Posts Tagged ‘learning’

JALTCALL 2009: Some closing remarks

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

This year’s JALTCALL 2009 was held at Toyo Gakuen University, Hongo Campus, pretty much across the street from the Tokyo Dome. I thought it was one of the better JALTCALLs, in spite of the title of my presentation getting hacked off in the handy daily sheet of events. Let’s work on that one, okay (it happened in the web site submission area last year, too)?

On that note, on to the conference. Even though I arrived early, I skipped the opening ceremony. My presentation was in the opening slot, and I wanted to give the equipment a try-out before things got started. I knew from the presenters’ information that I wouldn’t be able to get the Internet up and running on any computer I took along, so I left my office’s MacBook in the drawer. I put together the most basic of PowerPoint slides, with no designs, colors, or transitions in the hopes that the available PC would run my presentation and the notes I added; no such luck. It was a good thing I printed out a copy of my slides and notes. I also made jpegs of the slides, just in case. It was a small turnout; can I blame the clipped title on the event sheet? If you want more information on my presentation, here you go.

What follows are some random notes from some of the presentations I attended. Any criticisms are meant to be constructive. If they come off as anything but, I’m sorry! This online communication can be challenging, but I find getting this information out can be useful for me and my regular reader. ;-)

After my gig, I saw Robert Chartrand, of Kurume University, talk about the (CALL?) lab he put together using 16 Gb iPod Touches! All the iPods are kept in a locked cabinet and have a berth for storing and charging. Each unit has a number and all the students in each course are assigned a corresponding iPod number for ease of tracking. A variety of realistic materials are used, including movies and music from YouTube. When asked (by me, and I’m paraphrasing ;-) ) we learned the reason for using iPods vs. computers, Robert told us that installing iPods is cheaper and saves a lot of desktop space. Both were big factors since there was a budget limit and the room is relatively small. I think using iPods under these constraints is a good idea, but with batteries scheduled to run out after 2-3 years of heavy use, a budget will be needed to either replace the batteries or iPods.

Next up was Charles Browne talking about vocabulary assessment. Some of the vocabulary information was review for me, but the figures demonstrate that students with low levels of English need to focus on basic vocabulary. These figures bear repeating:
50% of just about any text you read or hear is made up of 100 words.
75% is 1,000 words.
81% is 2,000 words.
95% is 5,000 words.
98% is 8,000 words.

Charles’ research indicates that too many students here in Japan are trying to learn vocabulary at the higher levels, rather than their own proper level. This shotgun approach is leaving too many holes in students’ vocabularies. Charles pointed out that Japanese middle schools are mostly focusing on the first 1,000 words; this is a very good thing. The problems begin in high school where 77% of the vocabulary comes from the first 5,000 level list! This jump is causing frustration in students who often find the task of learning high school English too difficult. Charles and his partner have put together the Word Engine web site to find students’ levels and give them an edge to learning the vocabulary they need. I got a card for a free account, so I hope to be able to review it some day.

Joseph Poulshock and Frank Tuzi talked about the the lack of non-fiction books in the graded reader market. They have put together a number of such texts in a variety of areas at their BeeOasis site. I’m sorry, but that’s about all I have in my notes. This was a broad presentation, but the materials look quite promising.

Paul Daniels, one of the moodle programming gurus in Japan, is working on embedding Flash-based audio in moodle. We often have to use outside materials for collecting our students’ audio projects, so this addition can help us consolidate more of what we do. The requirements are a bit hefty, however, in that some kind of media server is required to deliver the goods. These packages include Adobe Flash Media Server, Wowza Media Server Pro, and Red5 (open source). Since each moodle module using the Flash player needs some or a lot of tweaking to work, the maintenance bar is a bit high for this one. As moodle gets debugged and improved, each of the Flash-enabled modules requires modification. I’ll have to hold off on this one for a bit, but it looks very promising!

They keynote speaker was Mark Warschauer from the University of Irvine who talked about several written text areas: blogs, wikipedia, automated essay scoring with AWE, and text scaffolding software. My notes are a bit scarce here; I just sat back and enjoyed the talk. The focus on written text was not because of any great needs in Japan, it just shows what is currently going on in the U.S. The party after Mark’s talk was one of the better I’ve been to. The food was good and plentiful, and I got a chance to talk with the keynote speaker. It turns out we are both Lakers fans (grats to them!) :-D

Sunday morning started off with Tom Robb talking about embedding videos into CLOZE quizzes to check students’ listening. I missed the first 10 minutes because I got turned around on the way to the site. It turned out to be a very important 10 minutes because I missed the instructions on what to do. I wasn’t able to put together my own set up, but from what I saw, it looks like a good way to add some listening through video to your courses.

Andrew Boon and Colin Skeates talked about using instant text messaging in research development. They demonstrated how live texting by someone in need of help in researching and focusing on their work can be of benefit. The “listener” is able to read and comment in real time. They had some technical problems (no Internet for outside computers, and, as far as I could tell, their tethering system wouldn’t cooperate), so they did it live in the room. I thought it was a clever Plan B, but the length of watching each other type went a bit too far. I think 5 minutes or so of live typing worked well, but after that my mind began to wander. I found myself multitasking and even tweeting about the the presentation and the conference. I think some text and analysis from past IM sessions would have served us much better. Having written that, I had a couple of revelations during the presentation. What they were demonstrating was absolutely brilliant! Not only does the “speaker” get to think out loud, as it were, but the speaker gets a written record of what was discussed. Keeping a record of what was discussed is often a problem for me (see my lack of notes scattered throughout this), so this could be a way to solve it.

Jennifer Rice and Matthew Rooks talked about using the social networking site Ning for creating blogging communities. Ning is one of the more flexible social networking sites I’ve seen, and there are lots of tools for a teacher to put together public or private communities. If you’re not hosting something yourself already, Ning may be an option.

I guess the most surprising presentation was the last one I saw on Sunday. Bill White and Shawn White (no relation we were told; I thought they were twins ;-) ) talked about PortaCALL, using applications from Portable Apps that are pre-configured for particular courses and/or activities. How this works is streamlined applications, designed to be used on USB drives, are bundled together for a course and all the bookmarks and addons are set up beforehand. Students download the package and install them on their USB drives. Doing this allows teachers to work with the tools they are used to and need for their courses. Quite often computer labs do not have much in the way of software and are locked down, preventing the installation of what is missing. I’ll be looking into this one a bit more. Thanks!

All in all a good conference! Thanks to the staff for putting it together. During the party Mark Warschauer said that he was very impressed with how well organized it was and how smoothly it all went. He noted that the U.S. doesn’t have such a focused group of English teachers dedicated to CALL. Wow!

Reading print vs. digitally: Let the debate begin

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Makoto Rich has an interesting article on how reading has changed and is changing. Questions to consider as you read:

  • What, exactly, is reading?
  • Can what you do online, including weaving through hyperlinks and reading comments on what others think, be considered reading?
  • Should traditional tests of reading be updated to reflect what Internet users are doing online?
  • Is more education needed in how to evaluate the veracity of online sources?
  • Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? @ TED

    Thursday, July 10th, 2008

    Do you have kids? Have you ever thought about what they’re (not) learning? Sir Ken Robinson has a few thoughts on the matter. This one is highly recommended whether you have children or not.

    moodle and (Extensive) Reading

    Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

    Are you using moodle with your English students? Do your students read books as a part of their program? If you can answer yes to both of those questions, then I have put together a database module (free registration required) for moodle that allows students to keep track of their reading. You can get it by clicking here.

    Currently, students will need to input their own student ID number, so you can search by student, but there is a fix in the works to have searchable student information added from moodle’s own database. Film at eleven. Thanks go to Tom Robb for giving me lots of helpful advice. :-D

    Book Review: Using Moodle

    Sunday, March 9th, 2008

    Jason Cole and Helen Foster have written the second edition of their book Using Moodle. As I wrote in the first review of this series, if you’re out to get a book on moodle, this might just be the one. While it does not get into the details of installation, it does have a comprehensive overview of moodle version 1.8 and its many components. And, because it is based on a later version of moodle, it details more of its current features.

    Cole and Foster start off with an explanation of what moodle is and the philosophy behind both its software development and its educational design. The book moves on to setting up moodle accounts and courses; then it adds information on adding course content and managing a moodle course. The major modules are discussed, most of these have their own chapters with detailed information on setting them up and creating effective activities. Unlike the Rice volumes, however, Cole and Foster include separate chapters for the assignment, blog, and database modules.

    If I had to choose one out of the three books (obviously I didn’t have to ;-) ), I would get this one. It has a good balance of the basic for new users and solid suggestions for more advanced users to create useful activities. Unfortunately, with last week’s release of 1.9, it’s time for a third edition of Using Moodle.

    Book Review: Moodle Teaching Techniques

    Sunday, March 9th, 2008

    Rice’s Moodle Teaching Techniques is the next logical step for someone who knows his way around the Moodle LMS. While Rice’s first book gives a good overview on getting started with moodle, this book helps users to create many interesting learning activities. The chapters are based on some of Moodle’s included modules. If you’re looking at a blank moodle course page and having trouble figuring out what to do, this book can take you through adding an activity and tweaking the settings to create learning tasks for your students.

    There is a complete run-down of how forums can be used to open up dialogues with individual students or bring students together in relevant course discussions. Chats, extremely processor-intensive in my own experience, can be used to bring a ‘guest speaker’ to a course or help students with course questions. Quizzes can be used for self-assessment of course material or checking learning under timed conditions. Lessons can introduce new content, check understanding, and provide remediation. Wikis can be created and uploaded before class time with course outlines which students can then augment with their own notes, a process Rice calls “guided note taking.” Several other modules are discussed and each one has at least one clever approach to the teaching/learning issue. All in all, this could be a very useful book for someone who needs some ideas for their moodle installation. Check it out.

    Book Review: Moodle

    Sunday, March 9th, 2008

    I’ve been using the learning management system (LMS) moodle since 2003. I’ve created some of my own ways to work with students in blended- or hybrid-course formats, and I’ve been peeking in on presentations at various conferences. Since I started down that road, at least three books on moodle have been written. This post is the first of three reviews.

    Rice’s Moodle from 2006 is a good overview of what moodle is, how you can get it and set it up, and how you can add some useful activities for your students or clients. If you have never used open source software or if you have never set a package up, it can seem a daunting task. One dangerous mistake in the section on setting moodle up is to have your data directory in the moodle directory itself. Doing so opens the data up for others to read and/or alter in some way. The recommended location for this directory is above your public_html directory, so please make careful note of this for your own reference.

    The rest of the book is a fairly thorough run-down of setting up courses of different kinds, adding course content relevant for your courses, creating activities that are appropriate for the types of learning you seek, and accessing user and evaluation data from courses as they progress. The final chapter has an overview of adding modules and plug-ins to enhance moodle’s features; it also runs through some of the essential maintenance tasks that will keep your data safe in cases of trouble or moving on to the next school term.

    Overall, if you have access to this book at a library or on a colleague’s desk, this book will go a long way towards getting you up and running with your own moodle system. Moodle is currently at version 1.9, and the version used in the book is moodle 1.4. The upgrade in features and changes in several moodle components require a major revision in the book. If you need to buy something, you might do better with the Cole and Foster book (review on the way), although this latter volume does not include the installation information of the Rice book. As always, the Moodle Documentation and online help forums may help with any questions you may have along the way.

    Get the Moodle “Buzz”

    Friday, February 29th, 2008

    I have been using the LMS moodle since late 2003. The moodle.org site has a wealth of information and help forums at free support (free registration required). To tell you the truth, the forums and the download area (free, as in beer) are the two places I use most often. Recently I have been exploring the moodle database module for helping my students to keep track of their reading (that will have to be another post).

    In that exploration, I discovered the moodle “buzz” area, which uses moodle’s database module. Go check it out. If you know of some new information or research on moodle, you can add it to the database. In that way, you can keep us up to date with the latest and get a feel for this quite useful module.

    JALTCALL 2007: moodle Remains King of the Open Source LMS

    Thursday, June 7th, 2007

    Since I was away from teaching and researching in Japan for a year, I have missed out on seeing what’s new with the learning management system (LMS) moodle (most tertiary institutions in the U.S. have a commercial LMS like Blackboard already in place; no need for people to look for their own solutions). JALTCALL 2007 was able to fill my moodle jones in a positive way.

    There were three moodle workshops on Saturday and a moodle reader presentation on Sunday, and I’ll try my best to do them justice here. The morning workshop was put together by William (Bill) Burgos of manabu3, a moodle partner. He talked about adding multimedia files to moodle’s quizzes (the quiz function is one of the modules in moodle). Bill described some of the basics for file sizes and manipulation, and recommended some freeware and/or open source applications to help out. He demonstrated uploading multimedia files of various kinds and showed us how to link to them for particular questions in quizzes. He showed a nifty trick by adding a space character so the file is embedded into the question itself. This trick is on my list of things to try out. We were all able to log into a sample course and try some things out for ourselves. We were also provided with a helpful handout and a CD chock full of material. Thanks for the cool workshop, Bill!

    The afternoon session started off with a great workshop on adding to/modifying/tweaking moodle for your own purposes. This was a fast-paced workshop, so my notes (and often the handout) do not include a name for an attribution. At one level, modules can be added, deleted, and modified to suit users’ needs. Some of the modules with an English-teacher-in-Japan background include Hot Potatoes, lecture feedback, project, and self-study. I do not understand why a Hot Potatoes (HP) module has been created. HP restricts users to quizzes which are open to the public only; why bother with this when the moodle quiz module works fine? Paul Daniels talked about his development of several modules. The presentation module allows teachers to convert their PowerPoint presentations to Flash for easy viewing. The media blog module adds voice recording and other media support to the blog modules. He also talked about seating chart and freemail modules. I believe none of these are quite ready for primetime, but they are well on their way. Gordon Bateson then took the floor to show off some of his very, very cool tweaks. How many times have you spent teaching your students to register with moodle using a capital letter for the first letter of both first and last names and ended up with all small case or all large case? Gordon’s cool tweak not only changes it to the proper format, but it also eliminates the long vowels that are unnecessary in romanized Japanese. Gordon got a big oooohhh during the workshop for that one. He also had a tweak for unique cell phone addresses that is a kind of override for moodle’s email address check. To be honest, at this point, my head was spinning from all I had seen in this workshop, and my notes come to an abrupt end. But if you want to see some of this stuff, the workshop materials are available at: http://englishforum.sgu.ac.jp/downloads/jaltcall2007/. I have to conclude this section with a two thumbs up on this presentation, as it was the first that I saw that went far beyond the “moodle has forums, and quizzes, and…” so typical of recent JALTCALL conferences. At the party on Saturday, I put in a request to the JALTCALL powers-that-be to have more of these higher level presentations and workshops. I am always ready to take my skills to the next level. The future indeed looks bright for the moodle platform.

    The final moodle workshop of the day was by Peter Ruthven-Stuart on how to get moodling. We got two handouts on moodle and one for a reading activity, and lots of hands-on time with moodle; my notes are sparse on Peter’s presentation for that reason. The first handout (sorry, I cannot find a link to it) describes in clear detail (without the technical parts) what one should do to get a moodle installation up and running. If you don’t know how to do this, you might want to contact him to get his handout. The second handout walked everyone through logging into a moodle course that was already set up. Peter set up accounts beforehand with user names, passwords (that were the same as the user names), and some fake names. For anyone setting up their own workshop, this seemed to be a great way to do it. Once users logged in, they could change both their fake names and their passwords. I’m guessing these were all created in a text or spreadsheet file and uploaded later. We were then led through some of the many activities that were set up for us: various pre-reading activities for a short article, vocabulary-building activities, quizzes, and many others. All in all, it was a great workshop, jam-packed with lots of hands-on activities.

    On Sunday, Tom Robb, of Kyoto Sangyo University, talked about the development of his moodle reader module. This module, not yet ready for prime time, is designed to help students keep track of what they have read as well as give teachers a way to check students’ progress. Students will be able to use the module to choose the book they read and take a quiz on the book’s content. Students scoring more than 60% will receive credit and be awarded points based on the level of the book. Tom is working with publishers to use the tests that publishers have already created. This module could go a long towards helping students and teachers keep an eye on reading progress.

    Whew! I guess that’s about all I have on moodle for now…

    JALTCALL 2007: Second Life in the Language Classroom

    Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

    The second workshop I chose was by Forrest Nelson who talked about using the virtual world Second Life (SL) for learning languages. We were given an overview of what it is and how it works. We got an idea of the technology necessary to run the simulation, and what to expect in the future. Forrest stressed that the language of the simulation is important to know, and we were quizzed on some of the terms used and the nuances important to know in order to survive and thrive in that huge world.

    Forrest then showed us some of the user-created videos describing SL and talked about some of the famous people and companies using SL for promotion. We learned that even the political parties of France are using SL, not only for promotion, but also to lob virtual rockets at each other. Forrest moved onto buying space and creating such objects as microphones, buildings, and even guitars. He finished up by talking about some of the implications for using SL in the classroom to teach languages and showed us a video he created of a group of students he took on a virtual class. He noted that privacy could be a concern, but that teachers can use SL’s privacy settings and create a space for friends-only.

    SL looks a bit overwhelming and appears to have a steep learning curve. Maybe I’m getting old, but I would need to do a lot more research before I step out there with some students. I hope to see more of what Forrest is doing in the future.