at least) a complete unknown (with no followers) . . . and surely destined to be . . . like a rolling stone?
So when the ILT Diploma course gets up and running proper and I am forced to be a bit more serious . . . and actually set some vaguely 'SMART(!)' targets & remember this was all inspired by a day off sick and the idea of doing things . . . differently . . . I can rest easy with the fact that my first blog concluded with a bit of Bob Dylan . . . and (stretching things a little now) hope that my "going electric" will be every bit as enjoyable as Bob's . . . . . . Hmmm - maybe I CAN do 'SMART' targets after all . . . . .
Signing off blog#1 now with a link to someone else who advocates (if not 'going electric') then definitely doing things differently . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Background: I am a teacher. English of many different varieties (Lang. Lit. ESOL / EFL). I teach in Oxford at the College of Further Education. I'm also a teacher trainer and I am about to start teaching on a new University Diploma in ILT and we are asking the teachers on the course to record their professional development & reflections on a blog. There have been some reservations about the idea of "going public", so I thought the least I could do was take part in the same way as all the others.
So this is me. Going "public". I suppose I should have a sort of mission statement about what I hope to get from this experiment . . . although I'm not exactly sure yet. Certainly, being able to discuss the technical ins and outs with t.he rest of the course is the main idea at the moment . . . but I do hope that in some sense this will be the tiny acorn from which a great oak of some description springs forth.
Why "sick note"? Why indeed . . .
Earlier this week, I had my second and third days off sick in 8 years of working at the college. A murderously bad flu. So I found myself at home on a Monday (but not on holiday) for maybe the first time in my life and thought it might just be the ideal time to do some low impact work. I've had a word document with various weblinks & thoughts relating to ILT / multimedia & general use of IT to enhance learning for several years now. And I add to it at least once a week - often more frequently than that & occasionally a little less frequently. But its always there. Being added to. But never actually used. I tell myself at work that I must make time to reflect & explore and it's terrible lying to yourself so I though this week - off sick - not at work, but not on holiday - it was time to stop adding to the list and time to start reading it. Time to join the dots - or at least the disparate array of links and half-thoughts - into something that makes sense.
So this is me. Starting small . . . armed only with a blog and good thoughts . . . with no particular direction home . . . and certainly in blogworld (for now at least) a complete unknown (with no followers) . . . and surely destined to be . . . like a rolling stone?
So when the ILT Diploma course gets up and running proper and I am forced to be a bit more serious . . . and actually set some vaguely 'SMART(!)' targets & remember this was all inspired by a day off sick and the idea of doing things . . . differently . . . I can rest easy with the fact that my first blog concluded with a bit of Bob Dylan . . . and (stretching things a little now) hope that my "going electric" will be every bit as enjoyable as Bob's . . . . . . Hmmm - maybe I CAN do 'SMART' targets after all . . . . .
Signing off blog#1 now with a link to someone else who advocates (if not 'going electric') then definitely doing things differently . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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