To Blog or not to Blog!

Hello! We are currently running a 2 week Effective Use of Technology in Teaching course here at Anglolang and have been discussing blogs. 

• What is a blog?

• Have you ever read a blog?

• Have you ever contributed to or kept a blog?

• Is it something you could use with your students?

• How time consuming is it going to be?

• Who'll be able to see my / the students' posts?

I have created this post so that the course participants can see what a living and breathing (!!) blog looks like and provide them (and you!) with the opportunity to contribute. 

So, feel free ... what are your thoughts / experiences of life in the blogosphere? All contributions, positive or otherwise, are welcomed :)

Getting ‘techy’

Following on from Dan’s ‘techy’ theme last week, I want to talk about my (often limited) approach to technology. As Philip, Head of the Executive Department at Hyland Language Centre, Madrid, will tell you, I am fairly (if not very) incompetent when things go wrong. After 7 years of comments such as ‘Philip, my mouse doesn’t work/is stuck’ or ‘My page has gone big/small/won’t print’, at least that is one part of his job that he no longer has to do! Dan now has to do this job, only now it’s usually ‘Dan, I can’t get the listening to work from the IWB’ or (more than once) ‘Dan, how do I get the video link onto the IWB?’

However, I AM interested in technology and where technology can take teachers. I have been lurking for a while (just looking at other people’s blogs, not commenting and not being brave enough to write my own). Now, I find myself contributing to this blog at Anglolang, which is interesting, challenging and, at times, even a bit scary!

It was Sandy Millin who (inadvertently) got me thinking about this particular post. I saw her interview

at Harrogate 2014 and was interested in her advice about blogging. Firstly, she said that you should write about what interests you and write a blog that you would be interested in reading. So true! The blogs I’ve enjoyed have a chatty style that I like and encourage me to reflect on my teaching without being too academic or difficult to follow. They are blogs I am happy to read on the bus / train home, not too taxing.

Keeping things simple!

Secondly, Sandy talked about staying simple and practical. Again, so true! Of the blogs I have written on this page, the most viewed (by a mile!) was one entitled Getting students to speak, which is the only one with a list of practical classroom activities.

Thirdly (and this is the one I am working on), hone your writing style. At times I think I have been too academic and, more often than not, I am not sure how a blog reads. I always ask Dan to read through what I have written and sometimes find that I haven’t expressed things in the way that I intended.

Starting and contributing to this blog has been interesting both in terms of having a forum on which to share ideas (and sometimes even to talk myself into or out of an idea which may not have been fully formed) and also in terms of the actual mechanics of setting up a blog (all very easy). I am an experienced teacher but this introduction to all things techy has been great for my own professional development.

Something else that Sandy talked about (and this

might have actually been on her blog. I didn’t write down the reference) was the importance of sharing and how her own blog had a huge number of hits after the British Council Teaching EnglishFacebook page shared it.

Anglolang’s  previous blog, which talked about IATEFL 2014 in Harrogate, received 100 times more hits than previous blogs because Sandy shared it on her blog (thank you!).  I think that this was the first time I had really understood the power of sharing and creating networks online. Something I would like to think more about.

Earlier I mentioned the importance of giving practical information in a blog so, in the interests of being practical, here are the sites that I have lurked on most frequently on over the years:

1.    Jamie Keddie -  http://lessonstream.org/ . This site, with its comprehensive lesson plans, has been a lifesaver during many a standby class! Looking forward to the new Videotelling site. http://jamiekeddie.com/project/videotelling/  

2.    Ceri Jones - http://cerij.wordpress.com/.  Ceri was my first DoS in Spain so this seemed like a good place to start. Thanks, Ceri, for lots of reflection in language most of us can understand!

3.     Ditto Sandy Millin. http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/ whose reflections have helped me to understand the possibilities surrounding technology.

4.    Sadly now no longer updated is http://sixthings.net/ .  I liked this because there were only ever 6 things – some were useful things for my classroom but others were just 6 things that made me laugh or random facts that I found interesting.

5.    Russell Stannard’s site http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ which gives step-by-step training videos in various things technological.

I’m sure my thoughts will develop as I get further down the road of becoming more technological. I’d be really interested to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience / similar concerns.

A Brief History of EFL Audio Equipment!

I began teaching English as a Foreign Language in the mid 90s and at that time listening activities were all about cassettes. (I'm not sure what preceded cassettes? 78s?) The first problem with cassettes, or tapes, was the machines that played them.

They looked something like this and came with two volume levels; a) so quiet nobody could hear it or b) so tinny and distorted that the whole machine vibrated and the audio sounded like somebody talking through a comb and paper.
They were also extremely temperamental. The player might randomly decide to jam closed, leaving the cassette marooned behind the smoked perspex, useless. This would ultimately lead to the cover being snapped off, giving the player a kind of stripped back, urban look. 


There was also a one in ten chance that the machine would chew and/or eat the tape and result in the dreaded ... tape mangle.

There was a nifty solution to this dilemma of course ... a good old fashioned pencil. 25 million twists later and voila! the tape is fixed. Crinkly, but fixed.

Next came the problem of queueing the tape up. Endless fun spent fast forwarding and rewinding the tape in a desperate bid to track down the starting point of the listening you needed. Trying to get into the mind of whoever it was who did the tape-to-tape in an effort to understand how Unit 5 appeared to come before Unit 4, while Unit 6 (the one you needed) didn't seem to be there at all. Unless it was on the other side. And all of this as the clock was inexorably ticking towards lesson time. Aaah, what sweet panic!

If you were lucky, your tape player may have had a counter on it so (if you could work out how to use it) you could queue it up more effectively. You may also have been able to access the master tape (rather than a copy of a copy of a copy) and so there was a chance that the quality might have been passable. And perhaps your boss even invested in a machine capable of filling the whole room with sound ...

Boom Box!

However, if your school was anything like mine then the chances of all of these factors coinciding was on a par with spotting Haley's Comet. 

Next, and from outer space, came CDs. Bright and shiny they promised a new beginning, devoid of background hiss. But, in the language classroom at least, they usually failed to live up to the hype.

The first problem was that there was often nothing to play CDs on. Tapes had existed for decades and no school could afford a whole new fleet of CD players.  So the older alternative was often favoured simply because it was what we were used to. CDs gathered dust. In addition, some of the books we exercises and units we treasure(d) were in books long out of print and with no prospect of ever being digitised. The answer lay in the CD / cassette / radio hybrid becoming the norm. 

Another drawback of CDs was that, if anything, they were even harder to queue up than tapes. If you wanted a separate track then that's fine, but if you needed to find a certain point in a track or to go back just a few seconds to listen again, fine motor skills were required. Pressing the button down long enough for it to register but briefly enough to prevent it from leaping too far forward or back was a frustrating art. 

I'm using the past tense here because we've moved on from the hi-fi era here at Anglolang. We spent a long time converting old cherished tapes to CDs and then ripping these CDs to mp3 files. These are now all stored on a central server that can be accessed from any of our classrooms. So no more mangled tapes. And no more cracked CDs. Marvellous!

It would be great to hear about your classroom experiences with audio equipment, or to find out how far down the technology road your school has travelled? Anyone?!

Dan's Favourite Warmer

As a follow up to my ‘throw the ball game’ blog entry, I thought I’d say a few words about my favourite warmer. It’s called (drum roll, please ...) ‘have a chat’.

It’s where I chat. With the students.

You could consider that this isn’t really an activity at all as such but rather just an insignificant start of a lesson. I would beg to differ!

The classroom is often not a place where real English conversation often takes place. We ask our students to do role plays and practise conversations that mirror the outside world but are not actually ‘real’ when they are doing them. 

We create false environments (at the post office, in a job interview, in a meeting etc.) so our students can practise safely within the confines of the classroom in preparation for the outside world. The informal chat that we conduct at the start of a lesson, ‘How are you?’ ‘How was the weekend?’ ‘Is your leg better?!’ etc. is one of the few times that we engage in real conversation. This;

•          Improves student confidence
•          Shows that the teacher cares about the student as an individual
•          Provides an opportunity for the students to improve / brush up their small talk skills
•          Provides an opportunity for the teacher to identify, for example, pronunciation and grammar weaknesses
•          Allows time for late comers to arrive and get settled
•          Is fun!

The irony of this activity is that we often feel compelled to end  the chat and get on with the lesson. ‘I’m not teaching, we must start soon!’ But by cutting the informal conversation short (which by now may be involving more members of the group and becoming increasingly animated) we move away from real communication. 

We then spend the next ten minutes setting up a completely false speaking environment ‘Ok everyone, I want you to imagine that you’re at the airport and you’ve lost your boarding card’ that can be less personalised and potentially less motivating.

I do, of course fully appreciate the need for role plays in the classroom and consider them an integral part of the English language learning process. And I know the conversation won’t always flow and that we shouldn’t force it, but I also believe that time spent ‘chatting’ is not time wasted and that we shouldn’t rush to finish it.

N.B. Students may also potentially feel that chatting is a waste of time and not ‘real learning’ so it might be worth summarising what has taken place before moving on, e.g. ‘Thanks everyone, that’s a great start to the lesson. We’ve already had the chance to practise our speaking and listening skills together and made a note of a few new words too.’

Chat’s all folks! (sorry!)

Dan

Hello & Welcome!

Hello & welcome to the Anglolang blog!

Andrea Sweeney is on the left, our Academic Director and Dan Methven, Head of Online Learning, is on the right. Hi!