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Which tool(s) you found most useful/engaging and believe you’ll use again in the future with your classes?

The tools I liked best were TedEd and Webcorp and I’ll definitely be using these again.  TedEd, Edpuzzle and VideoAnt allow the teacher to more closely tailor video content to the needs and interests of specific groups of students than is possible using text books, which, of course, do date quickly, and can get boring for the teacher after a couple of uses. However, finding the right videos can be very time consuming and may involve many rounds of watch-discard, watch-discard, watch-earmark, watch-discard, watch-approve before you end up with something you think suits your students and teaching purposes… The thing to do is probably to bookmark and save likely candidates when you happen upon them.

I had looked at the WebCorp wordlist tool before and set it aside as likely to be a ‘very hard sell’.  I’m glad the course has forced me to give it another chance.  Using it with students, rather than just experimenting with it myself, has given me a better feel for its potentials AND limitations (of which more elsewhere), which it is important to be aware of when rolling it out in classes.

Some of the most useful items in the course were the little tech tips, which allow more productive use of some of the main tools covered.  So a big thumbs up for including those!

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What have you learnt about using technology in the classroom and how will this change your classroom practice?

A strength of many of the tech tools we have looked at lies in their ability to extend the classroom beyond physical boundaries and reinforce a sense of community, cooperation, support and encouragement, all of which can enhance enjoyment, motivation and students’ sense of responsibility for their own and others’ learning.  Expecting students to contribute to shared tasks online, participate in forums and comment on each other’s work requires them to make more effort outside the physical classroom than might otherwise be the case, enabling them to engage more reflectively, constructively and consistently with the learning process and others involved in it.

These tools allow a great deal of ‘flipped’ guided and independent exploration and learning to take place outside the classroom, freeing up valuable class time for discussion, debate, vocabulary work, questions etc. This is particularly helpful where, such as in our language centre in Florence, the courses are short and there is usually insufficient classroom time to cover everything one would ideally wish to cover.

I have gained an appreciation of the need for these tools to be demonstrated and experimented with repeatedly over time in the classroom in small manageable chunks for students to really get a sense of their usefulness.  Without this groundwork, students are unlikely to engage with them outside the classroom. Finding the time for this is quite challenging in our short courses in which we have a lot of material to cover in a short space of time.

I think it’s easy to get carried away by new tools and trends simply because they are new and I don’t believe in using things simply because they are there. So one needs to be clear about one’s reasons for using them and students need to be on board with that too. Students do not unanimously embrace social media or social learning, and this does not seem to be a function of age.  Many have reservations about ‘putting it all out there all the time’, being asked to sign up for multiple services, and having their data owned in perpetuity by Google et al.  This must be respected and factored into decisions about how heavily ‘tech-enhanced’ a course should be.

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What areas or questions about technology would you like to explore in the future?

I would like to explore use of corpus tools more extensively as I can see their potential for EAP students generally, and specialist writers of research papers in particular, who need access to the kind of genre-specific data that can only really be had by building your own corpus from papers in your own subject specialism or sub-specialism. I’m not sure how realistic it is to aspire to get our ESAP writers to build their own corpora as corpus building is very time consuming and currently available tools are not intuitive to use and/or may not be freely available (though things are improving on that front). So I’ll be thinking about that.

I would also like to find a ‘one-stop’ way of managing the multiple accounts we need to use a wide range of tools and hold the materials produced with each of them in a single storage space.  Google seems to be winning the race in that direction,  at least in terms of access, but it would be nice if there were alternatives… I might look into using a blogging tool such as WordPress (which I believe was used – very skillfully - to create this course) as a better, shinier, and more flexible  home for content than standard VLEs. Our creaky-croaky osteoporotic version of Moodle is grim.

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When my students experimented with extracting wordlists from articles and opinion pieces in The Guardian (which I suggested they use for ease of access, along with the Firefox Reader View tool) the activity sometimes generated no data of interest as too many collocations in the concordances were weak/unremarkable (e.g. ‘big/great success’ rather than the more noteworthy ‘resounding success’).

It also proved pretty much essential to work with long articles, as short ones generate short wordlists in which many words only occur twice and you simply cannot discern useful patterns of lexical behaviour from only 2 concordance lines. I suggested my students change the ‘minimum frequency’ setting to 5, but even this was often too low to generate any data of interest, and if used on a short article it can easily return an empty wordlist.

I probably should have done more homework and tested a wide number of articles before assuming the tool would work on most texts.  It so happened that the sample text I processed from the Guardian generated some interesting collocational information, and I assumed that that would always/generally be the case.  The padlet wall below shows my post with instructions to students for the text analysis task we did in class along with a word doc upload in which I highlighted useful collocations identified.  I intended them to follow this template.  We experimented first in class and then I asked them to do something similar at home and post their work on padlet. As you can see, results were very mixed and some students were evidently unsure exactly what they were meant to be doing (though some of the posts were from students who had been absent at the hands-on session). Only one student (Monica) understood fully what to do.

This experience shows that this tool in particular needs to be introduced by degrees and used several times in class for students to see the point and get a feel for it, and the above caveats all need to be borne in mind.

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Just to show you what we are up against in our short non-credit generating courses in which there is no penalty for not doing homework/coursework (though of course we highly recommend our students do), here is a Google Doc I shared with a group of EAP writing students. Only 5/15 students completed the task (to write an argumentative essay, and read and comment on others' essays), and some of those did it a little half-heartedly.  Designing tasks that will prove irresistible to busy students attending non-compulsory courses that they are not evaluated on is not easy!

PS for some reason I can't get Google Docs to show the comments in the below doc.  Have tried all sharing settings ('anyone with link can view/edit/comment') but get same result... Not sure why that is.

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Essay Writing Assignment-C1 Academic Writing

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This TedEd lesson tied in with a focus on job descriptions, job interviews, qualifications and describing skills, roles and personal strengths in a course for university administrators. Anything psychology related seems to go down well with most groups of students and generates a lot of conversation.  All of the students completed the multiple choice comprehension exercises but they didn’t all take the time to comment in the discussion space.  They did the activity at home.  We then continued the discussion in class and watched the video again, with subtitles, and extracted and recycled useful vocabulary and collocations (to find someone out, a nagging doubt, to shake a feeling, to share a concern, unwarranted sense of insecurity, highly skilled/accomplished….) which proved very productive. The following lesson some students found ways to reuse some of these collocations unprompted by me and in appropriate contexts.

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Take this test by Pauline Rose Clance, the psychologist behind imposter syndrome, to see if you have any imposter characteristics or experiences. If you find that you do, then know you're not alone. Take a look at this video of women sharing their experiences of overcoming imposter syndrome in their careers.

Check out this TED Talk by imposter syndrome expert Valerie Young for helpful tips on how to overcome it.

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What is imposter syndrome and how can you combat it? - Elizabeth Cox

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Even after writing eleven books and winning several awards, Maya Angelou couldn't escape the doubt that she hadn't earned her accomplishments. This feeling of fraudulence is extremely common. Why can't so many of us shake feelings that our ideas and skills aren't worthy of others' attention?