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Final reflection: How has technology changed me as a teacher?

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Final reflection: How has technology changed me as a teacher?

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I have always been keen to incorporate the use of technology into my lessons and have been using sites such as Kahoot and Socrative, as well as allowing students to use their mobile phones for dictionary and research purposes, for a couple of years now. However, I always felt that I lacked knowledge and understanding of how best to apply them.

Having been introduced to a wide range of new digital tools, as well sharing ideas with other teachers, I now have more confidence and understanding of how to use them in the classroom. Further to this, Puentedura's SAMR theory has given me a greater understanding of the purpose for using technology and has made me question how tools can be utilised to their full potential, so as to ensure that activities are augmented, modified or even redefined, rather than just substituted.

My recent use of Quizlet Live illustrates how I was able to do this with a vocabulary task. At Huddersfield ISC, we already have weekly sets of Quizlet Flashcards on our VLE, but prior to undertaking this course, I only really used them to encourage my students to learn new vocabulary for independent study. However, in light of learning the SAMR model, and having been encouraged to use this Quizlet Live on this course, I have started asking my students to revise the weekly Flashcards for homework, in preparation for a Quizlet Live game in the next lesson, thus adding a flipped element to my lessons. Although not all of the students do this prior learning, which means that the games sometimes take longer than is necessary, I believe the activity has been successful, as the students always seem to be fully engaged in the  game and enjoy working together.

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At Huddersfield ISC, we have recently started to mark students' assignments by using Quickmarks on Turnitin, as opposed to the conventional method of marking paper copies with pen. Therefore, I am interested to learn how I can use the technology to improve the feedback that I give to my students.

One way that I intend to do this is to accompany my written feedback with a  short screencast (3-5mins). This would be of benefit to students who prefer to receive oral feedback, rather than written. The fact that it is recorded means that the students can replay the fact as well.

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The tool that I have found most useful is Padlet. I have introduced some of my students to this app, asking them to use it to keep portfolio of independent study tasks. I always ask my students to keep these portfolios, but previously they have been in paper form.

So that the students knew what I expected of their Patlets, I created 3 fictitious student portfolios, which they were asked to evaluate. I found that this task worked well, as the students were able to identify the positive and negative aspects that I was looking for and they ranked the portfolios in the correct order. After they had done this, I helped them to create their own accounts, which was really straightforward. I asked them to share their URLs with me and the rest of the class, so that I could monitor their progress and so that they could peer evaluate.

As a result of using Padlet, I have overcome some of the problems previously encountered with paper-based portfolios. One of the issues that I used to face was that some of my students would forget to bring their portfolios to class. However, as Padlet is a live online document, this is no longer an issue/excuse that they can use. A second benefit of using Padlet is that I have been able to view and mark my students' work without having to take their portfolios from them. As such, they have not been prevented from adding to their portfolios, whilst waiting for me to mark and return them. Another positive is that Padlets can be made to look professional and presentable, whereas my students paper-based portfolios used to be quite tatty and poorly maintained. This means that the students have taken greater pride in their work. Further to this, students are able to take ownership of their portfolios, as they can personalise their Padlets by choosing their own background images and layout.

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I found David's example lesson in this module to be particularly useful, as it showed how the various tools could be used in conjunction.

I have since introduced my students to the Oxford Text Checker, when looking at a text from their reading exam preparation booklet. I demonstrated how to run the Oxford 3000 & AWL reports, then explained that they should prioritise learning words that were on both of the lists. I also showed them how these words can be identified (by the key and mortar board symbols) when using the Oxford Learner Dictionary website.

I plan to get my students to use the Oxford Text Checker again next week, before they submit the first draft of their end of course research essay, in order to check that they have used enough academic vocabulary.

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I recently introduced my student to this site, showing them how it can be used to address some of the language issues that are prevalent in their work, such as the position of linking words and punctuation; word frequency; collocations; use of prepositions etc.

In addition to the collocations feature, I was impressed with some of the others (e.g. as the family words, synonyms, definitions and related words), as well as the variety of different activities that students can do and we as teachers can create our own exercises. I also like the fact that the lay out of the site is clear, which makes it more aesthetically pleasing and user friendly than other concordance sites such as Lexcture.

I intend for my students to use the site again in a few weeks, when returning my first drafts of their end of course essays. As idea that I have is to group students according to the types of errors that they have made or language level, so as to differentiate tasks and encourage peer learning.

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Useful Website - Writing: Expresso Text Analysis

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Useful Website - Writing: Expresso Text Analysis

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Expresso is a fascinating site where you can paste in your essay and get an analysis of your language use, such as the complexity, range and sophistication of your vocabulary and grammar. Please read the guide carefully before using it.

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Useful Website - Grammar: UCL Internet Grammar of English

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Useful Website - Grammar: UCL Internet Grammar of English

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The Internet Grammar of English is a useful reference site for checking your knowledge and understanding of English grammar.

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Contents of the Grammar

Glossary of Terms

Index

Search

List of
Exercises

Welcome to the Internet Grammar of English!

The Internet Grammar of English is an online course in English grammar written primarily for university undergraduates. However, we hope that it will be useful to everyone who is interested in the English language. IGE does not assume any prior knowledge of grammar.

The Internet Grammar of English is accessible free of charge .

Please note that the Internet Grammar of English has been thoroughly revised and updated, and is now available as an App for Android and Apple mobile devices. See the links on the right.

Alternatively, to avoid potentially long download times, why not buy The Internet Grammar of English on CD-ROM? Prices start at 25 Pounds Sterling (GBP) + VAT, where applicable. Institutional and network versions are charged at different rates. Click here for more details and the order form.

If you are a UK school teacher we strongly recommend you look at our Englicious website. Englicious contains hundreds of teaching resources for professional development and age-appropriate classroom teaching, specifically aligned to the Grammar scheme of the new UK National Curriculum.

To use the site for reference purposes, use the navigation tools on the left.

To use this site, it is essential to have Javascript enabled in your browser.

WE REGRET THAT WE CANNOT REPLY TO GRAMMATICAL QUERIES.

This site includes information on

o
Our 1 million-word fully-grammatically analysed (parsed) corpus of spoken and written British English, ICE-GB. This is the British component of theICE project.

o
Our state-of-the-art corpus exploration and correction software, ICECUP.

o
A free sample download corpus package which contains twenty-thousand words (1,622 trees) of spoken and written English, and the ICECUP software.

Recommended by:

BBC Skillswise
Guardian Education
Chicago Tribune

iGE: a completely revised
grammar for Apple and Android
hand-held devices, available
in a free 'Lite' version,
or a complete version
at a modest price.

More...

iGE

iGE Lite

iGE

iGE Lite

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Gerald Nelson, Justin Buckley, Survey of English Usage, University College London, 1996-8

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Contents of the Grammar Glossary of Terms Index Search List of Exercises Welcome to the Internet Grammar of English! The Internet Grammar of English is an online course in English grammar written primarily for university undergraduates. However, we hope that it will be useful to everyone who is interested in the English language.

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Useful Website - Grammar/Referencing: English Grammar Explantions

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Useful Website - Grammar/Referencing: English Grammar Explantions

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English Grammar Explantions is an excellent grammar reference site as well as a place to do grammar practice activities

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English Grammar Explanations - Reference - Materials for Teaching and Learning English

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Useful Website - Vocab: Academic Phrasebank

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Useful Website - Vocab: Academic Phrasebank

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The Academic Phrasebank is an excellent website for discovering common phrases used in academic writing.

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The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological 'nuts and bolts' of writing organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation (see the top menu ). Other phrases are listed under the more general communicative functions of academic writing (see the menu on the left). The resource should be particularly useful for writers who need to report their research work. The phrases, and the headings under which they are listed, can be used simply to assist you in thinking about the content and organisation of your own writing, or the phrases can be incorporated into your writing where this is appropriate. In most cases, a certain amount of creativity and adaptation will be necessary when a phrase is used. The items in the Academic Phrasebank are mostly content neutral and generic in nature; in using them, therefore, you are not stealing other people's ideas and this does not constitute plagiarism. For some of the entries, specific content words have been included for illustrative purposes, and these should be substituted when the phrases are used. The resource was designed primarily for academic and scientific writers who are non-native speakers of English. However, native speaker writers may still find much of the material helpful. In fact, recent data suggest that the majority of users are native speakers of English. More about Academic Phrasebank.

Call for research participants
Are you a postgraduate student with a specific learning difficulty? We are conducting research into how Academic Phrasebank can be useful for postgraduate students who have specific learning difficulties. Would you like to assist with this project by taking part in an online interview? If so, please complete thisshort form. It will only take around one minute of your time.

This site was created by John Morley.

Academic Phrasebank is the Intellectual Property of the University of Manchester.

Copyright © 2023 The University of Manchester

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The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological 'nuts and bolts' of writing organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation (see the top menu ).

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Useful Website - Writing/Referencing: Leicester Plagiarism Tool

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Useful Website - Writing/Referencing: Leicester Plagiarism Tool

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The Leicester Plagiarism Tutorial is a great way to look into how to avoid plagiarising in your subject.

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The Academic Skills Centre provides one-to-one help, advice and online resources for University of Leicester undergraduate and masters students.

Our maths advisors, academic skills consultants and librarians can advise you on:

Maths and Statistics

Academic writing

Dissertations, projects and assignments

Study skills and preparing for exams

Researching, finding and evaluating sources

Referencing

Currently all consultations are held remotely Monday - Friday. To book a study consultation you will need your University login.

Academic skills online

The Academic Skills Centre produces a wide range of short self-study guides to support you to succeed in your studies.

Our guides are based on questions we're often asked about which includes:

Studying

Researching

Find and evaluate sources

Analyse your question to search more effectively

Library Search guide and specialised research tools by subject

Writing

Plan and prepare your assignment

Develop and write your assignment

Review and edit your assignment

Referencing

Why, when and how to reference

University of Leicester Harvard and Footnote referencing styles

OSCOLA and Vancouver referencing styles

Refworks and Endnote guides

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The Academic Skills Centre provides one-to-one help, advice and online resources for University of Leicester undergraduate and masters students. Our maths advisors, academic skills consultants and librarians can advise you on: Maths and Statistics Academic writing Dissertations, projects and assignments Study skills and preparing for exams Researching, finding and evaluating sources Referencing Currently all consultations are held remotely Monday - Friday.

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Wordnik is an excellent reference site for finding more out about words, think of it as a dictionary on steroids! Type in a word and find out more about it than you thought possible.

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Voyant tools is a rather fabulous site for entering text (from either a webpage or your own text) and getting corpus data back about it. Very visual and easy to use, recommended by our own Anastasios Asimkopoulos.

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TEDxESL is a collection of lesson plans for the efl classroom using TED talks as their basis.

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TED is a really useful website for practising your academic listening skills.

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TED Talks are influential videos from expert speakers on education, business, science, tech and creativity, with subtitles in 100+ languages. Ideas free to stream and download.

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VOA: Learning English is a news site designed for English language learners with readings at different levels as well as downloadable audio versions of all the stories.

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Voice of America - Learn American English with VOA Learning English

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Learn American English with English language lessons from Voice of America. VOA Learning English helps you learn English with vocabulary, listening and comprehension lessons through daily news and interactive English learning activities.

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Useful Website - Writing: British Council Discipline Writing

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Useful Website - Writing: British Council Discipline Writing

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Discipline Writing is a collaboration between the British Council and Coventry University to provide useful information drawn from their academic corpus about essay types. A lot of very useful information to read through

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All Disciplines

If you are studying in a British university you will be required to do a large amount of writing, whatever your subject. The type of writing you do will depend on your subject. On this website, these different types of writing are called Genres or Genre Families.

Some of these Genre Families are more common in some disciplines than in others. For example in business, Case Studies are very common, in law Problem Questions are very common, while in history and philosophy are very common.

So according to the BAWE corpus, across all disciplines, the most common Genre Family is . However Methodology Recounts are common and so are Case Studies, and Explanations.

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All Disciplines If you are studying in a British university you will be required to do a large amount of writing, whatever your subject. The type of writing you do will depend on your subject. On this website, these different types of writing are called Genres or Genre Families.

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UEFAP is Andy Gillet's website with a huge range of info about academic reading, writing and grammar.

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Useful Website - Writing: Linking Words And Phrases - Academic Writing

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Useful Website - Writing: Linking Words And Phrases - Academic Writing

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Linking Words And Phrases - Academic Writing gives a lot of useful advice about essay writing and some of the language needed to write effectively.

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Personal opinion:

In my opinion/view, To my mind, To my way of thinking, I am convinced that, It strikes me that, It is my firm belief that, I am inclined to believe that, It seems to me that. As far as I am concerned, I think that the economic recession of the previous decade was foreseeable.

To list advantages and disadvantages:

One advantage of, Another advantage of, One other advantage of, A further advantage of, The main advantage of, The greatest advantage of. The first advantage of riding a motorbike in a large metropolis is that of not getting caught in major congestion.

To list points:

Firstly, First of all, In the first place, Secondly, Thirdly, Finally. To start/begin with, we have to address the inadequacies within the education system before we can tackle unemployment fully.

To add more points to the same topic:

What is more, Furthermore, Apart from this/that, In addition (to this), Moreover, Besides (this),... not to mention the fact that your choice of career is a fundamental decision which will influence the rest of your life. Not only is your choice of career a fundamental decision, but it is also one that will influence the rest of your life.Your choice of career is both a fundamental decision and something that will influence the rest of your life.

To refer to other sources:

With reference to, According to the latest scientific research, the use of mobile phones can be damaging to one's health in the long run.

To emphasise a point:

Indeed, Naturally, Clearly, Obviously, Of course, Needless to say, the scheme was hound to fail due to insufficient funds.

To give examples:

For instance, For example, by establishing day-care centres across the country, working mothers can he encouraged to resume their careers. By providing incentives such as, like day-care centres working mothers are encouraged to resume their careers. If working mothers are to resume their careers then the provision of incentives particularly, in particular, especially day-care centres is essential.

To state other people's opinion:

It is popularly believed that, People often claim that, It is often alleged that, Some people argue that, Many argue that, Most people feel that, Some people point out that wealth will bring happiness. Contrary to popular belief, wealth does not necessarily bring happiness.

To conclude:

Finally, Lastly, All in all, Taking everything into account/consideration, On the whole, All things considered, In conclusion, On balance, For the above mentioned reasons, Therefore I feel that, To sum up, it is unlikely that there will be peace in all the countries of the world concurrently.

Summarising:

In short, Briefly. To put it briefly, his performance on stage was fantastic!

Works consulted
Taken from "Successful Writing Proficiency" by Virginia Evans

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Personal opinion: In my opinion/view, To my mind, To my way of thinking, I am convinced that, It strikes me that, It is my firm belief that, I am inclined to believe that, It seems to me that. As far as I am concerned, I think that the economic recession of the previous decade was foreseeable.

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Useful Website - Writing: University of Leicester

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Useful Website - Writing: University of Leicester

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Develop your writing — University of Leicester has extensive resources to help you develop better as an academic writer.

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Develop your writing - University of Leicester

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This is where you'll find all our resources on writing skills. You can access the full list below, or if you're working on an essay, why not take the Writing essays tour, which provides additional advice and guidance? In addition, you might also find it helpful to attend a related workshop or come to see us for a consultation.

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The Academic Collocations List is a researched list of the most common academic phrases/word combinations that you'll need at university. Very useful for writing.

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Academic English Online is a site that has a huge number of exercises to help develop a range of academic skills.

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System requirements:

JavaScript. Many of these materials require JavaScript enabled in your browser. We are currently developing some non-JavaScript versions.

Flash. Many of these materials also require the Adobe Flash plugin installed in your browser.

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Academic English Online. Queen Mary, University of London.

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System requirements: JavaScript. Many of these materials require JavaScript enabled in your browser. We are currently developing some non-JavaScript versions. Flash. Many of these materials also require the Adobe Flash plugin installed in your browser.

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This site founded in Australia provides clips of Doctoral students presenting their thesis in 3 minutes. There are clips of English speakers with a wide range of accents, and these can be an excellent resource when teaching presentation skills, speaking skills, and how to be concise. It ma be more appropriate for more advanced learners.

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The Skills Hub on the University of Sussex website is a useful resource for EAP materials and guidance. The Critical Thinking and Reading information and clips are particularly relevant for the types of students we work with.

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Skills Hub home : Skills Hub: University of Sussex

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Preparing for university - Using Skills Hub - Support at Sussex

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Reading List

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Reading List

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Jones, Christian, and Waller, Daniel. Corpus Linguistics for Grammar : A Guide for Research. Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides. 2015.

Timmis, Ivor. Corpus Linguistics for ELT : Research and Practice. Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides. 2015.

Weisser, Martin. Practical Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction to Corpus-Based Language Analysis. John Wiley. 2016.

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Skell (Sketch Engine for Language Learning) gives you access to basic information from the Sketch Engine corpus tool. You can search for similar words, examples of words in context or create a word sketch – a useful compendium of language that often accompanies the word you search for. A simple enough tool for students to use in and out of class and expand/refine their vocabulary.

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Word Wanderer

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Word Wanderer

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Word Wanderer aims to make corpus-analysis more visual and interactive. You can upload a text or use a pre-loaded one (a corpus analysis of a Borges story? Shouldn’t there be a Borges story about that?) and get a map of all the words in the text. Clicking on a word will show you a map of the word in context, ie with the language that goes before and after it. You can also draw lines between words to generate comparisons.

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The WordWanderer interface has three main views:

The cloud view displays the most common words of a text using font size to represent relative frequencies. The ordering of the words is alphabetical from top to bottom, left to right. When hovering over a word, its relationship with other words, in terms of their rate of proximal co-occurrence in a text, are highlighted in colour.

Clicking on a word selects it for the context view. The word sizing corresponds to how often they occurr in the text near the selected word: the larger the word, the stronger the association between the words and the selected term. Vertical positioning is alphabetical and horizontal positioning represents sentence positions relative to the selected word.

Dragging a line between two words triggers the comparison view. In this view a word's size corresponds to the combined association strength with the two words. Here, the horizontal position represents the difference in association between the two selected words. If a word occurs more often with the left word, it will be placed more towards the left side of the screen.

All views show a limited a number of words. To find a specific word there is a search function above the visualization. Simply type in a word and hit enter to activate this function. In the options (top right), you can set which types of words are included, based on their parts of speech. When in context view, the instances of the selected word are displayed below the visualization.

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WordWanderer - take your text for a walk

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We are experimenting with visual ways in which we can enhance people's engagement with language. By fusing the information we can obtain from corpus searches, concordance outputs and word clouds we are aiming to enable and encourage people to notice and wander through the words they read, write and speak.

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Just the word

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Just the word

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Just The Word is a user-friendly site where students can look up information about word collocations.

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Just The Word collocations - helps you in writing English

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COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) is probably the most technical site but getting to grips with it can furnish some really useful data. We particularly like the ability to compare words and to search by part of speech. The same website can also give you access to the British National Corpus and others.

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american national corpus corpora englishdavies word lists wordlists frequency

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[Davies] 1.1 billion word corpus of American English, 1990-2010. Compare to the BNC and ANC. Large, balanced, up-to-date, and freely-available online.

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Nesi Writing for a Purpose

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Nesi Writing for a Purpose

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Hilary Nesi explains some of the ways corpora have informed the British Council’s Writing for a Purpose project for EAP students

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Spreading the Word: The Challenge of the Corpus as an Agent of Change

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Analysis of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus has revealed similarities and differences in student writing across disciplines, levels...

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Durrant AVL

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Durrant AVL

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Philip Durrant makes an interesting use of corpora to evaluate the new corpora-based Academic Vocabulary List (AVL)

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Hyland Corpora & Genre

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Hyland Corpora & Genre

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An example of how Ken Hyland used corpora to analyse changes in a genre.

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JavaScript is disabled on your browser. Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page.

Highlights

*

There is a widespread belief that academic writing is becoming more informal.

*

We explored a corpus of the 5 top journals in 4 disciplines in 1965, 1985 and 2015.

*

We found only a small increase in the use of 10 key features over the past 50 years.

*

Increases occurred only in the hard sciences and were restricted to three main features.

*

This represents changes in rhetorical conventions of interaction in the hard sciences.

Abstract

Informality has become something of a contemporary mantra as, from the denim-clad offices of internet startups to the pages of business reports, we are encouraged to shed old constraints and relax conventions. This paper explores the perception that since informality has now invaded a large range of written and spoken domains of discourse, academic writing has also followed this trend. It asks the question whether academics are now freer to construct less rigidly objective texts and craft a more inclusive relationship with their readers. Taking a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines at three periods over the past years, we explore changes in the use of ten key features regarded by applied linguists and style guide authors as representing informality. Our results show only a small increase in the use of these features, and that this is mainly accounted for by increases in the hard sciences rather than the social sciences. It is also largely restricted to increases in first person pronouns, unattended reference and sentences beginning with conjunctions. We discuss these results and argue they represent changes in rhetorical conventions which accommodate more obvious interpersonal interactions in the sciences.

Ken Hyland is Chair Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He has published over 200 articles and 24 books on language education and academic writing. He was founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes and was co-editor of Applied Linguistics.

Feng (Kevin) Jiang is a PhD student in applied linguistics at the Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include disciplinary writing, corpus analysis and genre studies. His recent publication appeared in English for Specific Purposes.

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Is academic writing becoming more informal?

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JavaScript is disabled on your browser. Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page. * There is a widespread belief that academic writing is becoming more informal. * We explored a corpus of the 5 top journals in 4 disciplines in 1965, 1985 and 2015.

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Ideas for using text analysis tools in the class

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Ideas for using text analysis tools in the class

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After a reading text, get students to guess which words are more ‘academic’ and then ask students to take the text and put it into the Oxford Text Checker to find out.

Similar to above, get them to run a text through the Oxford Text Checker but this time get them to focus on words that are within the Oxford 3000. Focus on words that they say they ‘know’, but then get them to run them through Flax, Just the Word, or any of the online dictionaries to see how much more they can learn about them.

Pick some keywords from a text and ask groups of students to research useful phrases/collocations  for different ones using a tool like Flax. Then pool their knowledge by mixing the groups and getting them to share or getting them to put the information onto a shared space such as Padlet or Google Docs!

Similar to above, but this time, get them to run the text through the Webcorp text analyser and then exploring the most common words through the sentence snippets and identifying any key phrases/collocations/grammar patterns that emerge through it.

Create exercises for your students with collocations using this page from Flax.

Combine or mix and match any of the above!

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Flax Collocations

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Flax Collocations

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There are many definitions of collocation. We think of collocations in the same way as expressed by Benson et al.: "In any language, certain words combine with certain other words or grammatical constructions. These recurrent, semi-fixed combinations, or collocations, can be divided into two groups: grammatical collocations and lexical collocations."

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Web Corp Live

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Web Corp Live

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The URL of the page from which to generate the list of words.

Turning on the stopwords filter will exclude high frequency words like 'the' and 'a'.

If case insensitive the frequency of lower and upper case variants of a word will be combined.

Instead of generating a list of words you can generate lists of combinations of words (immediate neighbours). Up to 5 words.

Specify the minimum frequency each word must have in the text in order to be included in the word list.

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research and development unit for english studies

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The URL of the page from which to generate the list of words. Turning on the stopwords filter will exclude high frequency words like 'the' and 'a'. If case insensitive the frequency of lower and upper case variants of a word will be combined.

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Oxford Text Checker

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Module 7 - Corpus Linguistics: Oxford Text Checker

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Text Checker | Oxford Learner's Dictionaries

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Teaching with Hand-Held Devices

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Teaching with Hand-Held Devices

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Going Mobile: Teaching with Hand-Held Devices by Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly has some useful ideas for using mobiles with students, although some of their ideas may need adapting for an EAP context.

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Shortlisted for the 2015 ELTons Innovation in teacher resources category.

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile Learning: Languages, Literacies and Cultures

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile Learning: Languages, Literacies and Cultures

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Mark Pegrum’s Mobile Learning: Languages, Literacies and Cultures takes a more scholarly approach, but has some interesting ideas.

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This book explores the use of mobile devices for teaching and learning language and literacies, investigating the ways in which these technologies open up new educational possibilities. Pegrum builds up a rich picture of contemporary mobile learning and outlines of likely future developments.

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Best Phone Apps for Language Teaching

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Best Phone Apps for Language Teaching

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Another longer list of apps with wider application for both EFL and EAP.

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A list of apps built by participants of the online course "Mobile Learning EFL"

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Module 6: Best Phone Apps for Language Teaching

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Module 6: Best Phone Apps for Language Teaching

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A list of Apps for Language Learning with a focus on EAP.

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Best Mobile Phone Apps for Language Learning

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Here are some great apps you can use to help you learn English using your mobile phone or tablet.

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This blog has regular posts on future developments in ELT, many of which, naturally, end up including apps.

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Dyslexia affects up to ten per cent of people in the UK and it is one of the most well known and researched learning difficulties. Yet, many teachers, publishers and digital product teams still feel ill-equipped to cater for dyslexic students. A 2016 survey of...

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With the 52nd IATEFL conference kicking off next week, we'd thought we'd share what we're going to be up to. Here's what we've got coming up over the conference week. We hope you can join us!

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The potential impact of AI on English language teaching and learning has been the topic of hot debate for some time, with computational linguists and language teaching professionals clashing over the benefits and drawbacks of integrating the technology into a language...

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Dyslexia affects up to ten per cent of people in the UK and it is one of the most well known and researched learning difficulties. Yet, many teachers, publishers and digital product teams still feel ill-equipped to cater for dyslexic students. A 2016 survey of...

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Free Tech For Teachers

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Free Tech For Teachers

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If there’s a new educational app or a new way to use an existing app in education,  it’s almost guaranteed to be covered.

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Smartphone usage and English acquisition

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Smartphone usage and English acquisition

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Violeta Jurkovic studies the extent to which exposure to English via smartphone usage helps students with their overall English acquisition.

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Online informal learning of English through smartphones in Slovenia

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The accessibility of online resources in English means that today informal contexts offer a multitude of language development opportunities. The main ...

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile phone use for effective teaching

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile phone use for effective teaching

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Botero et al’s article gives an interesting insight on the importance of student acceptance of mobiles for them to be effective in teaching.

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile devices in EFL

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile devices in EFL

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Research on how students react to using mobiles in class, Nicky Hockly’s blog post makes interesting reading.

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What do EFL learners think about working with mobile devices in the classroom? Does it make them more motivated? Do they participate more in class? Does it improve their English?Is there evidence for any affective improvements?

This blog post describes the findings of learner surveys on this, as part of a research project for The International Research Foundation in English Language Education (TIRF).
Health warning

The tone of this blog post is a little more academic than usual. This is because it is to be read in tandem with the related TIRF paper on mobile task design and sequencing (due to be published online later this year).

I make no claims at all for the generalisability or validity of this data. I have a long list of Caveats at the end of this post. But for me the surveys threw up some interesting - albeit anecdotal - data about learner perceptions and affective factors in the use of mobile devices. It certainly provided me with some food for thought. It may provide some for you too.

Who were the learners?
The project had students using their mobile devices to carry out communicative language learning tasks (we also used a course book). It was carried out with two consecutive small groups of international EFL learners studying at a private language school in the UK, over a period of two weeks in July 2013.

The first group (week 1) were post-beginner level learners (A1+ level) with a total of 12 learners. The majority were Arabic speakers, with one Chinese speaker, and one Russian speaker. Half the class were adolescents (16 years old), with adult learners ranging from 20-45 years of age.

The second group were of low intermediate level (B1) with a mix of nationalities among the 8 learners (Kuwaiti, Italian, Brazilian, Turkish, Argentinian and Chinese), and ages ranged from 16-27 years old.

Each group attended three hours of class with me in the mornings, and another hour and half in the afternoon with another teacher.

What mobile devices did they use?
A BYOD (bring your own device) approach was chosen because the likelihood of most - if not all - learners owning smart phones or tablet computers was very high. This proved to be the case, with all learners in both groups owning smart phones (iOS, Android and Blackberry, with a majority of iPhone owners), and one tablet owner. Private language schools in the UK tend to attract students who can afford these devices, with professional adults attending, and adolescent learners coming from relatively wealthy backgrounds.
The initial class survey
In the first class of the week, both groups completed an online survey designed to check what learning experiences they may already have had using mobile devices, what devices and connectivity they had with them in the UK, and to gauge their attitudes to the idea of working with their devices during the coming week. In terms of attitudes and experience, the results of this initial survey were very similar for both groups:

All the learners regularly used bilingual dictionary or translator apps on their mobile phones in class. None of the learners had ever used their mobile phones for any other language related activities.

All of the learners in both groups agreed that using mobile devices could help them improve their English, and that they would like to find out more ways to do so both in and out of class. Although the learners had clearly not had any experience of this in the past, this showed that 100% of learners in both groups were positively disposed towards trying out mobile-based learning activities.
The end of week survey
An end of week survey was given only to the intermediate group, on the Friday of week 2. The survey contained questions focusing on the use of mobile devices, including whether they enjoyed using their devices overall, whether they found it useful, and soliciting comments/feedback on individual activities carried out in class.

It was decided not to administer the survey to the post-beginner week 1 group for a number of reasons:

Their very low language proficiency meant that beyond yes/no, agree/disagree statements, it was difficult to get more detailed information from them on their experiences with mobile devices.

In addition, 8 of the 12 learners left halfway through the morning class on the final Friday in order to attend the local mosque, so time was very limited in this final class.

However, I did carry out one-to-one end of week tutorials with each of the beginner learners individually, and they all expressed (in limited language) that they had enjoyed using the devices, using words such as 'like very much', 'new', 'different', 'interesting', and expressing a desire to continue using their devices in subsequent weeks.

What did the learners say?
Here's a downloadable PDF Survey Summary for the intermediate week 2 group. It shows:

The majority of the class enjoyed using mobile devices (questions 3,7,8,9,17), and would like to continue to do so in the future (question 11). The majority also felt that using their mobile devices had improved their English (question 8), and their mobile literacy (see question 9) by familiarising them with new apps such as Chirp, Audioboo, Woices, and new mobile-related concepts such as QR codes - the latter were new to everyone in both groups.

But probably the most interesting thing this survey shows is:

One learner clearly felt that there were few benefits to the mobile tasks, with comments such as 'useless' and 'it doesn't work'. This learner was reluctant to take part in any class communicative activities, either with me or with previous teachers, and preferred very structured written grammar practice activities in class. This is related to personal learning style and preferences, and expectations/beliefs about learning; it is also highlights the need for discussions about the benefits of not only using mobile devices, but of the communicative approach in general, for some learners.

Other survey findings worth highlighting address two typical BYOD teacher concerns:

Question 13 explored the learners' perceptions of an issue that often worries teachers: that in a BYOD approach, teachers need to understand how every mobile device in the room works, and need to be able to provide technical support for learners. Question 14 explores another concern: that a BYOD approach can only work if everyone has the same devices. The learners' responses do seem to give some credence to both concerns. The majority of learners (6 out of 7) felt that the teacher should be familiar with the technology. On the issue of everyone needing the same device, the class was split, with a slight majority (4 out of 7) feeling that this was not that necessary.
Caveats: What are the limitations?
The questions posed at the beginning of this blog post are clearly large questions for a very small study. So here are the caveats:

The timeframe for this study was very limited: one week with each group was not long enough to get the learners accustomed to using their devices, or to explore a wider range of mobile-based tasks. A longer timeframe - for example across a term, or even an entire school year - would make a more robust study.

The scope of this study was limited: only two small groups of learners at fairly low levels of proficiency, were involved. A greater number of students with a range of levels of proficiency would make a more robust study.

The study context of the study was limited: a multilingual group of relatively wealthy students in an immersion context (UK). Studies carried out in a number of monolingual contexts would be interesting for the purposes of comparison.

The educational context of the study was limited: I was a single teacher trying out an ad hoc BYOD approach. Working as part of a team of teachers within an institution-wide implementation plan would ensure students could continue using their devices after I left, hopefully in a pedagogically sound manner.

Not all students had 3G connections, or access to Wi-Fi at home, so mobile-based tasks that required connectivity had to be limited to the school and grounds. This meant that potentially interesting mobile-based out of class activities (e.g. using geo-location) could not be explored.

Whether our week with mobile devices really improved the learners' English is simply not possible to prove. Even with more time at our disposal, so many factors are involved in second language acquisition, that such a generalised question is problematic. But the learners perceived that their English had improved, and this is a positive affective outcome.
What's the conclusion?
Is there evidence for any affective improvements from the use of mobile devices?

The responses to the end of week survey by the intermediate week 2 group (apart from the one learner already mentioned) do seem to bear this out, with increased motivation and class participation noticeable during several of the mobile tasks.

Increased motivation and participation were equally true of the post-beginner week 1 group where wholesale enthusiasm was noticeable, especially with the QR code tasks described here and here.

The reluctant learner who gave consistently negative written feedback is important. Resistance or rejection of learning with mobile devices points to a need for careful planning and a far more staged approach with some learners. Starting on more familiar ground (e.g. with behaviourist language apps for homework), plus learner training and discussion might be more effective with some groups, rather than the 'deep end' approach taken in this project.

But these conclusions can only be applied to these learners, in this context. How about running your own classroom research project to find out what your learners think?

Please feel free to leave me a comment with your thoughts. Do your own experiences with mobile devices reflect my findings, for example?

Nicky Hockly
The Consultants-E
August 2013
Blog posts for my TIRF Research Project:

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Mobile devices in EFL: What do students think?

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What do EFL learners think about working with mobile devices in the classroom? Does it make them more motivated? Do they participate more in class? Does it improve their English?Is there evidence for any affective improvements? This blog post describes the findings of learner surveys on this, as part of a research project for The International Research Foundation in English Language Education (TIRF).

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile phone activities

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Module 6 - Mobiles: Mobile phone activities

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Stuck for ideas on how to use mobiles with your students? Try one or more of these simple ideas (Starred ideas require an app and/or internet connection).

| 1 Set students a 28-day challenge for their English learning: Students make a pledge of something they’re going to do in the next 28 days to improve their vocabulary or a particular skill. In pairs, they make short videos outlining their pledge and, if possible, share the videos with you. 28 days later, ask students to review the video and discuss their experiences with the class, e.g. What did they try? Was it successful? Will they continue to do it? Oddly, the videoing of their promise seems to give them more impetus to keep it.
| 2 Lecture summary: Students either attend a lecture or watch a TED talk online. They then use their mobile phone to record themselves trying to summarise the key points in no more than a minute and share the video or audio with you. This allows you to give targeted feedback on both their summary skills and their spoken English.
| 3 ***Evernote or Google Keep to record vocabulary*** Ask students to use one of these tools to record new vocabulary they learn over the course of a week. After a week, ask them to consider the benefits and disadvantages of this method. This can be made more collaborative by asking students to share their notes with other students electronically.
| 4 Photos for speculation (warmer): Take some close-up photos of everyday objects. Email them to yourself or post them on your VLE. Show them on the projector screen and get students to speculate what the objects are. Students then go and take their own photos of different objects, come back and show their photos to a partner or group and repeat the speculation. Alternatively, students upload their photos to the VLE and the whole class speculates together.
| 5 Number dictation: Dictate equations to students, making sure you include plenty of problem pairs like 16 & 60, and ask the students to enter it in their mobile phone calculators. Do they get the same result as you? Students can then dictate their own equations to each other in pairs. If your students have smartphones, this can be adapted to take in more complex mathematical equations as most smartphones now incorporate a scientific calculator (to access this on both IOS and Android devices, open the calculator and turn the screen to landscape orientation).
| 6 Am I saying it right? Most phones today allow the user to dictate text. This can be a great way to check clarity of pronunciation. At a simple level, you can write words on the board and ask students to voice search for it on Google by clicking the microphone icon. Do they get the required result?If students have a note-taking function that allows them to dictate text, this activity can be made more challenging by asking them to dictate a whole text and then compare their version with the original.
| 7 Memorable photos: Most students (and teachers) have some photos on their phones that they are loath to erase (have I assailed you with photos of my daughter yet?). Most teachers are also aware that students struggle with question forms. Put the two together by showing two or three photos of your own on the projector screen and asking students to ask any questions they like about them. Only answer a question when it’s been correctly formulated. After students have asked you questions, ask them to choose three significant photos on their phones. They should show them to a partner and answer their partner’s questions.
| 8 ***Tweet a concept*** Elicit from students the maximum character limit in twitter (140 characters, for now, but they’re trialling 280). Ask students to summarise a key concept from their discipline so that it can be tweeted. If students are connected to twitter, they can tweet them with a hashtag that identifies your class, e.g. #AEPC05. Searching for this hashtag would then allow the teacher to show a collated list of the concepts on the projector screen for discussion, comparison, etc.A possible follow-up here is to ask students to search for key academics and/or academic journals related to their discipline on twitter. Following them can be a good way to keep abreast of new developments and publications.
| 9 ***Explain the process*** Students show an app they use regularly to a partner and explain how they use it and/or how the app works. Useful practice for students for Part 1 of IELTS writing.
| 10 ***Dictionary comparison*** One of the hardest challenges facing an EAP teacher can be weaning students off reliance on the bilingual dictionaries they often have installed on their phones. Probably the only way to do this is to show them there are better monolingual dictionaries out there. Although it’s often expensive to download apps such as the Cambridge Dictionary app, the web versions give the same functionality. So, if students have access to the web, ask them to look up five to ten words on their bilingual dictionary (choose words they often get wrong) and then to look the same words up on a site like dictionary.cambridge.org or www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ and compare the information the monolingual dictionaries give. What differences do they note?
| 11 ***QR codes*** If you know how to create QR codes, you can get students moving around the classroom and learning at the same time. Before class, create a set of QR codes that link to a series of online documents. The documents can contain anything from single items of lexis you will be focussing on in class to short passages of texts or even images. Pin the QR codes around the class (preferably in places students might not immediately guess, e.g. the side of your desk) and challenge them to work in pairs to find the QR codes and collate lexis, scan texts, correct sentences, etc.
| 12 A selfie tour: The Kardashians aren’t the only ones who can use selfies. Give students a document (or a link to one) with instructions that require them to move around your city and/or campus. The instructions can be as mundane or as cryptic as you think your students can cope with, but they should always have the end result of getting them to a place where they need to take a picture of themselves, e.g. ‘Take a picture of yourself in front of the Student Accommodation Office’; ‘Take a picture of yourself with the book you find at Western Bank Library PEARCE 2478.’ Students bring the selfies in to class as their homework answers. This tour can then be followed up with discussion questions about the buildings, the experience, the range of facilities on offer to them on campus, etc. Although particularly useful for disciplines such as architecture and geography, this activity can also be a helpful way for students to get to know the campus/city. The word ‘selfie’ itself can lead into a useful discussion/study of neologisms and linguistic fashions in English, while it also links nicely to discussions of celebrity culture and/or privacy. See this lesson on Film English for another way to exploit selfies as a concept.

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: BetterCloud Monitor

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: BetterCloud Monitor

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Tips on how to get more out of Google and Microsoft or, even easier, you can sign up for their daily email tip. You may not read them all immediately, but they’re good to have in the inbox to browse at a quiet moment.

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We've rounded up some of our best Gmail tips and tricks for you. Whether it's simply creating a contact group, enabling desktop notifications, or using Gmail advanced search, you can take these tips to help you become more productive and save time. READ THE FULL STORY

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We've rounded up some of our best Gmail tips and tricks for you. Whether it's simply creating a contact group, enabling desktop notifications, or using Gmail advanced search, you can take these tips to help you become more productive and save time. READ THE FULL STORY

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Co-originator of Technology, Content, Pedagogy Knowledge model (often shortened to TPACK), Matt Koehler's  own website.

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Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge

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Co-originator of Technology, Content, Pedagogy Knowledge model (often shortened to TPACK), Punya Mishra's own website.

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TPACK Newsletter archive | TPACK videos | TPACK Fun

Ambigram for TPACK. This image would look the same when reflected in a mirror .
The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, builds on Shulman's idea of PCK, and attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. The TPACK framework looks at the relationships between technology, pedagogy, and content, in specific contexts.

At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK). Effective technology integration for pedagogy around specific subject matter requires developing sensitivity to the dynamic, transactional relationship between all three components. A teacher capable of negotiating these relationships represents a form of expertise different from, and greater than, the knowledge of a disciplinary expert (say a mathematician or a historian), a technology expert (a computer scientist) and a pedagogical expert (an experienced educator).

The two definitive articles on TPACK are:

The most comprehensive summing up of the research and scholarship around TPACK can be found in the second edition of theTPACK handbook:

Herring, M., Koehler, M.J., & Mishra, P. (Eds.) (2016). Handbook of technological pedagogical content knowledge (2nd edition). New York: Routledge.

For a comprehensive and ever growing literature on TPACK please visit the TPACK wiki at http://www.tpack.org

Some other interesting links about TPACK on this site are the TPACK Newsletter archive, some videos that can help you learn more about the topic and some strange TPACK Fun.

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TPACK Newsletter archive | TPACK videos | TPACK Fun Ambigram for TPACK. This image would look the same when reflected in a mirror . The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, builds on Shulman's idea of PCK, and attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge.

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: Cloud Document for note-taking

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: Cloud Document for note-taking

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This is an academic study of using cloud documents for note-taking and its ideas are easily transferable to the EAP context.

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: Cloud-based computing

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: Cloud-based computing

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For an overview of the kind of things universities and departments might consider while switching to cloud-based computing, this Swedish study raises some interesting questions.

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google apps for education; affordance; tunnel-vision affordance; cloud computing; tethered appliances

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Pupils in the clouds: Implementation of Google Apps for Education | Lindh | First Monday

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Pupils in the clouds: Implementation of Google Apps for Education

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: Ways to use Google Docs

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Module 5 - Cloud Docs: Ways to use Google Docs

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David Read on seven ways to use Google Docs with EAP students.

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What is a Google Doc and why might we want to use it in the EAP classroom? Before getting onto the practical applications, let's first clarify what a Google Doc actually is. This isn't meant to be patronising for those who already know, rather an acknowledgement that not everyone has had the chance to use them before.

A Google Doc is very similar to a Microsoft Word document, the main difference being that the Google Doc is not stored on your computer but instead on the internet. This means that it can be shared and viewed with more than one person at the same time.

There are many advantages to cloud documents such as Google Docs over those stored locally on your computer: they can be accessed from any computer or device; they save automatically so you don't lose all your work when the computer crashes; and it's much easier to collaborate when you are editing the same document rather than sending attachments back and forth. Even my tech-savvy and tech-saturated students are visibly impressed when I demonstrate how two or more people can write on the same document at the same time.

Cloud Docs aren't perfect - formatting options are quite limited and the need for an internet connection can cause issues - but it's that collaborative aspect that makes them an incredible tool in the EAP classroom. In this post I want to explore seven possible ways that they could be used in the EAP classroom. Throughout the post I'll be referring to Google Docs simply because that's what we use at our university but there are other options available such as Microsoft Office online and Apple iworks and at the end I'll make some suggestions as to how you can use these online tools even if they are not officially used at your place of work.

Idea one: feedback on written work

Getting students to look at and respond to feedback on written work can be challenging, it's not always something they enjoy and it can be a lengthy process waiting for them to read and react. Using Google Docs, however, can make the process a little less painful and a lot more interactive through the use of side comments.

In Google Docs you can make side comments on anything the student has written, a feature found in most word-processing software. However, the online nature of these docs means that the students can actually respond to any comment the teacher has made and have a conversation down the side of the page (see pic below). These comments can be either a correction code, a question (What do you mean by...?) or just praise.

I've been using this for several years now and from my own experience I'd say that students are much more likely to respond to comments if done in this way rather than if they are written or sent to them via attachment. The sheer novelty factor alone makes it more engaging for students, but also the conversational element makes it seem more interactive. What's also really useful is that any comments made on the doc are then sent to the author via email so they are alerted to anything new.

This can be used in different ways with students. Students can write outside of class and then you can comment on it later. Another option - assuming they have either access to either a mobile device or a computer/laptop in class - is to get them to do writing during a lesson and monitor their writing as they are doing it and provide ongoing comments to help guide them.

One thing I've found helpful to do at the beginning of term is to create one document for each student with their name on it and then ask them to put any writing they do onto that. This saves a lot of hassle constantly creating and sharing Docs and makes them a lot easier to locate on Google Drive. It also has the added advantage that students and teachers can easily look back and see what feedback they got on previous writings and incorporate that into their new one.

Idea two: peer feedback

The techniques used for teacher feedback can also easily be applied to peer feedback as well. Students can share their essays with their peers and they can use the same commenting system for feedback.

One useful sharing setting when doing peer feedback is to only allow their peers to comment on their writing rather than edit. This means they can't actually change their peer's writing but can do two things : firstly they can add margin comments like a teacher can and have the same interactive conversations down the side of the page. It also though gives them the ability to make suggestions on their classmate's writing without actually changing the text. Anything added is put in a different colour and a margin box explains what has been added. The author can then decide whether to accept or reject those suggestions by clicking a tick or cross.

Idea three: brainstorming ideas for essays

Google Docs are ideal for different kinds of brainstorming sessions both inside and outside the classroom. It might be collecting ideas or arguments for an essay or simply finding out what they know about a topic. One way to do this if you want them to see immediately each others ideas is to create a table with two columns in it and in one column the students put the name of the students in the same group as them, in the other their ideas.

If you don't want them to see each other's ideas immediately you can create multiple Docs and send them to small groups. When they've finished, you can pull up their ideas on the board or share their Doc links on a master document.

Again, the facility to make side comments means they can evaluate the ideas of their peers immediately.

Idea four: vocabulary curation

On some courses I've used Google Docs as a way to curate vocabulary from the lessons and share among the class. There's probably a variety of ways this could be done but I normally just created a table and selected one person at the end of the lesson to be responsible for adding new vocabulary to the document.

One of the built in features that really helps with that is the Research tool. By highlighting a word on the document and then right-clicking and selecting Research, it then opens up a search panel on the right showing results for that term. You can then insert links directly from the sidebar or drag an image directly onto the page. This is particularly useful if you need to define or show something a little more specific that can be easily represented by a picture.

Idea five: collaborative essay writing

One activity I've had students do that they really respond well to is collaborative essay writing. This works better if it's a short IELTS type essay. Once they've brainstormed ideas for an essay, you can put them into groups and assign them a part of the essay each to write: one does the introduction, another the for arguments, another the against arguments and the last the conclusion.

What I've found great about this activity is that since they are working on the same document, they have to constantly negotiate meaning with other to make sure the essay is coherent and cohesive. This brings in another great feature of Google Docs. If they are not sitting right next to each other when they are doing this, they can use the document chat feature. Here they can take part in synchronous chat actually on the document they are working on to help make the essay more consistent.

Idea six: error correction

Another common classroom procedure that Google Docs can enhance is error correction. During the lesson, if you notice that students are making particular speaking or writing errors, you can collect them on a Google Doc and then share them with the group either at the end of the lesson or for homework. I would set the sharing settings so that students could only comment on the mistakes rather than edit them, and then they could work in pairs/groups to make suggestions in the margins as to what the correct answer is.

Idea seven: textual analysis

A variation on the typical reading comprehension exercise is to copy and paste the text or article into a Google Doc and then set questions in the margins for students to respond to. These can be traditional comprehension/true or false questions or questions about the language in the text.

Responding to these questions can be set up as a jigsaw activity so only certain groups or individuals answer certain questions. Alternatively, everyone answers all questions and the responses can be seen stacked on top of each other down the margin.

Whichever way you choose to do it, the fact that students are able to see each other's answers creates an immediate point of comparison or gives the opportunity for students to check each other's work for accuracy.

Just a small tech tip if you tend to get your articles from websites such as the BBC or the Guardian. Often when you copy and paste from the website to the document, formatting can get all screwed up because it's trying to copy in lots of ads and images from the website. However there are quite a few excellent browser extensions that will help strip down the article to pure text and make it easier to copy. I use the Evernote extension to do this but there are others such as Reader for Firefox.

But what if we don't use Google Docs where I work?

Obviously life is made a lot easier if your institution uses GAFE (Google Apps for Education). All of the Google products are integrated into your log-in and sharing is a lot easier because Google can search internally for people's emails to connect them to documents.

But there's still no reason why you can't use Google Docs with your students. If you create your own Google account, you can share documents via a link rather than via individual accounts. The only difference - and it's a reasonably big one - is that any comments in the margins will not have the students name but will be signed as anonymous. In this case, you'd just have to encourage students to add their names when they make comments.

The other alternative is to encourage students to sign up for a Google account - the likelihood is that many will have one already - and then just use those addresses to share documents to. Again, not perfect, but does at least give full functionality within Google Drive.

And some technical considerations...

For students to use Google Docs both inside and outside the classroom they are going to need a device with an internet connection and one from which they can access Google Drive and Docs. Since it's accessed through the Web, any laptop or computer can be used. Or students can use their mobile devices if they are using either an Apple or an Android product as there are apps available for them (and very good ones). The mobile apps don't have all the features of the Web version but the key ones such as working on shared documents and commenting are there.

If a lot of your students are Chinese, you may also run into the issue that their mobile devices are not set up to have Google apps on them. Because of the restrictions on Google in China, Chinese phones tend to have a different app store on them that doesn't include any of the Google products. However, most students know of ways to get round this by installing additional software or by changing the location of their app store to another country to make them available.

Of course, this does raise the bigger issue of whether you want students using their mobile devices in class, but since they are going to use them anyway whether we sanction it or not, it might be better to focus their use on something productive.

Do you use Google Docs or other cloud services with your students? If so, let us know in the comments how you are using them and add to our list of ideas. Or let us know if you have any questions.

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7 Ways to use Google Docs in the EAP Classroom

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What is a Google Doc and why might we want to use it in the EAP classroom? Before getting onto the practical applications, let's first clarify what a Google Doc actually is. This isn't meant to be patronising for those who already know, rather an acknowledgement that not everyone has had the chance to use...

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Tyson Seburn is an EAP teacher and in this article he gives some great examples of how to use Google Docs with EAP students.

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NB: Let me preface this post by saying if you have never touched a Google doc before, you may want to watch a quick Youtube tutorial on the subject first, like this. You won't regret it.
My first workshop of the year is coming up at the #realize15 forum on January 23-24. In this session, I'll be talking about a blended EAP research project I did with students this past fall. In this second iteration of the assignment this year, I added more of a digital component through Google Drive, which I more heavily use with each new term. The basic functions have remained constant, but like with many everyday situations, the infamous 'teacher eye' continues to find stronger and more collaborative ways to incorporate Google Drive functions into the classroom. This leads me to the next few posts on its functions for course purposes, partially in support of my #realize15 session, partly just because I like to persuade people to use it. Today's topic: Google Docs for in-class collaboration.

The traditional context

Very often in writing courses, some form of collaborative writing occurs. Probably one of these scenarios sounds familiar:

Build a story: one student writes a few lines. That gets passed to another who adds to it and so on.

Peer editing: one student finishes a piece of writing in class. The paper gets passed to a partner, who gives feedback in one form or another on it. Then it's passed back.

Board examples: you choose a few students to go up to the board to put their sample sentences on for feedback.

I'm sure there are more. In each case, however, obvious limitations occur: the number of students who can give feedback to a piece of writing; the number of students who can be at the board at the same time; the temporary nature of board work; your ability to monitor student writing closely enough while walking through the classrooom; etc. etc. This led me to wishing there were another way to do these types of shared writing tasks.

Google docs with colleagues

Oddly, I have been using Google Docs as a shared document tool with my colleagues to plan our weekly syllabus and take notes at course meetings for several years. I've even shared information with workshop attendees using it. Though I'd never really cowritten anything substantial with a colleague, a colleague of mine who teaches our first-year History credit course, Alexandra Guerson, often writes papers with a partner in different time zones. With this mounting familiarity in Google Docs, the leap to use with students for in-class collaborative writing was natural (and somewhat of a -why did't I do this before- facepalm moment).

Written feedback in class

One day before class, I asked students to bring their laptops to class ( NB: this room had accessible wifi and a projector-pretty essential for maximised functionality). We were reading a short text with academic reading circles and learning how to respond to questions with short answers (SAQ)-those exam-type comprehension questions that require several cohesive sentences and evidence from a text, like mini-essay body paragraphs.

We began traditionally, by answering an SAQ individually with pen and paper. Upon completion, they exchanged with a partner who cluttered up their paper with little bits of pen/pencil scratches and questions in tiny print, aimed to be squeezed into the small blank spaces available. Once returned, each student took feedback and rewrote their answers on a new paper, sometimes whispering a question to their partners to clarify meaning or simply decipher the scribbles written feedback. I asked three to put their answers on the board (this is the definite max who can write on the board simultaneously) while others were finishing. Even though these students had already finished a second draft of their answer based on peer feedback, they still took their time, laboriously staring at the board, then erasing parts of their answer, then rewriting. All in all, this process probably took 10 minutes longer than I intended. Most other students finished. They waited, checking their phones. We then worked on the board answers together; I elicited errors from the crowd; I corrected in different coloured chalk all with the resounding permanence of being erased one fell swoop of my board eraser. Gone into oblivion (and perhaps a few photos taken by students who prefer not to write things down as we go).

Round 2: students use Google docs

For the second round of practice answers, I shared the link ( bit.ly/020_conlin) to a Google Doc where I allowed anyone to edit anonymously if desired. On it was only the photo and I began typing the question and instructions in front of their eyes:

Next, I asked students to type their answers as they were writing them into the space provided below it. To their amusement, they began seeing a few answers appearing on the screens before them, followed by heads turning around the room to see whom it was typing. After a few minutes of big eyes and little giggles, they were composing their answers above or below another. It was magical to watch 15 answers simultaneously appearing. I took this opportunity to add further instructions and my own answer to the document.

Once all students were completed, I projected the Google Doc on the screen and showed them the next instructions. It was time to give feedback to each other based on shading categories we previously used (...when despite my best sales pitch, not everyone had highlighters):

First, I demonstrated on one answer. Then, I assigned each a classmate's answer ( NB: for this, they had to tell me if I'd given them their own since no one's was clearly identified). Their goal was to read and highlight a classmate's issues in these colours on the Google Doc. Colours began appearing all over the document like rigid horizontal brushstrokes! More whispering and giggling. Here, they started to see how their answer was being mysteriously highlighted as they watched. Remember, because it was in anonymous mode, only students who had logged into their Google account on their own were identifiable at this point-a surprisingly effective way to overcome the initial fear of publicly sharing one's writing. One answer looked like this, for example:

The final step of this peer feedback was commentary and more specific editing. For this, I changed the Google Doc into "Suggesting" mode (very similar functionality to Microsoft Word's Track Changes). I demonstrated on one answer that when reading an answer it's valuable to give specific feedback through comments, asking for clarification or giving suggestions. I made a few edits to a paragraph-missing punctuation, incorrectly spelled word, etc-to show how the edits would appear in the document until resolved by the user. This time, I put students into partners to coedit an answer together. The result was fascinating. Students were drawn into this activity, giving loads of feedback ( NB: sometimes justly, other times they were wrong too-a skill that improved slowly over time). Paragraphs became colour artwork like this:

Once every last comment had been given, everyone looked with focussed attention at the feedback their answers had been given, accompanied by laughter and the occasional light-hearted accusation of injustice. We went back up the page to look at my sample answer, analysed it for strengths, and ended with new homework instructions to compare their answers to mine, consider the feedback they'd been given and resolve it (select to accept the changes or not) and revise to a second draft answer in a new Google doc they'd create and share with me.

Google docs = 1; pen and paper = 0

Using Google Docs for effective feedback is not an exact science, but the point was for students to become familiar with its functionality, appreciate what it can do more efficiently than with pen/paper/blackboard, and keep a permanent record of what we'd done in class together.

In a forthcoming post, I'll talk about using Google Docs revision history and comments to demonstrate writing process and give feedback directly to students in real-time .

Click here to see the entire Google Doc discussed in this post.

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NB: Let me preface this post by saying if you have never touched a Google doc before, you may want to watch a quick Youtube tutorial on the subject first, like this. You won't regret it. My first workshop of the year is coming up at the #realize15 forum on January 23-24.

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Ideas for lessons with Google Docs

Brainstorming: As a homework task to brainstorm ideas round a particular subject you are studying

Vocabulary curation: from a reading or lesson, create a table with the words in it and ask different students to find definitions, collocations for each of them

Collaborative essay writing: works better with shorter essays, once they have finished brainstorming ideas for an essay, a student can be assigned a different part of an essay (introduction, main body 1, main body 2 etc). Since they are working on the same document they have to constantly negotiate meaning with the others to make sure the essay is coherent and cohesive. Later they can share their essays with other students for them to make comments.

Error Correction: during a lesson, note down any common errors on a Google Doc and then either at the end of the lesson or for homework, share it with them. Set the sharing settings to only comment and they can make margin comments making suggestions for the correct answer.

Textual Analysis: Copy and paste an article into a Google Doc and then set questions in the margin for students to respond to. Responding to questions can be a jigsaw activity so only certain groups or individuals answer questions. Alternatively, everyone answers all questions and the responses can be compared. Make sure the share settings are set to comment.

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Module 4 - Video: Promoting Engagement on VLE

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Module 4 - Video: Promoting Engagement on VLE

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Marie Fournier from UCL shares a very pithy set of principles for promoting engagement on Moodle.

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Marie Fournier's French department students called her Moodle 'a work of art'. The UCLU Student Choice Teaching Award-winner shares her tips.

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Module 4 - Video: What goes into a good VLE

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Module 4 - Video: What goes into a good VLE

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Anna Ruff at the University of Southampton has put together a useful presentation on  what goes into a good VLE. The examples here are based around Blackboard but the principles are universally applicable.

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TEDxESL is a variation on TED Ed in but the lessons are focussed on ESL content and discussions.

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Ideas for lessons with Google Slides

Research a topic: groups of students are given one slide each to find info about one aspect of a topic (British Culture, Nationalism etc). Once they have finished they can comment on the other slides or suggestion corrections.

Getting to know you: If a relatively new group, students can be given one slide each to create a profile of themselves (videos, text, pictures) and others can comment/ask questions later.

Visual/Written Guides: students work in groups to create guides to an aspect of their UK city, combining pictures, text and video. Others can comment/edit/correct.

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Google Slides: Online Slideshow Maker | Google Workspace

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Use Google Slides to create online slideshows. Make beautiful presentations together with secure sharing in real-time and from any device.

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Film English is not strictly pure EAP but it does have a lot of interesting and thought-provoking lesson plans based around short films and documentaries…

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Ororo TV is a site that aggregates other video sites that are useful for English language learners, lots of useful links there.

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Youtube videos in English with subtitles watch online | ororo.tv

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Youtube videos in English with original voice acting, dual subtitles, dictionary and convenient translator. Register and watch for free!

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"Flipped" classrooms don't invert traditional learning so much as abstract it

This year, more university students and professors will encounter a trend that has come to be known as "flipping the classroom." It's been largely associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs), that edu-tech vogue committed to delivering classes to large numbers of students all at once via video lectures and automated assessments conducted over the Internet.

Some promote MOOCS as the future of lower-cost higher eduction, while others lament them a solutionist privatization of educational practice. Despite the polarization, both MOOCs and flipped classrooms enjoyed positive mentions last week from President Obama, who announced a White House plan to make college more affordable:

A rising tide of innovation has the potential to shake up the higher education landscape. Promising approaches include three-year accelerated degrees, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and "flipped" or "hybrid" classrooms where students watch lectures at home and online and faculty challenge them to solve problems and deepen their knowledge in class. Some of these approaches are still being developed, and too few students are seeing their benefits.

Even among those who have become accustomed to hearing about MOOCs in the media, the "flipped classroom" might be a new concept. What is it, anyway? Here's a definition from a forthcoming report on the subject by the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U) at my own institution, Georgia Tech:

A flipped classroom inverts the traditional structure of a classroom. In a typical traditional classroom, students listen to lectures in class and perform other learning activities, such as solving practice problems after class. In this traditional structure, students are exposed to material in class via lectures, and they attain deeper knowledge after class via various forms of homework. In a typical flipped classroom, students listen to pre-recorded video lectures before class and perform other learning activities in class. In this flipped structure, students are exposed to material before class via videos and readings, and they attain deeper knowledge in class via activities.

Generally speaking, educators have warmed to the idea of the flipped classroom far more than that of the MOOC. That move might be injudicious, as the two are intimately connected. It's no accident that private, for-profit MOOC startups like Coursera have advocated for flipped classrooms, since those organizations have much to gain from their endorsement by universities. MOOCs rely on the short, video lecture as the backbone of a new educational beast, after all. Whether in the context of an all-online or a "hybrid" course, a flipped classroom takes the video lecture as a new standard for knowledge delivery and transfers that experience from the lecture hall to the laptop.

And the idea of a "flipped classroom" does sound good on first blush. After all, classrooms are hardly the pride of the educational experience, for students or for teachers. Flipping them might be for the best.

Dissatisfaction with the structure of classrooms is hardly a new enterprise. Fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan cited the lecture hall as an example of a "hot" medium, one that exercises a single sense and therefore obviates the need for students to fill in the details. By contrast, for McLuhan the seminar exemplifies "cool" media, those that require more conscious effort from their participants. McLuhan had previously made the same observation about the print book, arguing that its single-origin, single-sense method of knowledge recording and delivery set the stage for industrialization.

More recently, Duke professor Cathy Davidson has reminded us that the lecture-style classroom is itself a product of industrialism, a tool meant to train students to sit quietly and conform to a single set of processes and ideas. No matter the learning content deployed in a classroom, its form embraces a disciplinary practice purpose-built for the factory or corporation who might later hire its compliant graduates. Given the collapse of industrialism and the rise of the knowledge economy, Davidson advocates for a more process-oriented, distributed, and exploratory method of learning more suited to today's post-industrial age.

Given the same critiques of the classroom can be found both a year ago and half a century ago, it's worth asking how the "flipped classroom" would improve the educational process.

Perhaps surprisingly, a flipped classroom doesn't fundamentally alter the nature of the experience in the way that McLuhan and Davidson propose. Both MOOCs and flipped classrooms still rely on the lecture as their principal building block. In a typical classroom students listen to lectures. In a flipped classroom, students still listen to lectures -- they just do so as homework, edited down into pleasurably digestible chunks. The lecture is alive and well, it's just been turned into a sitcom.

Of course, a flipped classroom is not meant just to deliver pre-recorded lectures. As my C21U colleagues indicate, it hopes to allow the reclamation of class meetings for "learning activities" meant to provide "deeper knowledge." Given the luxury of a small, McLuhan-cool seminar-style class, one can easily imagine that such an arrangement would prove beneficial.

But flipped classrooms and MOOCs are not meant to enable a larger number of smaller, more personalized classes. Or, when they do, such success is purely accidental and secondary. These new courses are first efficiency measures that hope to aggregate fewer higher-level (and higher-cost) educational encounters and standardize them for regularized future delivery. In practice, flipped classroom meetings usually involve additional assessments and exercises, most of which are non-synthetic and automated ( clicker responses, low- or un-moderated online discussions, quizzes, and so forth). The abstract, open-ended engagement with ideas (what makes the seminar "cool") is subordinated to efficient, measurable productive acts.

An astute observer might start to wonder... what's so flipped about the flipped classroom? Looking at the two side-by-side reveals one major difference that will help us reformulate this concept without the bluster of its trendiness.

A traditional classroom has readings before class, lectures during class, and assignments after class. A flipped classroom has lectures before class, assignments during class, and assessments after class. Flipped classroom supporters like to argue that traditional classrooms only provide first exposure to materials via lecture, but that claim assumes that nothing whatsoever happens before such classes, that students enter class blind. In reality, digging deeper than hearsay is a hallmark of university education. Classes in all disciplines ask students to engage with primary and secondary materials beforehand.

The flipped classroom abstracts these materials, overloading them into the lecture, which itself is usually shortened and condensed into modules less than 20 minutes in length. This condensed primary material then becomes fodder not for discourse or practice, but for evaluation.

A cynic might say that the flipped classroom ushers in the CliffsNotesfication of university courses. Slate's Will Oremus has offered a more moderate take: the MOOC-style flipped classroom lecture might be best understood as a replacement for textbooks and other reading materials students traditionally encounter in university.

But "replacement" is an imprecise characterization, particularly for courses in which a singular, canonical textbook doesn't (or shouldn't) exist (hint: most of them). More specifically, video lectures compress both primary materials (readings) and their clarification (lectures) into a single format, one shorter and necessarily less detailed than would be possible with a combination of pre-class readings and in-class lectures or discussions.

In essence, the flipped classroom is really a condensed or an abstracted classroom, one in which primary and secondary materials are refactored into pre-built lectures for the sake of value propositions other than the student's direct encounter with the currency of ideas. A condensed classroom is a compromise.

Even so, such a classroom isn't necessarily a bad thing. A guide published this year by Vanderbilt University suggests that flipped classrooms offer better opportunity and incentive for students to gain exposure to material before class. For example, it's possible that non-major students taking introductory courses might find more gratification in a short, summary lecture than they would reading esoteric textbook chapters or difficult primary material. In this case, condensation means encapsulation, compression: making materials more condensed so as to render them more easily and broadly digestible.

But then again, one could easily argue just the opposite: that a condensed classroom is a false copy, one that exchanges detail for facility -- a particular concern especially in introductory courses whose students won't later enjoy deeper contact with primary materials. Thumbnailing or abridging a subject might be fine in a magazine article or a TED talk, but isn't higher education supposed to provide genuine mastery, not just glib adequacy? Aren't college courses meant to place students in direct contact with the history of knowledge, not just to offer another channel of short-form entertainment students can collect and assemble into a credential?

No matter its benefits or faults, it is inaccurate to call this flipped classroom "flipped," when really it is condensed, abstracted. But you can see why it's an effective rhetorical term. "Flipping" implies an ambitious and visionary overturning of the sort Davidson advocates, rather than a simple refactoring of resources that might allow classes to better prepare students for assessment -- one of the other principal benefits cited in the Vanderbilt findings. Worse yet, many instructors who are legitimately interested in increasing the "cool" and reducing the "heat" of their lecture classes may be inadvertently tricked into thinking they are "flipping" their classrooms, thus lending credibility to a project with incompatible aims.

As ed-tech learning practices become commonplace, we would do well to remember that technology does not improve some underlying, pure nature of their subject. Rather, it changes those things, transforming them into something new, something different. The telephone doesn't improve communication; it alters it. Facebook doesn't improve socialization; it alters it. When it comes to the process of condensation, blanket statements slip through our fingers. Condensed milk isn't necessarily worse or better than fresh milk. Winnie the Pooh likes it. It can be spread on toast or dolloped atop New Orleans snowballs. But it is not an improvement over fresh milk. It's something else entirely. Likewise, the condensed classroom ought not to be thought of as an evolution. Instead, we should see it just for what it is: one approach to learning whose merits are hardly sufficiently justified by its correspondence with current trends in Internet culture.

Indeed, flipped classrooms may not even offer the benefits of efficiency touted by ed-tech startups and parroted by the White House. Contrary to the common wisdom about MOOCs and their ilk, condensed classes actually seem to require more work rather than less. Not only because they require the creation of elaborate video lectures, but also because in-class activities have to be designed, monitored, and evaluated. The likely end-game of flipped classrooms isn't a proliferation of high-contact, expert-run seminars, but the condensation of fewer, more readily distributable "online textbooks" with armies of low-paid instructional personnel cleaning up after them. Flipping-off the classroom, in other words.

Stripped from its current context of cost-cutting and oversight-amplification, the more abstract idea of flipping the classroom harkens back to Marshall McLuhan's hot and cool learning environments. If anything, a truly flipped classroom would just look more like a seminar, not more like a series of TED talks with associated assessments. The error of flipped classroom advocacy is not a distaste for the big lecture classroom, but that its reversal entails online lectures and in-class assessments instead.

Of course, it's theoretically possible to turn every classroom into a small-scale, discussion-heavy period of reflection and exercise. But such a feat requires investment, and both Obama's plan and the MOOC advocates make the false assumption that today's educational austerity is both incontrovertible and acceptable. Now we can get on to the privatization of education (Coursera, Udacity and other harbingers of publicly-supported short-term ed-tech speculation), or the administrative bureaucratization of it (ObamaEd, which has already been called the higher education version of No Child Left Behind). Parents and students who have worried about increasing size and decreasing attention in K-12 classrooms should note that flipped classrooms are an extension rather than an interruption of this practice, one tightly aligned with long-term financial deprivation in education (despite also costing more in the short-term).

The proliferation of such signals help us imagine what a truly "flipped" classroom might look like, one that really did reverse the worst aspects of education for the sake of improving it as a long-term social practice rather than converting it into a short-term appraisal contraption. It would be one in which administration and commercialization take a backseat to high-touch teaching and learning, one in which educators have the resources required to conduct what we've long known is better for students, and perhaps most of all, one in which compromises and short-cuts aren't palmed off as innovation.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Ian Bogost is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His latest book is Play Anything.

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"Flipped" classrooms don't invert traditional learning so much as abstract it This year, more university students and professors will encounter a trend that has come to be known as "flipping the classroom." It's been largely associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs), that edu-tech vogue committed to delivering classes to large numbers of students all at once via video lectures and automated assessments conducted over the Internet.

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Module 3 - VLEs: Pros & Cons of the Flipped Classroom

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Module 3 - VLEs: Pros & Cons of the Flipped Classroom

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Since Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams first experimented with the idea in their Colorado classrooms in 2004, flipped learning has exploded onto the larger educational scene. It's been one of the hottest topics in education for several years running and doesn't seem to be losing steam.

Basically, it all started when Bergman and Sams first came across a technology that makes it easy to record videos. They had a lot of students that regularly missed class and saw an opportunity to make sure that missing class didn't mean missing out on the lessons. Once students had the option of reviewing the lessons at home, the teachers quickly realized the shift opened up additional time in class for more productive, interactive activities than the lectures they'd been giving.

And voila: a movement began.

A 2014 survey from the Flipped Learning network found that 78% of teachers said they'd flipped a lesson, and 96% of those that tried it said they'd recommend it.

What is a flipped classroom?

Once a new idea becomes a buzzword, pinning down the definition can become a tad more challenging. The flipped learning network has developed what they hope will be seen as the definitive definition:

"Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter."

That gets the idea across, but it's a bit of a mouthful. The gist, in somewhat simpler terms, is that it's about moving the more passive elements of learning (watching a lecture, reading a chapter, etc.) outside of the classroom, so that more class time is available for interactive, hands-on learning.

Most people hear "flipped learning" and picture kids watching videos at home, but proponents of it suggest that it doesn't have to be exclusively about videos. Teachers are encouraged to give students options - some students will still learn better by reading a textbook chapter, but others will benefit from videos, audio files, or any other type of material you can find or create that covers a given topic.

The Benefits of Flipping Your Classroom

For a veteran teacher, flipping the classroom means completely re-thinking how to do the job you've done a certain way for years. And it comes with some extra work. That being the case, why would any teacher bother?

1. Flipped learning keeps students more engaged.

The flipped classroom model addresses how students learn best. We all know how hard it can be to stay focused during a long lecture, even if it's on a subject we're especially interested in. Discussions and hands-on activities tend to keep students' interest. While you work with students directly as they explore the concepts they're learning in class, you can provide immediate feedback that helps them improve their learning as they go.

2. Teachers provide more personalized attention.

Students don't all learn at the same pace and in the same ways. That's always been a complicating factor in teaching. The question of how to meet thirty or more unique students at their own levels is one that keeps teachers up at night.

The flipped classroom model gives teachers more opportunities to work directly with students. They can therefore clearly see when an individual student is having trouble with a concept and work with them directly to get through it. The increased interaction with students in the classroom will help teachers gain a clearer idea of the different learning styles of their students, so they can tailor their instruction to the needs of each one.

3. Students can work at their own pace.

A student sitting in a lecture, diligently taking notes will almost certainly miss one thing the professor says while writing down another. And that's still a vast improvement over the student whose mind wanders so they don't catch much of anything.

If they're watching a video at home instead, they have the power to pause the lecture while they write something down, and rewind and re-watch a particular part they didn't fully understand the first time. If they feel they could really use a second viewing to better understand the concept, they have that option. They have more power over the way and process by which they study and learn.

Examples of Flipped Classrooms

As in most things, there's no one right way to flip a classroom or lesson. But knowing how other teachers have done it can help give you ideas about what will work best for you.

The Backwards Classroom

Stacy Roshan's classroom is probably the closest to what most people think of as a "flipped classroom" of those on our list, although she's referred to it as the " backwards classroom " herself. She flipped her classroom largely to help reduce the anxiety she saw students experience in her AP Calculus class whenever she'd introduce complicated new concepts.

For homework, her students watch videos she's recorded in advance that cover the concepts explored in each chapter of her textbook. They spend their time in class doing the types of math problems that students have traditionally done as homework. If they have difficulty working through a problem, the teacher's right there for them to ask for help.

She does have to spend a lot of time creating those videos, but is happy enough with the results of using a flipped model that she's been at it for over four years now and is taking the time to experiment with new ways to make it better, like including embedded quizzes in the videos that students watch at home.

The Faux Flipped Classroom

One of the common criticisms leveled at flipped learning is that it depends on a certain amount of privilege: what about all the students who don't have a computer at home to watch videos on? Tracey Gillies addresses this concern with what she calls the "faux flipped" classroom.

Students who don't have a computer at home can watch the assigned video in class. Gillies' classroom is full of students each doing their own thing - watching a video, working out problems, taking quizzes, or posting or commenting on an online discussion board to get input from other students. Each of them is able to work on an assignment for as long as they need in order to master it, and then move on.

And Gillies is there to work with anyone who needs her help, at whatever point in the process they are at.

An Evolved Flipped Classroom

Shelley Wright embraced the flipped classroom back in 2011 and wrote a post about her experiences with flipped learning so far. But she followed it up a year later with a new post about how her flipped classroom had turned into something else - not a reversion back to the traditional way, but a more evolved version of the student-centered classroom she was seeking by flipping her lessons.

As students in her classroom became better at taking the lead on finding valuable resources and pursuing learning their own way, she shifted her focus to helping them with the process of learning how to learn better on their own rather than teaching about the subjects directly.

Her lesson to other teachers interested in flipped learning seems to boil down to: don't think it's all about the videos, they can be a part of it or not. It's about shifting from passive learning to active learning, in whatever way works for you and your students.

The Tools of Flipped Learning

A comprehensive list of every possible tool educators could use to flip a classroom would require a book (and probably still miss some), but we wanted to address a few resources that are common in flipped classrooms.

Of course, familiar tools like YouTube, Evernote, Google Drive, and blogging platforms can play a role as well, but here are a few more specifically suited to flipped learning.

To create videos for students to watch at home, you'll need easy-to-use screencasting software. Camtasia isn't the only one on the market; you can find a list of some of the other screencasting tools you can use here (including some free ones). We're highlighting Camtasia, because the company has optimized the tool for flipped classrooms.

Using Camtasia is fairly intuitive for new users. It allows you to record either your screen, or yourself. And, in one of the features that most sets it apart, it allows you to add interactive elements to your video. You can include quizzes throughout a video to test students' comprehension of what they've just seen, and you can include links out to any additional materials you want them to read or view. It does cost $75 if you're buying the Mac version, and $179 for the PC version, so it's a bit of an investment. But there are volume discounts that may help out if enough teachers in one institution are interested in exploring the flipped classroom.

Part of the appeal of flipped classrooms is that all that extra class time provides more opportunities for collaboration amongst students. Wikispaces is a great tool for encouraging and enabling that collaboration. It's free, unless your school is interested in purchasing a more secure version of the product.

The free version provides a lot of useful features though. You can give students assignments through the wiki, for both individual and group projects. You can load content for them to review and comment on, start discussions (or let them do so), and track how engaged different students are with the content you've assigned. It's plenty useful for non-flipped classrooms as well, but can help students collaborate and interact more both within and outside of the classroom, so lends itself especially well to the challenges of flipped learning.

EdModo is one of the most commonly used education tools in the world and can even claim the title of largest K-12 social network. It enables a lot of the same kind of tasks that Wikispaces does: loading content and assignments for your students to access, and allowing students to share discussions and comments, for instance. But it adds a much larger social element since you can interact with other students and educators beyond your own classroom. That means you can tap into the content and lessons beyond those you've developed and students can seek out insights beyond those their own classmates have.

The tool also provides analytics that help you spot who needs help with what so you can make your class time more productive. And students can access everything loaded to Edmodo on mobile devices as well as desktops, so they can do their learning wherever works best for them.

Like WikiSpaces and Edmodo, Moodle has the functionality to serve as the platform for a flipped classroom. Teachers can load resources, including any relevant ones they find shared by other teachers in Moodle, to create the assignments and curriculum for each class.

Conveniently, an educator from Northwest Regional ESD created a course on how to flip a class using Moodle within Moodle itself. So you can learn about some of the best practices and processes, while also seeing an example of what a course in Moodle looks like at the same time. You can load all the content related to each module, divide it according to topics, and include a variety of content formats.

The last resource on our list is less about providing or organizing content and assignments for your students, and more about actively soliciting their feedback. If the goal of a flipped classroom is to make the learning experience more student-centered, then it makes sense to regularly check in with them.

You can use Poll Everywhere both for occasional quizzes to see how students are doing throughout a class period and to solicit input from the class on which concepts to focus on and how to address them. If you have three ideas for activities students can do together to explore a particular concept, make them choices students can vote on. You can group the students according to their preferences, or focus on the winning option for activities that involve the whole class.

Additional Helpful Resources

As you've noticed by now, this is a big subject. You can find a lot more to learn and say about flipped learning than we've covered here. If you want more information before trying the flipped classroom out, here are some helpful places to start:

In Conclusion

The flipped classroom may not be for everyone. It involves some extra upfront work and just might not mesh with the teaching style of every educator out there. But enough of the teachers that have tried it are having success that you may find it worthwhile to experiment with flipping a lesson or two to see what happens. You might just become a convert.
Editor's note: This article is a revision and combination of several older Edudemic articles, updated and re-analyzed to reflect the latest innovations.

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The Teacher's Guide To Flipped Classrooms

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Since Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams first experimented with the idea in their Colorado classrooms in 2004, flipped learning has exploded onto the larger educational scene. It's been one of the hottest topics in education for several years running and doesn't seem to be losing steam.

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Module 3 - VLEs: Reflection on Lessons From a Flipped Classroom

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Module 3 - VLEs: Reflection on Lessons From a Flipped Classroom

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A blog post reflecting on the experience of designing over 100 flipped classroom lessons.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Module 3 - VLEs: e.g. of TED-Ed for the Flipped Classroom

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Module 3 - VLEs: e.g. of TED-Ed for the Flipped Classroom

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An example of Ted.ed for the flipped classroom - Study Group Feb 2019

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What's going to happen to humanity tomorrow, next year, or even a millennium from now? These are questions that governments and military and industry leaders employ people called 'futurists' to try and answer. Watch this video and answer the questions. While you watch, try to reflect on the experience from the student perspective.

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VideoAnt is a web-based video annotation tool for mobile and desktop devices. Use VideoAnt to add annotations, or comments, to web-hosted videos. VideoAnt-annotated videos are called "Ants".

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TED-Ed celebrates the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Discover hundreds of animated lessons, create customized lessons, and share your big ideas.

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything: SAMR provides an excellent range of resources to help understand and apply SAMR

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Dr. Puentedura graciously Creative Commons-licenses some of his papers to allow for reproduction on other sites with attribution.

I have taken one of the PDF files and turned it into a slideshow below. I have included links to the original PDF files in case you want to download it from Dr. Puentedura's site.

Bloom's and SAMR:
​My thoughts based on the work of R. Puentedura, A. Churches and L. Nelson

I feel teachers need to both create tasks that target the higher-order cognitive skills (Bloom's) as well as design tasks that have a significant impact on student outcomes (SAMR). A visual to illustrate that follows.

Educators will argue they have seen redefinition tasks that only target the remembering level or have a creative assessment that is only at the augmentation level. Of course that is true, but I believe we should be planning for technology tasks, activities, and assessments that include both the higher levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy and the transformation area of the SAMR model.

My vision of how the Bloom's and SAMR models work together and intersect follows below.

Bloom's and TECH: My thoughts

Work by others

Videos by others

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SAMR is a model designed to help educators infuse technology into teaching and learning. Popularized by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, the model supports and enables teachers to design, develop, and ...

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Ruben Puentedura on Applying the SAMR Model

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Suggestions for things to try with VLE:

if you have a reading or listening task coming up, set a brainstorming or pre-task question in the VLE’s forum or post stream for them to respond to for homework ahead of time.

after the weekend, ask them to share any new words they’ve encountered in their reading or listening and what they learnt about them. Pull them up on the board on Monday morning for discussion and analysis.

Most VLEs will have some kind of wiki function, a document that all of them can contribute to for pooling ideas or knowledge. If it doesn’t, you could always use a posterboard tool such as Padlet. This can be used to create summaries of what students have learnt (‘What did you learn about paraphrasing this week?’) during the week or over the module of a coursebook.

Most VLEs will have some kind of private journal function where students can write and it can only be seen by the teacher. This can be a useful way to get students to regularly reflect on their learning or to prepare for tutorials you might have with them. Again, try to make this a regularly activity, maybe once a week or every two weeks for 10–15 minutes.

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Module 2 - Tools: Learning Technologies Vocab

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Module 2 - Tools: Learning Technologies Vocab

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Learning Technologies in EAP Course Vocabulary Flashcards | Quizlet

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Start studying Learning Technologies in EAP Course Vocabulary. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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Quizlet has study tools to help you learn anything. Improve your grades and reach your goals with flashcards, practice tests and expert-written solutions today.

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Review student understanding at the class, individual student, or question-level.

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Module 2 - Tools: Technology is Learning SAMR

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Module 2 - Tools: Technology is Learning SAMR

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Technology is learning gives a useful practical example with commentary to help understand the stages better.

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How to Teach English with Technology by Nicky Hockly and Gavin Dudeney is ageing a bit now but the ideas and principles are still very sound.

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how to teach english with technology book and cd-rom pack

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didaktik / methodik / schulpädagogik / fachdidaktik

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testverfahren und zertifikate für englisch als zweitsprache

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How to Teach English with Technology Book and CD-Rom Pack

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Paperback. Pub Date :2007-04-12 Pages: 192 Language: English Publisher: Pearson The complete How to ... for making the most of using digital technology in your classroom Practical advice on how to use the Internet. email. podcasts. interactive whiteboards etc. including how to structure lessons a...

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Module 1: Language Learning with Technology

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Module 1: Language Learning with Technology

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Language Learning with Technology by Graham Stanley has some useful practical tips for using technology in the classroom.

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Language Learning with Technology | Language Learning with Technology

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Language Learning with Technology | Language Learning with Technology is for teachers interested in integrating technology into their classroom practice. | Graham Stanley

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Mozilla’s Guide to Web Literacy gives a useful overview of the kinds of skills we should be aiming to equip students (and ourselves) with.

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In today's digital world, knowing how to read, write, and participate online is a foundational skill next to reading, writing, and arithmetic. At Mozilla, we call this Web Literacy. Combined with 21C Skills, these digital-age skills help us live and work in today's world.

People everywhere should have the knowledge they need to tap into the full power of the Internet -- and to use it to make their lives and the world better. Whether you're a first time smartphone user, an educator, an experienced programmer, or an internet activist, the degree to which you can read, write, and participate on the web while producing, synthesizing, evaluating, and communicating information shapes what you can imagine-and what you can do. Read our white paper to learn more about why Mozilla cares about Web Literacy.

With the goal of bringing more equitable access to the internet for more people, we have worked with a diverse community of educators, practitioners, and technologists to identify core Web Literacy Skills and 21st Century Skills.

We fundamentally believe that the internet has the ability to transform communities and help us achieve our goals if we have the skills to wield its power. We've curated a core curriculum to teach these skills, and our hope is that people will use this curriculum, build on it, improve it, and share it with others as a way to make more people Web Literate and keep the internet healthy and open for all.
Mozilla's approach to creating curriculum is based on the following:

Open Source and Remixable: All lessons can be freely used, shared, and modified for specific audiences and use cases. We use the open collaboration platform GitHub to facilitate sharing, reuse, and development of the curriculum.

Participatory and Learner-centered: We emphasize social, collaborative, and participatory meaning-making and strive to match fun and meaningful offline activities with every online activity we offer.

Hands-on Application: All lesson plans encourage learners to design or create a tangible product, performance or model as a part of the lesson. This promotes active learning where facilitators are in a supporting role and learners explore content and apply skills through the completion of a project.

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In today's digital world, knowing how to read, write, and participate online is a foundational skill next to reading, writing, and arithmetic. At Mozilla, we call this Web Literacy. Combined with 21C Skills, these digital-age skills help us live and work in today's world.

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Module 1: Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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Module 1: Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is another great site with articles on a huge range of resources and tools that can be used in the classroom.

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning (ETML) is a blog owned and operated by Med Kharbach. Dr. Kharbach holds a PhD in educational studies from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada. He was also a K-12 teacher with over 12 years of classroom teaching experience.

I launched ETML in 2010 with the purpose of helping my fellow EFL (English as Foreign Language) teachers integrate technology in English language teaching. Fast forward to 2022, ETML became among the top EdTech blogs with over 7000 published blog posts. ETML has been referenced in a wide variety of academic research journals, books, and news outlets including the New York Times, Huffpost.com, Hubspot.com... [continue reading].

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning (ETML) is a blog owned and operated by Med Kharbach. Dr. Kharbach holds a PhD in educational studies from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada. He was also a K-12 teacher with over 12 years of classroom teaching experience.

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Free Tech for Teachers is a wonderful site that keeps you up to date with all the latest web tools that can be used in the classroom.