Week #9: Next is Now

3 October 2016 - 2 December 2016

A screenshot of Nicenet on the very last day of Webskills course

The final day of Webskills.
And yes, the final project report has been submitted! Thank you Jo for providing detailed, constructive, and insightful feedback on my first draft (and sorry for the proofreading issues in my paper, too!)

In retrospect, let's cherish  these mementos:

• An enjoyable task: implement a final project
• A difficult task: get down to writing the final project report
• An easy task: Sorry, there’s no such easy thing in this high-quality course.
• A revealing task: challenge Google search engines
• An interesting blog photo: Gakul was returning back to Kathmandu from his village
• A thought-provoking blog entry: A life without deadline by Jo
• An emotional farewell: This journey ends and a new one begins by Grace

Like many other participants, I'm pondering What’s next?

Next is Now

For the past 8 weeks, my Wednesdays and Sundays have been devoted to Webskills’ tasks and assignments. Wednesday is for Nicenet discussion. I would dive into the readings, take notes and make a forum post. Meanwhile, Sunday is for reflection. I would write a blog post and comment on peers’ blogs.

The Power of Habit: http://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit/
Image Credit: http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/habitrpg/images/d/d6/Habitloop.png/revision/latest?cb=20141010040839

Thanks to the Webskills participation, a new habit loop is formed. Celeste's reminders email are strong cues which trigger the routine of devoting Wednesday and Sunday hours to writing. Rewards include other course participants' comments on my posts and blogs as well as Celeste's comments and grades. This, I believe, is one of the best habits I've formed this year!
That said, I'm committed to sustain the activities of Wednesday reading/writing and Sunday reflection. New projects of technology integration in education should be implemented; otherwise, the knowledge and skills gained from this wonderful course will be lost.

Next is Collaboration

I hope that I can continue to collaborate with Webskills course participants, hopefully in an international action research project.

Next is English Teaching Forum
The sponsor of our course. A very practical English teaching journal. Thinking of submitting an article to the journal. I know the selection criteria is extremely competitive, but you'll never know if you'll never try.

Tien
Vietnam

Week #8: Connecting the dots.

I am on holiday with my family in Da Lat city when the deadline for the project draft is calling.

Surprisingly, the draft writing of the project flows smoothly. It still needs lots of improvement (thanks God it's still a draft), but let's just celebrate the submission  moment first!

(Family Trip to Da Lat City November 2016. Son jumping for joy. Staying at a mountain room)

 I think there are two contributing factors that make project draft writing much less daunting: the weekly project tasks and the project template. In retrospect, the first one is so useful: the big project is broken into more manageable chunks in which we have to fulfill on a weekly basis. Therefore, the final project writing can be utterly easy if we stick to the original plan. Otherwise, the workload can be overwhelming if we make substantial changes, say, the class or the tools implemented, at the last minute. In this sense the adjective final in the collocation final project should lose its meaning. If we wait until the very end to carry out the project, it'll be too late. We shouldn't expect any finals! Instead, the better approach is to connect the dots. 

In addition, the project template provides practical guidelines that clearly help shape our general project implementation. I'm not a huge fan of action research, but the questions in the template definitely revisit my thinking of doing action research as well as incorporating project-based learning.

These are important lessons learned when it comes to course design, and I feel grateful to the Webskills' course developers!

Here comes the last week. 

Just a little more patience to polish a better version.

Tien

Vietnam

Week #7: The 21st Century Education Heroes

20/11/2016
Celebrating Vietnamese Teachers' Day

I always feel blessed to be working in the education factor. Firstly, I'm a keen learner, and there's no better profession which is better for learners than being a teacher when it comes to practitioners' development. And more importantly, I'm inspired by the childhood heroes who have paved the passion for teaching: my parents (who always trust that I can do whatever I want), the secondary teacher of Vietnamese literature (who is now regarded as the most outstanding Vietnamese teacher in Ho Chi Minh City despite his lack of qualifications) and the English teacher (who now is a priest serving parishes in Italy).

For the past few years, I'm  fortunate to meet (online) three heroes whose impact on primary, secondary and tertiary education is profound. Reflecting on this week's theme, I believe that they have put their complete trust in learner autonomy.

Sugata Mitra and the Younger Learners: Hole-in-the-Wall Education Project

He set up self-access areas where children in under-resourced villages can use the computers which are built in the walls (hence the name Hole-in-the-Wall). Students can learn, explore and discuss together.

Image Credit: https://performanceandlearning.ca/ipl/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Sugata-Mitra-hole-in-the-wall.jpg

In Vietnam, we do have similar hubs.

(Image Credit: http://www.baoangiang.com.vn/MBMCMS/files/24/24c4befe-5c65-495c-9f66-861cacd077db.jpg)

Those machines are literally translated as "Fishing Machine". But they are for gambling! Many families have gone bankrupt after members having been so addicted to this a social evil.

That said, hats off to Sugata Mitra! For creating a such wonder to occupy disadvantaged kids with meaningful self-organized learning.

Salman Khan and Secondary Learners: Khanacademy

Starting with producing tutorial videos to help his distant cousin to deal with math problems, Khan has built up a whole new online school which contains original, excellent instructional videos to explain different school subjects. I've also heard that Khan Academy is also endorsed by Gates and Melinda Foundation. The Youtubers generation will definitely take Khan Academy seriously as the videos are made with clarity and humor. An awe-inspiring work from Khan!

(Image Credit: https://cdn.kastatic.org/images/marketing/share-thumb-a.jpg)

You can learn anything.
For free.
For ever.
Sounds too good to be true? If you have teenage learners, have them check it to verify the claim.

Andrew Ng and the Undergraduates or Life-long Learners: Coursera

(Image Credit: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DNRa70bd2nI/maxresdefault.jpg)

I myself have experienced massive open online courses since its very fist days back in 2011. Courses I've taken include Introduction to Sociology, Gamification, Coaching Teachers, English for Composition and Writing, etc.
My final say is that if you haven't tried a MOOC on Coursera (or other platforms like Edx), enroll in one today! They are gemstones, again, given for free!

Goodbye week 7.

One, two more!

Let's pray harder! :))

Week #6: 18 days left...

18 days left...

The countdown to the final project submission starts to get really frustrating. We don't actually have much time to ponder what's going to happen next. Instead, real actions should be taking place. Implementation should be observed.

As instructed, this week is reserved for project initiation. I actually feel a bit awkward to present my very first recorded presentation to flip my TKT training course. The main aim of my project is to help participants in the TKT course to view in-class presentations when they can't attend the session for several reasons. Based on the attendance issue, Celeste suggested considering the flipped learning model. Video lectures are recorded for learners' view at their own disposal.

Following Celeste's advice, I've produced 2 online presentations with Office Mix, The choice of platform appears to yield promising results: recording is made easy, uploading is made fast, and most importantly, the interactive assessment at the end of the recording engages viewers' instant feedback.

The hardest part in preparing such presentations might  not be technical matters. It's the re-constructing of knowledge, the logical slides designing and the difficulty of digital voice projection that has somehow discouraged first-time producer like me.

If you're interested, please click here to view my Mix.

I believe that the recorded presentation processing is still left much to be desired, and participants' response has not arrived yet, but let's just celebrate this very first attempt!

I really hope that the flipped presentations will help teachers to prepare for the TKT successfully. Meanwhile, if you happen to check my Mixes, I'm very pleased to learn from your suggestions.

Warm regards,

Tien

Vietnam

Week #5: If I judge a judge...

It's November. Vietnamese Teachers' Day is approaching. 20 November. Such a great month to reflect on the profession. But let's talk about weekly digest first, and save career talk for upcoming posts.

The most interesting part week 5 involves Rubistar - an excellent tool to design assessment rubric for project-based learning. With Rubistar, the subjective scoring can be mitigated, and learning will be more product-oriented. Rubistar offers a wide variety of rubrics, ranging from oral projects like class debate, video talk show, research and writing to even a public awareness campaign. Brilliant!! For future updates, Rubistar should support the function of teachers picking different criteria in different rubrics to create a truly customized form.

Another week's 5 highlight is assessing our approaches to assessment. One-size-fits-all testing is clearly prevalent in many Asian cultures, with the wash-back effect exhausting learners’ motivations. Personalized testing might not be practical when the achievement test is administered to 1 million high school leavers in Vietnam. The real argument that needs addressing is not about how to design such a large-scale test, but about the existence of such tests. This thought reminds me of Prince Ea's I just sued the school system. Last month, the song went viral in not only English learning communities but also in mainstream Vietnamese media. His vivid, lyrical description is a powerful wake-up call:

"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid."

If I judge a tree...If I judge a dance...If I judge a judge...

Week #4: Cart before the horse

CART BEFORE THE HORSE

Implementing new technologies in the classroom is like a double-edge sword: you'll never know if it accidentally slaughters all your efforts in being an effective and progressive teacher. Nevertheless, it's not the tech that should be blamed...it's the concept of blowing a new wind of change (Hello Bob Dylan! Thanks for responding to the Nobel's committee. Haha). Confusion will never happen in the classroom if students are always exposed to the conventional teaching approaches, say, grammar-translation whose process involves read-translate-take notes-memorize-repeat. 

My experience of observing teachers reveals that once teachers are willing to implement changes - any kinds of changes ranging from classroom management techniques to skills-building - to the classroom practices, they are faced with the possibility of putting the cart between the horse, of following the wrong lesson sequence. It happened to my pre-service teacher training in a reading lesson when students were checking answers in pairs. It happened to a teacher with more than 10 year experience when he was first using the KWL technique.  It happened to me when I was conducting my first action research project 2 years ago: I even confidently figured out the research findings and indicated them in the abstract before actually carrying it out and gathering all data. Just to submit the abstract before the deadline!

How many times have we put the carts before the horses? 

How many times have we  punished our horses for their struggling movement  

when the carts were wrongly set up by us?

How many times have we silenced the horses 

when the were trying to inform us of the reversed order?

To be an effective teacher, I suppose we should think like a horse.

Week #3: Flooded and Roses in the Rain

(Photo credit: VnExpress/Pham Duy)

Ho Chi Minh City has been experiencing torrential rains for the past two months, leading to heavily flooded streets. Many city dwellers have to re-set their travel schedules: getting to work earlier and going home later than usual when the weather forecasts are in favor of the God of Water. Under most circumstances, I am one of the the lucky ones whose motorbike, just a simple a 110 Honda Wave, is still greatly functioning among heavy waters. Mere luck.

I seldom fear the rain or the floods. Week 3 of Webskills is when the first term at HCMC Open University starts. It could the workload that is engulfing me: course planning, teaching, training, research in progress and online tasks, all with deadlines hovering over my head. Thanks to Celeste's friendly email reminders, I'm on track again!

The thing I feel I'm improving the most is finalizing written products in Webskills such as discussion posts, comments, and blog posts. Yes, I do fear writing! To me, getting down to writing is never an easy job. More often than not, I'll be in a desperate search for a suitable word, a phrase, or a structure to convey the particularity of the message. Another important aspect of the course is that it is training me to become a better writer. And when I do complete a task, I feel like roses in the rain.

My wife is growing them in front of the house. Honestly speaking, I never care for them, but the realization that roses grow more beautifully in the rain (my wife told me that) makes me confortable.

Getting back to online learning, once committed, I believe that online courses will be much more intensive than any other face-to-face modules. The latter mode might involve lots of in class oral discussions, significantly reducing the written tasks. However, online course quality assurance seems very much depend on participants' written artifacts.

Then a quick thought popped up: maybe we could have an ORAL discussion task in the future weeks of the course. We might submit an oral discussion post instead of written. We might work in groups to call a peer or join a group chat to discuss a reading text.

The idea of Skyping a Webskills friend sounds promising, doesn't it? I've started to learn how to identify voices via other Webskillers' writing, but having a  meet-up like via Skype or Google Hangout could be an interesting thing to try when this week's focus is about improving learners' oral/aural skills.

Do you agree?

Tien
Vietnam