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!