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

Week #2 Wrap-up: Writing Objectives and Questioning Search Habits

On writing this I can't believe that week 2 is ending very soon. The two activities I'm particularly fond of this week: writing ABCD objectives and discussing search engine possibilities.

Writing ABCD Objectives
The acronyms are basic, though comprehensive.
A is for Audience: Who are our learners?
B is for Behavior: What do we expect them to do?
C is for Condition: What have they known?
D is for Degree: How much do we want them to achieve?
The application of ABCD is truly demanding despite the clarity of the instruction. I tend to write overgeneralized aims that are mostly based on my intuitions when designing lesson plans, so being as concrete as ABCD planners will take lots of practice. More specifically, ABCD objectives requires us to think scientific rather than artistic, quantitative rather than qualitative, and learner-centered rather than teacher-centered. In short, ABCD can be one useful strategy that contributes to teachers' art of thinking clearly!

Questioning Search Habits

This week, our instructor, Celeste, has put forward an interesting topic for discussion: What are alternatives to Google search engine? 

We promptly scan through the recommended websites, and we've found useful resources. Take, for instance, the Newseum site curating front pages around the world:

(Screencasted from Newseum. My thoughts and prayers are with the Thai people.)

Jo (Malaysia) goes further by commenting that the website can enrich learners' multiple sociological and cultural perspectives as they have access to the world's most popular front pages. I couldn't agree more!
Getting back to the search issue, all of us has reached the consensus that Google is still the king when it comes to productive search engines. The questions, then, would be how to train learners to search effectively and how to provide learners with websites that support readability as Celeste recommended. My contribution is exposing learners to Simple Wikipedia (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). Content is made simple, exposing lower-level EFL learners to a more reader-friendly environment.
Obviously, this week's discussion has challenged my search habits in two ways. Firstly, I tend to rely so much on the proven success of the conventional practices that we might ignore possibilities which might multiply the learning outcomes. And secondly, the status of Google can't be denied, yet its omnipotence is in question. To look for information, I still search on Google. But what if necessary information is SHARED to me via social networks?

(Line Chart taken from Venture Beat)

It's interesting to note the observation: "Nowadays news is discovered through social media instead of directly searched for."
The above data illustrates the way Internet users read news is changing: Googling breaking news is on a significant decline while social media has shown its popular gain. Of course, as educators, we do much more than reading news. It's teaching strategies. It's graded texts. It's online exercise and the like.  However, I believe that social media should not be overlooked as it potentially impacts on our searching habits. For the past months I have intentionally searched a few key words on Facebook. On such cases Facebook Search's space is the first place that I thought of, not Google's.

Welcome social media to the Game of Search!

Week #1 Wrap-up: Diversity, Writing Challenges and Time Management

The post title basically summarizes my first-week impressions of taking Webskills 2016.

I am in awe of the diverse backgrounds, locations, educations, experience of Webskills participants. Despite such differences, we have all been fortunate to go digital for one common goal: activating web skills to bring about the best educational practices to our classroom in the 21st century. And I'm very honored to be part of this unique community. And trust me, I'll devote time and efforts to making a sound contribution to the course.

Another noticeable feature of the first week is the amount of writing on the online platforms. Each participant has to post at least three discussions on Nicenet and one post on our blog. I think the workload is acceptable when every two days we're informed of our progress via emailed messages containing checklists sent by our course instructor, Celeste Scholz. The applause will very much also go to our course instructor as she will monitor, summarize, comment and mark the quality of all posts made. My observation is that late posters in each discussion might be left with 'nothing to say' so they could play the role of devil's advocate to add vigor to the discussion while early posters will have to carefully craft their pieces since they will be closely scrutinized by the latter commentators.

Finally, achievement in online courses requires effective time management skills. Self-directed learners are more likely to succeed, but better time strategies will yield better academic results. I've found these tips useful:

1. Allot a specific number of daily hours on the course (1): as taking this course is my priority at the moment, I'm spending the best hours of the day on it: 10-12P.M every two nights. Hope it works.
2. Plan ahead (2): what I fear the most is not completing the final project when it is due. Fortunately, our class wiki has a brilliant function: the countdown clocks is present on the main page. It reads:

53 days

till

Final Project Due

That said, I will take a look at the final project starting week 2: read it, re-read it, brainstorm, outline, review literature, and the like.

3. "Know when good is good." (3) This is to have a clear expectation of my participation in the course. I will try hard, but will not aim to be a perfectionist to avoid burn out due to my current daytime teaching schedule and research projects.

Goodbye week 1.

Hello week 2!

References

1. 4 Time Management Tips for Online Students (USNews)

2. 5 Tips for Online Student Time Management (ElearningIndustry)

  

A Blogpost about Blogging

I don’t have any problems with blogging mechanics. Creating a blog is fairly easy as I have experience blogging for the quite a few years. The only difference lies in platforms. I’m maintaining two blogs, my personal profile at Wordpress (tienmaiminh.wordpress.com) and our university TESOL conference weblog on Weebly (opentesol.weebly.com), both of which are not very active. For this course I’ve created a Blogger page at tien-mai.blogspot.com so that I could follow other teachers easier and vice versa as we’re all using one blog service provider.

Bloggers who could have the equal status of Op-Ed contributors takes lots of time and efforts to craft a decent post. I believe that insightful content is what matters most. To improve the blog’s readership, a post should be either pragmatic or entertaining. Otherwise, bloggers could be discouraged as there aren’t many visitors to the page. Blog stats don’t lie. Very often the writers’ block is always lingering when the thought of getting down to writing has just popped up.

The blogging process could be described as follows:

Following-Reading-Reflecting-Writing-Publishing

The last function, publishing, is a million-dollar button. Before the advent of social media, I think blogging had built the first cornerstones of digital journalism: everyone could be a reporter, a channel or a whole broadcasting network. Especially in regions where mass media was censored by the government, bloggers could reveal untold truths in opposition to propaganda.

In educational contexts, I think there aren’t many famous teachers-bloggers. One possible reason is that we are all busy lesson planning, marking papers, attending faculty meetings and workshops, etc. As mentioned above, setting a blog is easy, the much harder thing is to maintain it and to invite quality discussions.

I hope one day my blog can hit a thousand viewcounts per week (and then per day or per hour). Too ambitious? But that’s how I define my blogging success.

Tien

Vietnam

And the journey begins...

The U.S

Indonesia

Dominico

Paraguay

Nepal

Tanzania

Brazil

Mali

Kyrgyzstan

Egypt
Iraq
Mongolia
Siberia
India
Bahrain
Malaysia

ONLINE

I've never been in such a diverse course: e-classmates are based in all parts of our global village. Attending the course, Webskills Fall 2016, sponsored by the American English Institute at the University of Oregon, will definitely be an important professional development milestone. 

Learning to be a skilled online educator is a trendy act of tech-savvy teachers, but the more important aspect of the course is the sharing session in which I will have opportunities to collaborate with teachers whose various backgrounds will enlighten my teaching practices.

I'm very excited to begin!