A Review of National Geographic & Cengage Learning English with TED Talks App

I've used TED Talks in my English language classes for years, yet I've struggled finding ways to ensure that they are accessible to students. Often the high vocabulary load and rapid speech of the speakers presents challenges to English language learners. 

National Geographic Learning and Cengage recently released a Learn English with TED Talks application that attempts to address some of these language challenges so that learners can access TED Talks and instructors can find it easier to integrate into their language courses. I worked with the my regional Nat Geo/Cengage publishing rep while teaching at Oregon State University in spring of 2018 to demo the app in an academic listening and speaking course. 

Some of the features about the app I have found useful for my classes are the following:

• TED Talks are categorized according to Pre-intermediate, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and Advanced.
• Vocabulary, grammar and speaking activities are integrated into each TED Talk. 
• There both pre-, during and post-TED Talk activities. 
• Instructor resources that can be used to help integrate the TED Talks into classroom instruction. 

Integrating the Learn English with TED Talks Application into the Classroom

While there are available instructor resources to integrate the TED Talks app into the classroom, I've primarily used to the app as an outside of class listening and note-taking resource with my students. Typically, international students struggle with in-class discussion with their native English speaking peers, so I'm continuing to try and find ways to level the playing field by getting them to engage in more authentic academic discussions. I find that by combing explicit discussion instruction with the TED Talks app to be an effective approach in preparing students for college-level academic discussions. 

One way I do that is by focusing on different discussion and conversation strategies in the classroom, such as naming explicit talk moves. I will assign students a weekend homework task of choosing a TED Talk from the app and summarizing it using a listening log form. Their notes become their talking points for their listening log sharing circles, which I schedule at the beginning of the first class of every week of instruction. During these discussions students are the experts on their topic, and they typically find it motivating to share the rich content of the TED Talks with their classmates. As students are engaging in their discussions, I walk around the room and monitor them, taking note of positive academic discussion strategies being used. When students are finished, I highlight the conversational talk moves and strategies that I noticed students using during their TED Talk sharing circles. Over the course of the semester I've noticed students' ability to add onto a point of a classmate, ask probing questions or extend the discussion increase significantly. 

This semester I will be experimenting with the app in two of my listening and speaking courses at Saint Louis University. I will be sharing the results of this along with the listening log forms at the MIDTESOL 2018 Conference in Kansas City, MO later this month. 

Using Edmodo in the ELT Classroom

The school I was most recently teaching at was integrating the learning platform Edmodo for all classes, so I spent some time trying to get up to speed with it. In this blog post I share ideas and links that I have found useful and my thoughts on this community building platform.

The attraction of Edmodo for me is that, as a platform, it resembles facebook and other social networking sites. There are educational apps that can integrated with different lessons. The security of Edmodo enables you to control the privacy settings so that you can create a safe and secure environment for students. Edmodo also has attractive features for For K-12 teachers. A teacher is able to give parents access to the classroom group, which ensures that parents are part of the learning process and can track their child's learning progress in class. This helps ensure accountability and can provide something that parents and teachers can discuss together during conferences.

You can create quizzes through Edmodo. It allows for multiple choice questions, T/F and short answer questions. This allows for a quick way to conduct formative assessments.

One of the drawbacks with Edmodo is that it does not allow for weighting of assignments. And because Edmodo gives students grades based on the assignments and quizzes that are uploaded, the grade on the site may not reflect what student's actual grade should be. That being said, teachers could decide to use Edmodo for homework assignments and quizzes if they decide to combine these scores for an overall grade category.

What I did enjoy about using this platform was that I was able to post to my students and after a short time my students felt comfortable contacting me through this platform. This was very helpful for posting updates about assignments or addressing questions to the class and continuing conversations beyond the classroom. As many of my students were not used to emailing, this seemed like a better medium for communication. I also liked that I could leave comments on students assignments to go with the grade. For writing assignments, Edmodo also allows for annotation and highlighting. This could save teachers time, especially if they were looking for an alternative to having an alternative to students emailing assignments to them and using a program such as Microsoft tracked changes in Word.

I did find that it was hard to keep students engaged and to respond on the site as my course progressed. I feel that if I were to use this site in the future, it would be more beneficial to have a number of activities and example quizzes created that could be adapted to my course. 

Blog on Hiatus

I wanted to let people know that my blog will be on hiatus for a while. I hope to return to blogging about technology and teaching soon.

iTalki Site Review

italki was reviewed by Turkan, Quanya and Randy. 

italki is a language learning social network site. One of the distinguishing features of this site is how it links professional teachers or informal tutors with learners of a particular language. Professional teachers are expected to conduct courses similar to classroom-based language classes and are paid for their service. The method of payment is through the italki credits. It is worth pointing out that iTalki takes 15% commission on the money earned by teachers. The classes are offered online through Skype and must be arranged to fit to the instructor's schedule. Informal tutors are "near-native speakers" in the target language. Both of these teaching roles require an online application.

There is also a language partners section of the site where you can link up with speakers of the language and practice the language. You can view the participants levels in the language, which helps you make decisions about your choice in language partner. Once your are language partners, then you follow one another to respond to messages.

In addition to Skype, site participants also interact through the "notebook," "answers," and "discussions" tabs where you can read posts by users from a specific language group. This way you can see the types of questions and comments that have been posted by users. This seems to be the asynchronous section of the site.

In general there seems to be a lack of professional teachers featured on the site. We looked at Turkish teachers and found only one professional teacher. What is nice about the message boards is that it seems users are fairly responsive in making corrections to postings in a timely manner.

WK 13: Computer Based Testing

This past week we covered the topic of computers and language testing. There were a number of benefits and drawbacks that we discussed. In this blog post I highlight some of those.

An advantage for using computer based testing relates to practicality. It is saves on time and resources when a computer delivers the directions for the exam and the questions. Scoring is also a much more efficient process on the computer. Another advantage mentioned in the DuBravac (2013) chapter was that test items can be enhanced in online formats.Animation, video, audio, and pull-down menus can all be used to enhance more traditional types of testing items.It was also been discussed that computer rating systems are more reliable than human raters because the issue of rater bias is not a factor.

Despite these advantages, there are a number of unresolved aspects of computer based testing that make implementation questionable. For starters, automated scoring programs such as ETS Criterion can only assess certain aspects of production. In writing, for example, it is difficult to assess more discourse-level organization features than grammatical features using automated scoring. This is one area where I believe using a computer is still not as effective as a human rater. Doug Hesse has recently made a similar argument in an article written for the Washington Post.

Another issue with computer based testing has to do with fairness. A test should be fair and equally accessible to all learners. However, as was brought up in class, even in such a technology savvy age there are still some learners that have little to no experience using computers. So designing tests that rely upon computers could be unfair to these learners. Some learners also have anxiety using technology, so using a computer based test could raise the level of anxiety, which in a high stakes testing situation, is likely to already be at a high level to begin with.

Culture and CALL

This week we focused on the topic of teaching culture with CALL tools. We read Guth & Helm's (2012) chapter, which gave a nice framework for explaining culture and how hard to pin down this concept is. In our class discussions we also talked about  the essentialist and non-essentialist approaches to culture.

I am quite critical of the way in which culture is sometimes taught and thought of in connection with language learning. Dan mentions in his blog post about some of the problems that arise when teachers think they should be teaching culture along with language. My experience is similar to Dan's, as my Chinese language learning experiences often involved learning meaningless dialogues about some aspect of Chinese culture. It seems that teachers feel they can easily teach some traditional practice of their culture as a way to embed culture within language learning. However, I think these approaches often do little to address students' pressing communicative language needs. If I am learning Chinese, for example, how beneficial will learning about Chinese tea serving customs really help me? In general, I think for some teachers sharing something about their own culture is rather self-serving.

Despite of my critical view on teaching culture, I do believe there is a place for some aspects of culture and language learning and the connection to CALL. Kerry Pusey has been looking into teaching different speech acts through the use of sitcom segments via youtube. In discussing aspects of American culture as they relate to the completion or failure of different speech acts, I feel the connection between culture and language is very apparent. To me, this is perhaps one of the most applicable ways to use CALL to teach culture, especially if the speech acts have been identified as ones the learners will need to know to function in the target culture.

Culture Learning Activity (with K. Pusey)

Student level: upper intermediate

L1: mixed

Target culture: American culture

Main features: use Web 2.0 tools to promote culture learn/break essentialist views

Breaking essentialist views of culture

1.     Ask students to write down 1 or 2 stereotypes/images/things they think about when they think of “American culture”

a.     Give examples: guns, fast food, obesity, military, pop music, hamburgers, Budweiser, white people

2.     Have Ss research the topic to break their essentialist view: search for counter-examples of the vie the initially express (fast-food vs. slow food; guns vs. anti-gun control; hamburger vs. vegetarian/vegan; gangs vs. youth advocacy groups; Budweiser vs. non-alcoholic party drinks)

a.     Use 2 different Web 2.0 sources (ex. blogs, podcasts, social media sites, Twitter, search hashtags)

b.     Search the hashtag #gangs on Twitter as an example

c.     Go to Google blogs and search for “_____ blog” as another example

3.     Write a summary of findings and post images from Tumblr or other site

a.     Summary/writing topic: Have Ss write a summary that answers the following questions:

                                               i.     What aspect of American culture did you select?

                                             ii.     Why did you choose this topic?

                                            iii.     What did you find out from reading the blogs and/or listening to the podcasts that was new to you and/or different from what you thought before reading/listening?

4.     Post their findings on course wiki

5.     Report findings in class (next class)