Debating with Germans

Again with the group of German teachers I had planned to do a debate afternoon with some of the topics that we had discussed during the week. This afternoon seemed to go down quite well with everyone concerned.

We started with language of discussion, giving opinions, disagreeing and offering explanations. I was able to elicit most of this language from the group however with a group at a lower level I might have needed to do some pre-teaching. I made an assumption ( I know, I know) that they would be ok with the concept of a debate. I did give them written instructions on their papers but in hindsight, wonderful thing that it is, I should probably have gone over it verbally with them before sending them off in groups. This night have prevented them all doing slightly different things. I should also have made it clear that the for and against groups needed to plan their speeches separately. Not every group got this without being told. Again I suppose I should have know better. Although this is possibly one of the problems with teaching teachers I expected them to know more and I should have treated them like any other foreign language class.

I had four groups with 4 different topics

• Twitter is a better tool for communication than face book
• The internet is a good way to experience different cultures
• Electric buses will replace trains as the transport of the future
• Globalisation has made people more open minded

The first two topic did not come off as well as the second two. The main problem with the first being that no-one in the group new what twitter was. Considering this they did very well, they made a coherent argument, it didn't really make sense but at least they gave it a shot.

The second topic was a challenge as none of them could find a way to agree with the point but they gave it a good shot. They did however produce the quote of the week "you can watch a man fall of a camel on youtube but you will never know what it is like to fall from a camel until you have fallen from a camel"

The third group completely missed the structure of the debate but they did use the target language and, I assume more by good luck than good management, they had 2 strongly opposing teams culminating in a lively discussion. Not a debate as such but I'll take it.

The final debate was easily the best as they stuck to the structure well and they all argued their points and made some very interesting arguments. They were also the only group to really bring the audience into the debate.

Regarding the audience, in my plan I had wanted them to react to grammar used in the morning session. They should have spent the morning working on reported speech but due to the nature of the group and the adaptations that needed to be made to the course this didn't quite happen. If I ran debates again I would do two things. 1st I would make the grammar an integral part of it because I see debating as a fantastic way to use target language in a structured situation. 2nd I would make the topics more similar which I think might bring the audience in to it a bit more.  

German Culture, British Culture

I have taught groups of German students on vocational work placement programmes before. This group however were slightly different, they were the teachers not the students. This presented a different set of challenges, the biggest of which being them knowing exactly what they wanted and not being afraid to say it. This in itself was possibly a lesson in culture conflict but that is another story. In an attempt to react to the needs and wants of the 'students' (not all of which were reasonable) I did a session on British culture. In the course outline for the week it was intended to be a book exercise (language leader upper-intermediate chapter 11) but the only activity from the book I used in the end was the reading activity on culture shock.

We started by discussing what culture is and what makes it then moved on to talk about outside opinions of British Culture. We ended up with a list of stereotypes on the board and were then able to discuss which ones of them were true and which were not.

While this may seem to be somewhat frivolous it did have a serious point. It had become clear over the course of the week that these teachers wanted to take something back to their students in Germany, students who were potentially coming to England on a similar trip. The topic of politeness led on to a later lesson on how to talk to people in different situations while this board developed into a list of things which, as a teacher, they could tell their students before their first trip to the UK.

This is what they came up with.

Of course this is only one groups advice but there are some very valid points made, traffic and smiling being two of the key points. Having lived in Europe I know that smiling at people tends to make people look at you like a lunatic but in England a smile goes a very long way.

I am trying very hard here not to give the impression that I was making this up as I was going along, but lets face it we all know I was. As a teacher I am generally terrified of walking into a classroom without a step by step plan... so of course I did have one. Unfortunately with this group of students I knew that they were not going to like it. So instead of 'making it up' and prefer to call it thinking on my feet. A skill I think is very necessary as a teacher and the results of the lesson were good and I would do it again. If I was to repeat this I would add a lot more structure, probably some office language (depending on the students) and I would also keep the reading on culture shock as I think it was a good lead in to the advice exercise. Depending on the level of students you could also add in some grammar, modal verbs are a good one with culture, or vocabulary. In general this lesson was a reaction to a bad situation but I think that the students got something from it which they wanted and at the end of the day that was the point. I am still not an advocate of seat of the pants teaching but in this case there was definitely a good outcome which I could use again.

Creating the quiz chain.

1. Create all of your quiz files in hot potatoes.
2. Use the hot potatoes masher to create a unit or chain. (click here for a masher tutorial)
3. If you want to edit your index.htm do it now. I used Kompozer, free and relatively easy to use for the novice. 
4. Go back to your quiz files and set the 'next exercise URL' 
5. Set the 'next exercise URL' for your final quiz to index.htm (assuming you haven't changed the name from the masher default)
6. Make sure that all of the files are in 1 folder. Create a .zip file with that folder ready to upload it to moodle (you can do it by uploading single files but that will take much longer)
7. In moodle turn editing on and then go to add an activity - Hot Potatoes Quiz
8. Select choose or upload file
9. Upload your .zip file and click on 'unzip'
10. You will then need to select the file for the 1st quiz in your chain (not the .jms or the .htm) select choose. 
11. Make sure you change 'add quiz chain' to YES and 'show next quiz' to YES
12. All of the other options will depend on your course and your moodle
13. Click save and fingers crossed you will have a chain of quizzes!

Mashing in moodle - or a quiz chain

In moodle you can upload a single hot potato file as an activity. You should also be able to upload multiple hot potato files and create a quiz chain whereby students are led from one to the next in an order specified by the course creator. I know this is possible because I have done it using instructions from the moodle forum here.

As you can see the  End of unit quiz has been listed here in 4 sections but the little closed eye shows that students would only see quiz 1. I am in the process of trying to create the same kind of chain again with different files for the next unit and, although I am 99% certain I am doing exactly the same as before, I cannot get it to work.







Today, when I follow the instructions from the forum above I got the first file in the chain but not the others. After a considerable amount of messing around I have discovered a few things. The most important of which is that if start the chain with the second file it works fine so the problem must be in the link between exercise 1 and exercise 2.

The problem was indeed the link between exercises 1 and 2, the important thing here, it seems, is making sure you have all of the links set up correctly. In your quiz file under: options - configure output - buttons. You need to set the next exercise URL using the .htm files you created when you used the masher. This seems to have solved my problem anyway.

This is also the solution to the problem I had with my 1st quiz chain which was the error message "sorry the requested file could not be found" after the last quiz in the chain. If you set the next exercise URL to be index.htm you will send your students to the contents page created when you built the masher unit in hot potatoes. The best thing about this is that I was able to make a simple edit of that page so it looked something like this.

Including the hyperlink which takes you back to the moodle course also solves the problem that I could find no obvious way of making the quizzes open in a new window.

I will follow this post with step by step instructions for creating a quiz chain.

the potential student benefits

Some thoughts that came up during the London meeting regarding how the different aspects of the Moodle can be utilized to most benefit students and teachers.
 
Grammar
The grammar section to my mind works most effectively in class as a resources that allows teachers to spend individual time with each student. In the computer room teachers can deliver a review lesson without having to select one grammar topic that most students have an issue with. By virtue of the fact that moodle provides both grammatical explanations and exercises students can be directed by their teacher to the topic that they most need to practice (this is not restricted to grammar by any means but I see grammar as the most likely subject for individual in class learning). In essence what this does is allows each individual student to practice what they need to and the teacher can circulate the class and answer questions as required. The only way to achieve such individual attention in a non-virtual class would be for the teacher to copy materials for each student. This may be achievable in a class of 3 but would be extremely impractical for 12 students.

Reading and Listening
Both passive language skills that students need to and should work on out side of class. There are numerous possibilities for these resources to be used by teachers in class however having a platform, much like a library, where students can access reading and listening material at their level means that they can easily get to it. In the future i see this as being more and more functional as students can use it on mobile devices while travelling or at home in the evenings. This is an infinitely more practical and cost effective way of encouraging listening and reading outside of school that lending books and tapes to students who may or may not return them.

Vocabulary
The vocabulary section of moodle is something that I see as growing and developing as students and teachers use it more. There is huge possibilities for class lists, for levels, for textbooks, for exams, the list really is endless and moodle allows you to merge lists, tag lists and upload and download them meaning that teachers can do a variety of things with them from having their own online vocabulary box which can be used to create games, to a constantly growing set of word lists from textbooks and courses which can be manipulated in many ways.

Citizenship - Life in the UK test

Another one of my projects is the course to help students pass the life in the UK test. This, for those of you who don't know, is a 24 question multiple choice test about things such as the history of immigration, society, work, education and employment in the UK. There are some really useful and interesting things covered. Equally there is some, how shall we put it, less interesting items. I have spent the last few months researching the test and it's questions and I am now in the questionable position of presenting the, often quite dry, information in a way that will be appealing and memorable to the people studying to take the test.

For some people, what is essentially memorising a list of facts, this will be relatively straight forward. For others I think less so. I personally would find it quite hard to remember everything. So I am trying to find a balance between giving information with assessments to test comprehension and cement knowledge and putting students in a situation where they are directed to specific websites in order to find the information themselves  I am hoping that this range will appeal to different types of learners and make the course accessible to anyone that might need to take it.

Presentation, like with my IELTS course, is a ever present issue which I am currently battling with.

Hiatus or terminus

Due to contractual reasons that are not to be gone into here, I have finished work (hopefully temporarily) on the LTC moodle but it is in a good place. There are three courses up and running with really nice content in them and we managed to, more or less satisfactorily, create the bridge between moodle and MEC. This involved a little screenshot video which shows students and teachers how to navigate the somewhat murky waters of the MEC log-in system. The branding of the site looks awesome, with a little html help from the web team the buttons re-organise themselves when you make the screen size change, not so important on the computer but a must for the tablets. Then there is all the things I want to do in the future... so fingers crossed they will have me back.

The upgrade

I can't not mention the upgrade. In the process of branding the site we also upgraded from moodle 1.9 to moodle 2.3. In theory this was a brilliant thing and in the long run will make my life much easier but at the time there may have been quiet tears, sneakily shed into my pillow when awake at three in the morning dreaming about html editors, csv files and LTC branded buttons.
Moodle 2.3 has much enhanced usability and a lot more time saving features allowing me to do some cool stuff that I couldn't do on 1.9. Unfortunately the reverse was also true and I had to spend a week relearning how to do some admin tasks and fixing some of the problems created in the upgrade. Although the sense of achievement when it was finally all fixed up and working was quite pleasing.

Intermediate and the re-design

After battling with scroll of death and some long conversations with some nerds about a good user interface we came up with this.



The idea being that each skill (there is one more to come - functions) has its own button, designed by the LTC designers. This means that every course page not only looks the same but, from a student point of view, all of the information they want to see is on screen with no scrolling.
Practically how this works is of course by using a scroll of death which is only seen by admin users so all of the pages can be accessed and edited by moodle admin. Behind each skills button is a contents page which looks very similar to the course page. The side bar blocks have been set to appear in the same place on every page so they eye is not distracted by different information.
The contents page looks a bit like this.


Then after the contents page students can navigate to their grammar point, pronunciation point or reading topic of choice. The grammar page needs to contain some more information about what each topic contains. Some are fairly self explanatory, and if being used in a teacher directed environment it doesn't matter so much but for self access purposes you cannot always expect students to know what a modal verb is.
The final page of the sequence is much the same as it was in version one but of course has been branded and has a slightly nicer lay out (in my humble opinion anyway)



So there you have the structure of the intermediate course. The rest of the site will be made it its image!
A massive thank you must be said to the designers and the web team for the buttons, the branding and the upgrade!!
Oh and Anthony for listening to me whinge....

Pre-intermediate - my first moodle course

How I did it!

I created a drop down unit for each skill. I did this using the collapsed topics plug-in to help with scroll of death issues.
Scroll of death can be hidden from students! This seems to work fine and all of the students navigated around it with no problems.

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Inside each of the topics there are buttons which are hyperlinked to pages within scroll of death.
The names of the buttons and how they describe what is behind them was a challenge. I wanted to make buttons that will continue through each level but that causes problems with how to describe grammar such as 'discourse markers' which is not necessarily a phrase which students know at pre-intermediate level but i think it is important to have continuity through the levels.

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Under the topic buttons are moodle pages which live in scroll of death and can be edited to hold the content that is required.
As the idea of the site is to create a self access environment of external resources for students to practice their language the moodle pages mostly consist of links to other sites. Some of them have explanations others do not.
Feedback from one student suggested that the links came with some kind of description of what the link will be to help students navigate to what they want to study and the type of material they want to use.
This could be done by tagging each link with a few basic comments or by listing them under different sub-headings such as 'interactive grammar', 'grammar games', 'matching exercises', 'grammar information' etc.
Visually I also think that the pages of links need to be broken up in some way. Even if just by putting small visuals relating to the sites they come from so students can build up an idea of preferences.
It was also suggested that there was a list of resources available for teachers so they could direct students towards specific things. This would have to be built up from the start of a course and formatting and labelling would be important.

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Having listened to the feedback from students I re-worked the pages, particularly in the grammar section to give them all headings and descriptions of what the link will take you to. I tested this again on a couple of students with good feedback. Having the page split into exercises and explanations also seemed to help. It gives more structure to the page so if the students need to find out information while they are completing exercises they now know where to look. The reading and writing pages still need to be re-designed in someway but i am unsure how to do this other than just putting headings at the top of the page.

Scroll of Death

Moodle does not allow you to have sub-headings under topics which creates the problem of scroll of death. i.e a very long list of resources which students may find it difficult to navigate through. I solved this by creating buttons (monster buttons with crazy html code) which are hyperlinked to other pages within the moodle site. In that way you can create sub-topics within the site. All the moodle pages that go into the buttons as hyperlinks however still need to go somewhere so I created an extra topic heading called scroll of death which can be hidden from the students but contains all of the resources for that course.

Pre-intermediate scroll of death is very messy however. In future i think it is necessary to build all the pages first in a logical order in scroll of death and then go back and add the content into them later.

LTC virtual learning

The LTC - moodle is in theory an on-line self access environment comprising of links to external content organised in a way that is functional and accessible for the students of LTC before during and after their course. These external links will be housed within a moodle that has been branded to look and feel like an extension of the school website. It will also be linked with Macmillan English Campus in such a way that the content of the moodle mirrors the content of the MEC package.
Is it for students to use at home?
Is it for teachers to use in class?
Can it and will it function as both?


EAQUALS - Is the British Council core curriculum of what each student should know at each level. The content of each course is based around this curriculum and the headings of the webpages more or less correlate with the grammar and lexis headings of the EAQUALS booklet.

MEC

MEC has been made in way to mirror the moodle site but it seems to me that there is currently no reason for students to click on the MEC button because they don't know what it is. They need to be shown or told to go there. But how and by who?

Blogs

This may come under format or it may be a question of assessment but I am going to attempt, through this course, to use the moodle forum function as a course blog. I have throughout the course encouraged students to upload specific information as well as general comments to the course blog. As it stands at the moment each skills section has a blog dedicated to it so as to limit confusion. It remains to be seen how well this will work in practice. In my head it is a great way of incorporating peer assessment and student communication in an on-line environment but I may just be being overly idealistic in my approach to virtual learning. The proof I suppose will be in the pudding. Fingers crossed that students share my ideals and we will have an ongoing, interactive course blog full of useful information, without the need for rose tinted spectacles.

Assessment

I am now at the stage of uploading the material as it is to the moodle platform. The challenge now is how to approach assessment. There are the obvious assessment such as submission of writing assignments and answers to reading and listening comprehensions but of course the speaking section is going to cause problems. I have suggested that students record themselves completing tasks and send ,mp3 files to the course tutor. There may be issues here if students do not have the needed software. Of course there is always skype and I am sure this will be a valuable way of communicating with students. Method of submission is an issue as well. Moodle offers assignment pages which allow students to upload documents and then provides a space for teachers to give feedback. Perhaps my reluctance here is something to do with the fact that, as a student, I never used this feature but preferred to email the tutor directly. Perhaps there is little difference in the too as long as appropriate records are kept. Or perhaps as a teacher I will learn why the submissions feature is important and feel obliged to email my tutors and beg forgiveness for my belligerence. One of my concerns regarding attaching an assignment to every unit is the worry that I will create a scroll of death (see LTC moodle) which will be hard for students to navigate. My second concern, or problem, is one of clear instructions and how to direct students from the .pdf document where the assignment is given to them to the relevant page in moodle for submission. I suspect that this is merely semantics and will be worked out fairly easily in the process of course compilation. Although method of instructions generally is an important point to consider as, mentioned above, students may be covering a wide range of abilities so instructions need to be kept to a level of the lowest students.

The Format

There are four topics, listening, academic reading, academic writing and speaking. In each topic there are units which correspond to the task types that will be presented during the exam. There is also an overview of each paper outlining timing, marking and what types of questions you are likely to face in that section as well as some general information for the paper. Each task unit is also started with basic information about the questions and what the examiners are looking for. This is then followed by tips and suggestion for approaching the task practice material and vocabulary and language which might be useful for the task. I have also, based on suggestions from colleagues, tried to give each type of information/practice a colour code. For example, sample questions are in yellow, tasks which need to be completed in blue, grammar point in green.
I am yet to decide if this format will stay, student opinion will ultimately be the deciding factor, but that is how it stands at this moment.

The greatest problem I have had with formatting is working remotely and is a problem I also had as a students. There are times when feedback is so much more useful when you can engage in active discussion with colleagues and peers. I will get around this by spending a day in Milton Keynes with colleagues however students on the course may not have this luxury and it is a point that needs to be carefully considered when laying out the course.

IELTS

The task

To create an IELTS exam course to be presented through moodle and 'taught' or supported through the same means. I am creating this course for MKLC the same on-line school I studied at for my DTLLS.

The Course

I have spent several months collecting web resources and using text books, namely 'IELTS Graduation' Mark Allen, Debra Powell and Dickie Dolby (Macmillan) and 'Improve your IELTS reading skills' Sam McCarter and Norman Whitby (Macmillan). Web resources that are particularly worth mentioning are The British Council IELTS , Cambridge ESOL IELTS, Dominic Cole's IELTS blog and IpassIELTS. These sites and books (amongst others) have provided me with a lot of ideas and most importantly practice material to base a course around. The course itself is based around giving students the skills to approach the different types of questions that may be asked. The rationale behind this approach being that students could be from anywhere between level 4 and level 9 but exam technician is a ubiquitous skill that is required at all levels. Within each course there are suggestions for grammar and vocabulary and where possible I have tried to provide a range of levels but it is also stated in the course preview that the course tutor (hopefully me) will be on hand to suggest extra materials for practice based on individual student needs. I have also tried to find as much exam style practice as possible from the internet which of course was easier for some skills than others. The major hurdle was always going to be how to provide speaking practice through an on-line portal but I will come to that later.

The World Trade Game

The world trade game is an activity based on world economics - link here

I have recently adapted it for use as a language game with a group of young German students. The game was played at the end of a 15 hour communication course based losely on business English. The students had been working on making contacts and gathering information. The world trade game then put them in a situation where they needed to do exactly that.
There is of course language and vocabulary that can be put in depending on the group but here is how the game worked with my group of 24 German speaking students.

The Groups

The group will be split into 6 countries
 The USA and Japan each with three students
Brazil and India with 4 students each
Mozambique and Tanzania with 5 students in each group.

The resources

Plain paper - at least 30 sheets
Coloured paper - a few pages
4 pairs of scissors
6 rulers
2 tubes of glue
2 rolls of sticky tape - a big one and a little one
30 '$100' bank notes

You will need to make sure the students have put all their belongings away so they can't cheat. 

The People
You will need one person - a student or another teacher if available to act as the Bank
The teacher will act as the UN moderator who will need to moderate disputes but without offering help. You and/or the bank can also alter prices, add 'raw material' or change the products depending on the situation. You will also need to be monitoring for language. Any non-English will be an immediate deduction of money from the countries bank (this really did work as a deterrent - one student spoke in German, money was lost and then no more German was used - at least not in my earshot)

 The Product



 I used the above shapes - the sizes of the circular products corresponding to the inside of the roles of tape (this information should not be given to the students). I had one copy of this on paper to be used to measure the quality of the products and drew a set on the white board with measurements and prices (prices may change throughout the game).

 The distribution of wealth

 The USA and Japan are each given 2 pairs of scissors, 2 rulers, 1 piece of paper and $600
Brazil and India are each given 10 sheets of paper, a stick of glue, $200 and a sheet of coloured paper Mozambique and Tanzania are each given 4 sheets of paper and a roll of tape

The game

The game is simple, the teams must manufacture the products. The products must be cut with scissors Only English must be spoken Complete products are take to the bank where they will be checked and money will be credited to the countries account. As monitor you can change prices, add in extra 'natural resources' think of uses for the coloured paper as time allows.

 The discussion
 After the game or in a following lesson there are a number of discussion topics that could be derived and a wide range of vocabulary which you could draw from it. Fair Trade Distribution of Wealth Trade agreements

The return of the prodigal teacher

So, I created this blog over 2 years ago when I embarked on my DTLLS. As you can see I didn't get terribly far but there are a few reasons for that. I was not completely absent from the web, as it turned out my action research project was on the viability of on-line learning for small language schools. As part of the project I created a wiki site which was a base for materials which I was working on. This wiki has been in use sporadically ever since for materials. However, due to a recent change in circumstances I have been using it more as a blog. This seemed to me a little silly so I have decided to migrate the bloggy stuff from there to here and keep the materials and stuff there. To avoid being overly cryptic I shall also explain that change in circumstances. I have recently stared freelancing as a VLE (virtual learning environment)administrator and course designer/on-line tutor. On top of this after achieving my DTTLS last summer I have decided to attempt professional formation to get QTLS. Whether or not the IFL will give it to me, as I am not really a teacher in the typical sense of the word, is anyone's guess but it would be daft not to try, wouldn't it? So there we are, the resurrection of excruciating forms of learning begins. Perhaps I will last more than 10 minutes this time!