Webinars

Macmillan is sponsoring a series of free webinars, or online seminars, set to start right after IATEFL. All you need to participate are an internet connection and loudspeakers. I've never taken part in a Macmillian webinar, but the way these things generally work is: You must register ahead of time. At the appointed time you then log on to the site with your name and password. You will see the trainer's whiteboard and hear him/her and other participants speak. If you want to say something yourself, you need a microphone. There is usually a "chat", or text messages that everyone can write in and read in real time. This is the schedule:

Wednesdays, 12 am - 12:45 pm German time:
8 April 2009 Pete Sharma "New technology - new pedagogies"
13 May 2009 Lindsay Clandfield "The power of lists"
10 June 2009 Scott Thornbury "Seven things beginning with M"
8 July 2009 Gwyneth Fox "A dictionary at your fingertips"

To register go to Macmillan 2009 interactive webinars

Classroom 2.0: If this sort of thing appeals to you, you can also try out a series of free US webinars at Live Classroom 2.0, which take place every Saturday (12 noon EDT). These webinars are aimed at "newbies". Classroom 2.0 is a social network for teachers on Ning, a social networking site that allows people to create their own special interest social networks. The majority of these teachers are focussed on K-12 schools in the US.

7 March, 6 pm-7pm: "What is Twitter and how can I use it to support my teaching?"

To register go to http://live.classroom20.com

You've heard of YouTube, but...

have you heard of TeacherTube? Most of the videos are aimed at teachers teaching at primary or secondary schools, so useful for teachers of English to young learners, however, some are aimed at teachers working with adults.

Here's one of my favourites

Check the site out!

Many thanks to Andreas Büsing of ELTA-Rhine and now of IATET (The International Association of Technical English Teachers) for sharing this link with me/us.

IATEFL Cardiff Online

Even if you aren't going to Cardiff for the IATEFL conference, which kicks off with pre-conference meetings on 31 March and continues through 4 April, you can follow the proceedings online at http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009. The Special Interest Forums are really worth visiting.

Read along or join in discussions, for instance on Interactive White Boards, which Scott Thornbury argues are useless:

"Yes, don't start me on IWBs! It baffles me why they are called "interactive" - they seem simply to reinforce, and exacerbate, the delivery model of education enshrined in coursebooks."

And Nik Peachey agrees, to a point:

"It's really all about how they are used. Who in their right mind would want to interact with a whiteboard?? Learning, and especially language learning, is about interacting with people. IWBs can help to make that happen, but so much of the way they get used and the content designed for them is unfortunately NOT leading to this."

More: Cardiff Online, IWBs are useless. Discuss.

Posting to a blog

Well, that almost worked out as planned (see below). Aside from getting the two lower images off centre I can say that, as a first-timer, it was really easy posting to this blog! Hopefully this will encourage more of you to give it a go.

Using Wordle

Hi all,

I've taken up John and Anne's call to contribute and help make this a teacher's site by teachers for teachers. This is my first ever entry to a blog so please go easy on me if it doesn't work out quite as planned. Hopefully the ease I have with making this entry will encourage more of you to do the same.

http://www.wordle.net/ is a great online application for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

You can use them to highlight key points from a given topic, such as this one on Presentations:

You can also create "wordles" of phrases by adding " ~ " between each word you input, such as this one for telephoning phrases:

I recently got my students to create their own word clouds on telephoning phrases for homework. Not surprisingly, they all did it!

You can also create a word cloud of an entire website. The higher the frequency of words on the site the larger they will appear in the word cloud. Here's one I just made by inputting the url of this blog:

Once you've created your word cloud, choose the print option and then save it to your computer as a pdf file before printing. This way you'll have the file saved locally and can then email it to your students, print it out or bring it to class on a laptop / USB stick (if you have such facilities to teach with). They're really great fun and really easy to make.

Have fun!

Going Fast On Mobile Web: Web 2.0 Expo

Www.slideshare.net is a website that lets you upload your own Powerpoint presentations to share them with others on the internet, and to download those made by other people. It's a great teaching resource, as you'll see when you browse the categories.

If you are interested in a (long) presentation about the mobile web, i.e. being able to access the Internet via a mobile device, e.g. an iPhone or a Blackberry, you might like to listen to this presentation by Jason Grigsby.

Even if you are not interested in mobile web technology, but think some of your students might be, give them the link to this blog and tell them to listen to a real live presentation about the mobile web by a native speaker who knows lots of geeky words. They might actually appreciate it.

Going Fast on the Mobile Web

View more presentations from grigs.

Thoughts about blogging

Before you ask your students to write online in English as part of an assignment or project, you might want to get some experience yourself. Here are some very general thoughts about blogging that you might find helpful:

1. Read what other bloggers are writing in your field of teaching, in the business fields you provide training to and in fields you're interested in, it will improve your own style and content. Have a look the the Auntie Web blog list - and recommend blogs to us!
   
2. Define your goals: A blog is a product. Who are you writing for and what is your purpose? Your goals can change, but then you must adapt your blog accordingly, or start a new one. As your projects and contracts change, so may your blog.
3. Network with bloggers and become part of an online community.
4. Post links to other sites on your blog; visit and write comments on other people's blogs, interested readers will be able to find your blog by following your link back.
   
5. Market your blog using online listings (e.g technorati.com), social networking sites (e.g. www.xing.com, local sites like www.melta.de) and twitter.com.
6. The trend is: blogs down, microblogging up. KISS.
7. Make your blog beautiful.
8. Serve a niche: Focus wins.
9. Post regularly so your readers know what to expect.
10. Unique content: A blog is subjective and personal.
    
11. Be yourself. Be friendly.
    
12. Mistakes make you human. You and others learn from your mistakes.
    
13. Every email and comment you get on your blog is enormously valuable. Build a readership by responding to your readers.
14. Mistakes by EFL students in their comments on your blog should not be corrected. Public correction in writing is very harsh. You can edit comments discretely and email the student, if you feel that is necessary.
    
15. Don't expect a lot of action on your blog. It's nice if people drop by to see what you're up to and what you have to say, but it's just one part of your overall communications.
    

Here is a very short reading list for using blogs in EFL:
Aaron Patric Campbell
Graham Stanley
Andrew Johnson
Very warmly recommended:
Mark Appleby

Setting up a blog

You're reading one, but what exactly is a "blog"? Lee Lefever explains things nicely in his "The Common Craft Show". Watch:



So what can a blog be for a teacher? A few purposes that come to mind are:

1. A professional journal you write, aimed at colleagues
2. A service blog for your community (like Ask Auntie Web)
3. A teacher's course log you write for your students, posting materials and homework
   
4. A collaborative work space for your students to post their own projects
5. Individual students blogging and communicating using their own favored communication channels, and linking you into their network (Facebook, StudiVZ, twitter...)
   
6. Part of a blended learning course, i.e. your own content linked to exercises and media you set up, along with workspaces for your students
   
7. The news section of your website, with changing content that keeps clients and students coming back.

Basic blogs
The Ask Auntie Web blog was set up for free by going to www.blogger.com. This is a service provided by Google, and it has proved to be very stable. Some of the best writers in EFL use this provider - for example David Crystal, for his DCBlog: http://david-crystal.blogspot.com. We could also have gone to www.wordpress.com for an equally good free provider. This is the provider Lindsey Clandfield uses on Six Things: http://sixthings.net.
A wide variety of templates let you personalize the look of your blog's layout, colors and fonts.
Here is a short tutorial on how to create a blog with Blogger:




The helplink given in the tutorial is http://help.blogger.com. Also feel free to Ask Auntie Web. If you have a question, there are probably dozens of others asking themselves the same thing. Be sure to make a note of the address of your blog and Google account e-mail address and password.

More advanced blogs
You can actually build a website with blog software, including static pages for contact forms and your imprint and so on (i.e. point 7. above). You can do this with WordPress (www.wordpress.org - not www.wordpress.com!) Pete Sharma uses this solution for his Technology for Business English (te4be) blog: http://www.te4be.com/pages/newblog. WordPress.org provides free opensource software, which means that noone is earning money on the programs, which are maintained by a professional community.

Blogspot and WordPress.com automatically provide you with everything a website needs, namely a host server (a computer that can be accessed by anyone on the internet) and a domain (a website address). If you set up with WordPress.org, however, you need to register those things yourself. That involves costs (ca. 10 euros for the domain and a monthly fee of ca. 10 euros for the host) but it gets you a professional website. I've found a very nice video tutorial on how to set one up at www.becomeablogger.com. One of the advantages of using WordPress for your website is that you can make changes to the static pages at any time all by yourself. In short, you don't need to have someone "hardcode", or program once and for all, a website for you anymore. If you ask a professional to set up a website for you, I can only recommend WordPress.

If you decide to start with a basic blog and later want to move on to the more advanced solution, it's no problem to import your old blog posts from Blogspot or WordPress.com into a WordPress.org blog.

A woman's way into technology

It sometimes irks me when women defer to men in matters of technology, because it hits a nerve. For years my husband ran things on my computer. I'm a freelancer working mostly from my home office, and he was all the sys admin I could afford. That put a bit of a strain on our relationship when I couldn't make a deadline because of a technical glitch, but he was tired and had been solving other problems all day. So at some point I simply decided I needed to be able to fix things myself.

I got into teaching distance courses using platforms that other people had set up. Then I took a Moodle course which opened up what things look like in the backend, where the bits and bytes John was talking about live. After that I really wanted to get cracking, so I got professional help setting up my own blog and Moodle platform, learned to work things in the privacy of the internet, and started thinking about what the user really gets out of the online experience. The last really exciting step was to help migrate e-learning magazine content from one system to another.

There is this "wow" factor associated with technology, but like magic tricks, applications can be learned. All you need is a patient mentor or two (!) and the determination and the spirit of wanting to get to the bottom of things. If I can't do it myself, someone on the internet can probably help. And mistakes are there to be fixed. Being a late-bloomer, I feel that if I can do it, anyone (and any woman) can. There's a very nice video interview with Nicky Hockly, director of pedagogy at the Consultancy-E which she co-directs with Gavin Dudeney, where she mentions something quite similar.

The real challenge, truly deserving of the "wow", is the content you put into a tool and how you use it. Nothing beats trying it out. A proven good way into technology, and the one Nicky Hockly says she found most effective, is a blog. So next up you'll find tips here on how to set up your own blog, and what you can use it for. Stay tuned.

Check your Internet connection speed

If you would like to test the speed of your Internet connection, there are a lot of free online speed tests that you can use. My personal favourite is Speedtest.Net.

I first used one of these tests after a friend of mine complained that she'd changed her provider to get a faster connection, but then found it was actually slower than before.

The test I did showed that my connection was also a lot slower than my provider had promised, but after a phone call and an online diagnostics test, they managed to speed things up a bit.

If you are paying for a high-speed DSL connection it's worth checking that you're actually getting what you're paying for.

Bits and bobs and bits and bytes

Bits and bytes do not mean the same thing although many of us seem to think they do; which is not surprising because many an Internet provider tries to make their broadband look faster than it really is by using bits rather than bytes.

Question: So what is the difference?

Answer: I'm afraid that's not easy to say! It depends on whether you are talking about the storage of data, e.g. on a hard disk, or a USB stick or the transfer of data, e.g. uploading or downlaoding files via the Internet.

If you are really interested in knowing exactly what the difference is check out: Byte and bits ,but at the end of the day, all you really need to know is that 8 bits = 1 byte, so one Megabyte is eight times more/faster than a Megabit.

Be careful if you are looking for a new Internet provider! The symbol for byte is an upper-case 'B' and the symbol for bit is a lower-case 'b', so Kb = kilobit and KB = kilobyte.

How much is a bob, John?

That's another very good question, Tom! A bob used to be 12d or twelve pence and there were 20 bob in a quid and twenty-one bob in a guinea.

Can anyone still remember how many ounces there were in a peck - as is Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers?

Actually, it might be best if you spared us from the answer there, even if you know it.

Creating your own crossword puzzles

Crossword puzzles are a great way to recycle new vocabulary and, as you will quickly discover, students usually love doing crosswords.

If you do a search for 'crossword puzzle makers' with Google, you will find there are hundreds of free crossword programs on the www that you can download and use to make your very own crossword puzzles.

I use a program which cost me a few euros, but seems to be able to pack more words in the grid than most of the free software and it also lets you define the size and shape of the grid and type of puzzle you want to make, e.g. a word search, cryptic, clue in box, etc.

I must admit that I got a bit carried away when I downloaded my first crossword program and began using it.

Don't go mad and dish out crossword puzzles for homework every lesson, but don't miss out on a great way to recycle some of the vocabulary you have been teaching.

Turn text upside down

˙ʇı "dılɟ" puɐ lɯʇɥ˙dılɟ/ɯoɔ˙pɐɟʌǝɹ˙ʍʍʍ//:dʇʇɥ pǝllɐɔ ǝʇıs ɐ oʇ oƃ uɐɔ noʎ 'uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ uɹnʇ puɐ unɟ ǝʌɐɥ oʇ ʇuɐʍ noʎ ɟı

Once again the right way around:

If you want to have fun and turn text upside down, you can go to a site called http://www.revfad.com/flip.html and "flip" it. The typeface is not perfect, because it's bottom aligned, but just think of all the fun you could have with it. What is special about this particular tool is that you can also use it in email, in a comment to Ask Auntie Web, in a forum, in your blog, ... in short, pretty much anywhere you can copy and paste text online.

Tweeted by britzel.

Using Outlook's Calendar to 'invite' students

To follow on from Anne's post about arranging meetings using Doodle, let's look at how to send students an invitation for a lesson using Outlook.

I find this function is very useful for some groups and one-to-one students who cancel regularly or where companies have a policy that the have to be more than a certain number of students before the lesson can take place.

First, open Outlook and go to your calendar. If the lesson is already shown in your calendar, double click on it. If it isn't in your calendar you will need to add it by double clicking on the day the lesson will take place and adding the relevant details (Subject, Location, Start time, etc.)

Now click on the 'Invite Attendees' button at the top and add the email addresses of the students you want to 'invite' to the lesson.

When you have finished, click on send.

A copy of the invitation is sent to all the students and they then have three options 1) to accept the invitation, 2) to accept it tentatively and 3) to reject the invitation.

As soon as they click on one of those options, Outlook will send you an email letting you know whether they have time or not and if they accept, the lesson will be added to their calendar.

It's simple, fast and can sometimes saves you from a trip to a group of students who don't have time for a lesson.

Arranging a meeting online

How can you arrange a meeting with your students? Don't send them an email with several suggestions and then work something out from their various responses. Do what the MELTA board does when they want to meet: Go online to www.doodle.com and set up an online survey (Umfrage). Lisa Förster showed us how:

1. Click on "Termin finden", type in a title (eg "English course pub night"), an optional description and your name.
2. Go to the next page and select possible dates.
3. Continue to the next page and type in possible times.
4. Then select "Fertigstellen" to create your survey.
5. On the next page, follow "Link zur Teilnahme" to go to the survey.
6. Highlight the URL in the survey window ( e.g. our sample is http://www.doodle.com/emp6c86a2e5rvv6n) and copy it into an email to send to your students.
7. OR if you have a blog or forum, go to "Einbinden" and copy the code on that page into your blog/forum to create a link like this:
   

You can be the first to respond, like I was in this sample, but the dates will probably suit you as you suggested them. Go ahead and test the links and take part in this "Unfrage" so you see how it works. You can't break anything :)
Any questions or problems? Ask Auntie Web.

YouTube for teaching English

Jamie Keddie has created TEFLclips, a site with free lesson plans for using YouTube videos in TEFL. Geared to very different levels and target groups, he pairs videos with pdf lesson plans and worksheets.

He has also created a nice video on how to download YouTube videos and organize them in your iTunes:



So the site he recommends for conversion is www.savevid.com.

His site is more than "simply" a free resource for the busy teacher. Jamie Keddie is exploring media with this project, and if you study his lessons carefully and try them out yourself, you can learn a great deal about the didactic potential of video. He explains:

"For the language teacher, YouTube may be the single best source of material the classroom has ever seen. The question, “How can we use YouTube in the classroom?” encompasses many others including:

* How can we use moving images in the classroom?
* How can we use audio in the classroom?
* How can we use film in the classroom?
* How can we use art in the classroom?
* How can we use technology in the classroom?
* How can we use music in the classroom?
* How can we use adverts in the classroom?
* How should we use and approach news and current affairs in the classroom?
* How should we approach the subject of the media in the classroom?
* How can we organise class film-making projects?

This website has been set up in order to address some of these questions." TEFLclips: About

Jamie Keddie has just won an ELTon from The British Council for TEFLclips. Visit his website at http://www.jamiekeddie.com. Thank you to Dagmar Taylor for recommending this teacher and his site. Have a look and tell us what you think.
Technical problems with downloads? Ask Auntie Web.

Using symbols

Have you got a German keyboard and find you sometimes have to type a £ or ¥ sign?

If you are using Word or Outlook, you can always click on 'Insert', then the menu point 'Symbol' and scroll through all the characters there until you come to the one you need or you can use ASCII code (an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) which is often much faster if you have to use a special symbol frequently. If you want to use the pound sign, for example, hold down the Alt key and press 156 (or 0163) and, hey presto, the pound symbol should appear: £
You can also assign your own shortcut key to a specific symbol, e.g. Alt + P for the pound symbol. I use Word 2003 and the screen to do that is found under 'Insert' ---> 'Symbol'
Select the symbol you want to create a shortkey for, click on the 'Shortcut Key...' button at the bottom of the screen and then assign a combination of keys to generate the symbol automatically in future. NB.
Do not use a combination of keys that have already been assigned as shortcut keys, e.g. Ctrl + Y (which is normally used to redo or repeat an action).

Stephen Fry on digital natives

Do you ever wonder whether the "digital natives" John was talking about yesterday can write a text message, watch a YouTube video, do their homework on paper, all at the same time, and still be listening to you? I sometimes wonder, but übergeek Stephen Fry seems to think it's no problem. He contributed to a broadcast by Kenan Malik on BBC Radio 4 that asked whether the web is rewiring the brains of young people, and if so, whether we should be worried. A prolific user of twitter himself (http://twitter.com/stephenfry), Stephen Fry has only positive things to say about his own experience. The experts are saying that kids today may not be reading and researching the way older generations did, their attention spans may be shorter, but they can switch quickly between different media and use the huge amounts of information there in new ways. But are they multi-tasking or multi-slacking? Listen to the 28 minute broadcast as a podcast (an mp3 download) and read or print out Stephen Fry's comments here: BBC News.

About two years ago Stephen Fry talked about the potential of the internet for learning in an interview recorded for www.videojug.com, a video sharing site. Did you know that you can download the videos there? It's easy, you just need to register there. Here is Stephen:


Understanding The Internet: Stephen Fry: The Internet

Are you a Web 2.0-er?

Like many MELTA members I belong to the Web 0.0 generation; a generation that grew up before PCs, email and the www had been invented, so I am what some people would call a digital immigrant rather than a digital native or a member of the thumb generation.

People of my generation seem to fall into two categories those who readily embrace new technology and those who think that most gadgets have far too many features nowadays and that mobile phones should be just that, i.e. mobile phones and not come fitted with digital cameras, MP3 players, GPS and Internet access.

I’m not too sure where I fall – probably somewhere between the two. I love my navigation system, can put together an online survey and I moderate an Internet bulletin board, but I don’t need an iPhone or an iPod.

I had already turned 30 when www was invented by the English computer scientist Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, so I guess my nephews and nieces view me as a kind of living dinosaur - even if I am doing my best to evolve.

So what was Web 1.0 and what is Web 2.0?

Basically Web 1.0 refers to the www prior to 2001. Websites were static; readers could not add content or comment. Most of us had slow dial up connections of 50K, so uploading or downloading large files was time consuming and viewing video files impossible.<

Web 2.0 is seen as the second generation of web applications and a move away from static websites to things like blogs, bulletin boards, forums, wikis and social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook where the individual can not only read, but also add content. The introduction of high-speed broadband means that people can not only upload digital photos to their online albums, but also upload and/or view video files on sites like YouTube.

Web 1.0 was a place which was top down; information was published to a site where it could be read. Web 2.0 technology is bottom up allowing anyone with Internet access to add content to it, be it articles, comments, photos or video and sound files.You have probably been a Web 2.0-er for quite some time without even knowing it.

A webbased email account

One of the basic tools you need on the internet is a free online email account that you can access from anywhere. An extra account is also good to have if you want to keep your "regular" email account free of online updates you have subscribed to, like newsletters or forums. Some of the providers you can use are Google Mail http://mail.google.com, GMX Mail http://www.gmx.net and WindowsLive Hotmail http://login.live.com. When you sign up, you can enable POP/IMAP to get those emails pushed from the online server to your email client, viz. Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail or Modzilla Thunderbird, on your home or office computer. However, keeping the online account separate reduces clutter.

When you register for a course in online technology that will take place in a media lab, you should have your online account information handy. The general procedure for using online platforms or tools is to sign up as directed, then pick up your "welcome" email right then and there from your online account server, and then to follow the login instructions. Being able to access your email account online is therefore essential.

Which online account provider do you prefer and recommend, and why? Any problems? Tips?

What is "Ask Auntie Web"?

At MELTA, the Munich English Language Teachers’ Association, there are many teachers who are quite frustrated with new media technology. There it is, you can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it, but you just can’t quite get your hands on it. There are techie blogs out there, sure, Nik Peachey (http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com) is one of the best, but they’re “so high-igh-igh above me”, and it makes a teacher feel awfully old, doesn’t it, to have to trawl through the language and only understand maybe half of it. Well, it's a shame when good teachers with deep knowledge feel like idiots. That is one of the things that we really need to change. Lucy Mellersh built this blog for MELTA about a year ago to go with the tech advice column, Ask Auntie Web, in the MELTA Newsletter. But then MELTA kept it under wraps because we wanted to promote the MELTA Forum (http://www.melta.de/meltaboard/index.php). That forum is a communication platform for MELTA members. Yet we're a big community of teachers out here on the web, with great big questions and a great big pool of knowledge. So here goes a relaunch:

Let’s build Ask Auntie Web into the blog it could be. Let's make it a place to share knowledge. As you know, the most productive part of learning is asking the right questions. What have you always wanted to be able to do in teaching? What applications would you need to make your classes simply brilliant? What tech tricks have you seen somewhere that you'd really like to be able do yourself? Ask Auntie Web, and we can start a discussion.


Photo: George Sled, Panoramio

How it works: You can post comments under each blogpost. Or you can become an author on this blog, and join the writing team. Just send an email to "info (at) melta (dot) de" (this strange spelling is to avoid spam, so translate it to a normal email address). You can also follow the Auntie Web conversation on twitter. You haven't discovered twitter yet? Then read the first blogpost, below.