It feels like a very long time since I last posted, but I see now that it has only been a month. After my brief push to apply to become a Google Innovator I’ve been focused on trying to get caught up with my other work. Some of that work has been trying to encourage others to move over to G Suite for Education (shortened to G Suite for the rest of this blog). To that end I have been trying to get a Faculty Development presentation going at my university, but I have also been working on getting two part-time English teachers interested. I had a two-hour session with one of them and showed him how Google could help him more easily do what he is doing now. The next step is to get him to try new things.
What prompted me to think about this topic is a good friend from my ESL MA program in the U.S. (from 30 years ago) and her husband came to visit us. I had mentioned that I was using Google more and she asked a question that threw me. “What is Google good for?” She didn’t mean it as a “gotcha”—she was asking out of genuine curiosity, but it threw me.
Often my first thought about LMSs like Google Classroom and Moodle is unfortunately that it helps me manage my classes that consist mostly of more than 30 students and up to 50 students. Along with cooperative learning structures I can easily get students into groups and can easily get their tasks to them. It frees me from paper, since everything I do is online. Even if students miss a class (and there are many legitimate reasons for missing) they can check what they missed using Classroom and Google Sites, on which I post weekly summary of what we do in class each week (we only meet once a week).
However, what I think G Suite does let me do is to help them share their ideas as they work through the worksheet I created for my language teaching approach. In the past they did it on paper, but in the past couple weeks I’ve finally come to realize that I can do it all on Google Forms. By doing everything on Google I can observe their interactions at each step as they move from pair work, work in groups of fours, and then go out to interact with other groups. I can also easily collect their ideas since it’s in digital form and can rearrange it in lists, word clouds, and even Quizlet.
I think the focus of my “communication English” course is to help them communicate. They don’t need any more grammar since they have had so much up to college and they also get it in another class anyway. They need chances to interact with each other and with each other’s ideas. G Suite helps me help them do that.
My goal in the future is to find ways to do that better. My students have access only to their smart phones so I need to figure out ways to get beyond the limitations of technological savvy (usually mine about what their various phones can do) and such problems as old versions of software, outdated phones, and dead batteries.
Most importantly, I want to learn how to put G Suite through its paces to help students learn. I will be spending three days in August at the Google Headquarters in Japan with 35 very talented Innovators in training coached by people who really know their stuff and supported by Google staff. Who knows how far I will be able to go?
I didn’t have a very good answer ready for my ESL friend. I’m still working on a good one, but I’m getting there.
Monday, July 22, 2019
Friday, June 7, 2019
Learning from our students
This past week I visited one of our students doing her student teaching at a middle school in Aichi. I teach English, but we help out when there are more students than the arts professors can visit. While I can't speak about art, I can certainly observe students in terms of how they present information and how they interact with students and I feel like I can give some basic advice regarding their experience.
This week I was more impressed with a student's teaching than I have been in a long time. Generally our students don't get a lot of preparation in their education classes. Actually, I'm not sure how much training they get, but they are kind of thrown into the deep end in their student teaching practicum. They observe their teachers at their schools for a week while they work on their official presentation, sometimes with the help of their observing teacher, and sometimes on their own. Then they do their official class under the eyes of their observing teacher, other visiting practicum students, other teachers at the school, and sometimes the principal. Oh, and me, in this case. Sometimes they get really nervous and tense and after they are done and we chat about how they felt they did, I've had students cry, even ones who I felt did well!
This student did many, many things right, in my book, anyway. Although she is a design student, she was asked to teach a morals class. In these classes students learn citizenship and life skills. The assignment this week was to have students learn about the concept of the value of human life. Yes, that difficult! The impetus was a famous Pulitzer Prize winning picture by Kevin Carter of a vulture eyeing a dying starving child in the Sudan. Let me see if I can include a link...
Kevin Carter Prize Winning Photograph
If you follow the link, you will see how powerful it is and might wonder how a teacher might use this with third-year middle school students!
What this young teacher decided to do was rather than just having students read some text and then look at the picture, she asked them to look at the picture first and write why they felt the photographer took the picture. She then asked students to share their ideas individually with the whole and many rose their hands to volunteer! She then had students share in groups (which they got into at lightning speed) and write their group members' ideas on A3 size paper. She then put all the groups' pages on the board and underlined in different colors the three main threads that wove through all three. Finally, she summarized the main point of the lesson, about the value of life and added that she didn't have all the answers but that students should think about their fellow students as real people.
Amazing. First, that she decided to go off away from the book, then that she got students to share ideas, and finally that she was able bring it all together.
After the class I usually get the chance to chat with students one on one, but the principal and vice principal also sat in this time. While we were waiting for her, I shared that I thought she had done a good job of guiding the students, but the principal decided to focus on teacher talk and suggested that she should have given the main point of the lesson first instead of asking students to think first. That was the opposite of what I'd just said, but I didn't disagree. I did write the student afterwards that the principal's advice was valid because the balance of teacher and student talk is always good to consider and besides, as a student, she needs to please her raters.
It did give me a chance to give my spiel that a good teacher, even one with long years of teaching, can benefit from thinking about every lesson and how they might change it if at all. My favorite example is a teacher at the University of Minnesota, one of my alma maters (don't know the Latin plural for that!) where there was an ESL teacher who had an entire file cabinet with each version of the grammar lessons he had taught. Each one was tailor made for a particular group. I always like to say that it seems hard to teach in the beginning and many feel that it will get easier as they get experience, and I say that is true, but that even really experienced teachers are always thinking about how and what they teach. The good ones, anyway.
I even considered using this artwork in my English classes, but the pictures I use are more to elicit lots of easily shared ideas, but this kind of picture is too powerful for that. What I did come away with was a sense of hope that there are future teachers out there who can draw outside the lines, so to speak. I like it when that happens!
This week I was more impressed with a student's teaching than I have been in a long time. Generally our students don't get a lot of preparation in their education classes. Actually, I'm not sure how much training they get, but they are kind of thrown into the deep end in their student teaching practicum. They observe their teachers at their schools for a week while they work on their official presentation, sometimes with the help of their observing teacher, and sometimes on their own. Then they do their official class under the eyes of their observing teacher, other visiting practicum students, other teachers at the school, and sometimes the principal. Oh, and me, in this case. Sometimes they get really nervous and tense and after they are done and we chat about how they felt they did, I've had students cry, even ones who I felt did well!
This student did many, many things right, in my book, anyway. Although she is a design student, she was asked to teach a morals class. In these classes students learn citizenship and life skills. The assignment this week was to have students learn about the concept of the value of human life. Yes, that difficult! The impetus was a famous Pulitzer Prize winning picture by Kevin Carter of a vulture eyeing a dying starving child in the Sudan. Let me see if I can include a link...
Kevin Carter Prize Winning Photograph
If you follow the link, you will see how powerful it is and might wonder how a teacher might use this with third-year middle school students!
What this young teacher decided to do was rather than just having students read some text and then look at the picture, she asked them to look at the picture first and write why they felt the photographer took the picture. She then asked students to share their ideas individually with the whole and many rose their hands to volunteer! She then had students share in groups (which they got into at lightning speed) and write their group members' ideas on A3 size paper. She then put all the groups' pages on the board and underlined in different colors the three main threads that wove through all three. Finally, she summarized the main point of the lesson, about the value of life and added that she didn't have all the answers but that students should think about their fellow students as real people.
Amazing. First, that she decided to go off away from the book, then that she got students to share ideas, and finally that she was able bring it all together.
After the class I usually get the chance to chat with students one on one, but the principal and vice principal also sat in this time. While we were waiting for her, I shared that I thought she had done a good job of guiding the students, but the principal decided to focus on teacher talk and suggested that she should have given the main point of the lesson first instead of asking students to think first. That was the opposite of what I'd just said, but I didn't disagree. I did write the student afterwards that the principal's advice was valid because the balance of teacher and student talk is always good to consider and besides, as a student, she needs to please her raters.
It did give me a chance to give my spiel that a good teacher, even one with long years of teaching, can benefit from thinking about every lesson and how they might change it if at all. My favorite example is a teacher at the University of Minnesota, one of my alma maters (don't know the Latin plural for that!) where there was an ESL teacher who had an entire file cabinet with each version of the grammar lessons he had taught. Each one was tailor made for a particular group. I always like to say that it seems hard to teach in the beginning and many feel that it will get easier as they get experience, and I say that is true, but that even really experienced teachers are always thinking about how and what they teach. The good ones, anyway.
I even considered using this artwork in my English classes, but the pictures I use are more to elicit lots of easily shared ideas, but this kind of picture is too powerful for that. What I did come away with was a sense of hope that there are future teachers out there who can draw outside the lines, so to speak. I like it when that happens!
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Success with VTS
I want to write more about my use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with my English students at Nagoya University of the Arts and elsewhere. VTS is an approach to teaching critical thinking skills using visual images that was developed by Abigail Housen at Harvard and Philip Yenawine at MOMA to help museum visitors get more out of their viewing experience. The approach has been expanded and adapted to teach many subjects at many levels, including me.
I was coteaching a course called "Art Through English and English Through Art" with Professor Chimako Maeda at Nagoya University of the Arts and she told me about VTS. I was immediately hooked. In VTS students answer three questions about an artwork, "What's going on in this picture?," "What do you see that makes you say that?," and "What more can we find?" The VTS facilitator doesn't give his or her opinion regarding the artwork at all and doesn't even provide students with feedback regarding their observations. Instead, the facilitator paraphrases students' comments and tries to find links between their ideas. Language teachers will see the attraction!
My background is cooperative learning, so I adapted a pair-share-compare activity in which students in a four-member group share their own observations with a partner, then share their partner's observations with the other two students in the group, and then each student in the group of four goes off to meet with a representative from another group. In a class of 20 this means that every student hears every idea. Having to report their partner's and their group's ideas means they have to listen, understand, and repeat what they hear several times.
In my dissertation I also write about how Paul Nation's Four Skills Approach and his and Stuart Webb's Technique Feature Analysis fit in to my adaption of VTS, but maybe I'll leave that and more details about other tasks I have students do (word clouds, for example) for later. I will also share my progression from the worksheet I used in my research to the one I'm using now, and will finish with the one I will probably end up with. My topic this time is about success with VTS!
Today we are in the 7th week of our semester and students have been practicing my adapted approach since the beginning of the semester. Today it was very gratifying that students in both of my classes were making an effort to share their ideas. Most of them had submitted their ideas ahead of time using Google Classroom, and they all understand that they have to write keywords rather than whole sentences (I want them to remember and process--not just read) both for their own ideas and for the ideas they hear, and while some "cheat" by writing out longer sentences and even peeking at their smart phones (I actually make a list of all of their ideas available sorted by ID number, so I'm a bit of an enabler), most of them made a good effort today.
Todays topic was from the weekly Visual Thinking Strategies page on the New York Times. The NYT posts a picture from the newspaper and ask students around the world to answer the VTS questions, and a representative from VTS moderates the ideas. The image I used this time was from May 1st, 2017.
VTS NYT 5/1/2017
Today's vocabulary included words like celebration, ritual, punishment, adorned(!), decorated, flowers, costume, and more. And, as always, there were some observations I had never heard before, this time one student observed that she was interested in the woman's expression, but she wasn't sure whether the woman was happy or sad or enjoying the experience. Pretty perceptive! One group in the 3rd period started giggling and I walked over to see why. It wasn't anything bad--they were just having a good time sharing their ideas.
Anyway, a long blog. My main take away is people love sharing their ideas and having others listen, react, and share them with others, and that includes "quiet" Japanese students.
I was coteaching a course called "Art Through English and English Through Art" with Professor Chimako Maeda at Nagoya University of the Arts and she told me about VTS. I was immediately hooked. In VTS students answer three questions about an artwork, "What's going on in this picture?," "What do you see that makes you say that?," and "What more can we find?" The VTS facilitator doesn't give his or her opinion regarding the artwork at all and doesn't even provide students with feedback regarding their observations. Instead, the facilitator paraphrases students' comments and tries to find links between their ideas. Language teachers will see the attraction!
My background is cooperative learning, so I adapted a pair-share-compare activity in which students in a four-member group share their own observations with a partner, then share their partner's observations with the other two students in the group, and then each student in the group of four goes off to meet with a representative from another group. In a class of 20 this means that every student hears every idea. Having to report their partner's and their group's ideas means they have to listen, understand, and repeat what they hear several times.
In my dissertation I also write about how Paul Nation's Four Skills Approach and his and Stuart Webb's Technique Feature Analysis fit in to my adaption of VTS, but maybe I'll leave that and more details about other tasks I have students do (word clouds, for example) for later. I will also share my progression from the worksheet I used in my research to the one I'm using now, and will finish with the one I will probably end up with. My topic this time is about success with VTS!
Today we are in the 7th week of our semester and students have been practicing my adapted approach since the beginning of the semester. Today it was very gratifying that students in both of my classes were making an effort to share their ideas. Most of them had submitted their ideas ahead of time using Google Classroom, and they all understand that they have to write keywords rather than whole sentences (I want them to remember and process--not just read) both for their own ideas and for the ideas they hear, and while some "cheat" by writing out longer sentences and even peeking at their smart phones (I actually make a list of all of their ideas available sorted by ID number, so I'm a bit of an enabler), most of them made a good effort today.
Todays topic was from the weekly Visual Thinking Strategies page on the New York Times. The NYT posts a picture from the newspaper and ask students around the world to answer the VTS questions, and a representative from VTS moderates the ideas. The image I used this time was from May 1st, 2017.
VTS NYT 5/1/2017
Today's vocabulary included words like celebration, ritual, punishment, adorned(!), decorated, flowers, costume, and more. And, as always, there were some observations I had never heard before, this time one student observed that she was interested in the woman's expression, but she wasn't sure whether the woman was happy or sad or enjoying the experience. Pretty perceptive! One group in the 3rd period started giggling and I walked over to see why. It wasn't anything bad--they were just having a good time sharing their ideas.
Anyway, a long blog. My main take away is people love sharing their ideas and having others listen, react, and share them with others, and that includes "quiet" Japanese students.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
ETiC
Welcome to ETiCally Speaking. I've experimented with blogs before to try them out, but never really saw a need for one. However, as I studied for the Google Educator Level 1 and 2 tests and started preparing to apply to become Google Innovator I started posting to Twitter regularly for the first time and came to realize that it's nice to be able to write longer, perhaps slightly more coherent texts than those allowed in Twitter, and it also offers me a venue and a more specialized audience outside of Facebook. Another inspiration for blogging was the blogs I've been reading by Adam Hill and others. I may never achieve their level of quality, but it is a good professional goal, and those are always good to have.
Therefore, this blog will be where I write about my positive and negative experiences using Google Suite and other applications in my classroom. However, since technology and teaching are never very far apart for me, I will also write about my teaching.
Finally a little bit about the name for the blog, ETiCally Speaking. Many years ago I ran a forum called ETiC on the English side of NiftyServe (OK, many, many years ago). They had a very active Japanese side and were testing the waters on the English side. Eventually with the advent of the WWW both sides fell away.
ETiC stood for English Teachers in Conference, and it was a place for 10 to 15 teachers mainly to chat online once a week. We had visitors from Kanazawa, Tokyo, and Fukui and had lots of fun. I tried to use ETIC as the name for this blog, but someone has already taken it, even though it's dormant. ETiCally Speaking has a couple nice elements to it. ETiC sounds like "ethic" but also etic and emic refer to whether one has inside or outside status in a group. Having lived in Japan for 30 years I have a sense of both emic and etic, depending on the context.
So, hello Blogging world! I'm looking forward to learning with you!
Therefore, this blog will be where I write about my positive and negative experiences using Google Suite and other applications in my classroom. However, since technology and teaching are never very far apart for me, I will also write about my teaching.
Finally a little bit about the name for the blog, ETiCally Speaking. Many years ago I ran a forum called ETiC on the English side of NiftyServe (OK, many, many years ago). They had a very active Japanese side and were testing the waters on the English side. Eventually with the advent of the WWW both sides fell away.
ETiC stood for English Teachers in Conference, and it was a place for 10 to 15 teachers mainly to chat online once a week. We had visitors from Kanazawa, Tokyo, and Fukui and had lots of fun. I tried to use ETIC as the name for this blog, but someone has already taken it, even though it's dormant. ETiCally Speaking has a couple nice elements to it. ETiC sounds like "ethic" but also etic and emic refer to whether one has inside or outside status in a group. Having lived in Japan for 30 years I have a sense of both emic and etic, depending on the context.
So, hello Blogging world! I'm looking forward to learning with you!
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