Teacher Learning Cast (TLC), #2: Take Teaching Seriously, But Not Personally

TLC Socials

Piry Herrera

Benjamin L. Stewart

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Making Teaching Personal

• Making teaching personal: How to bring client-led content into your teaching (Tweet; Tweet2; Tweet3)
• Webinar (March 16, 2018): Business English Online Conference (John Hughes, Angela Buckingham, and Rachel Appleby.
• Teaching more than English - giving students the professional skills to succeed
• Flipping your classroom - how to make the most of your teaching time
• Making teaching personal - how to bring client-led content into your teaching

Bringing Context Into The EFL Classroom

• Topic Context – (Broad context about an area of interest)
• Situational context – (where? And why? In which action of life?)
• Explicit Context –  (class simulations)
• Content integrated Context – (Task-based approaches, content integrated learning)

Shared Experiences

• (Benjamin): Academic Writing: Self-Assessment
• (Piry): Receptiveness to feedback: A case of communication interfered by the lack of mood-agreement.

Academic Writing: Self-Assessment

In this fourth-semester class (English language teacher trainers/Spanish L1), I facilitate a group discussion around common writing errors stemming from their first drafts (of a five-paragraph essay).  Trainers were asked to look through their own work and choose if the error type was something they needed to consider or if it was something they already did well.

Common Academic Writing Errors Discussed in Class 

1. Level I heading (APA)
2. Thesis statement: transitional phrase
3. Times New Roman, font size 12
4. Spacing: Double space and equal spacing between headings and paragraphs
5. Avoid
1. To be
2. It is important, it is necessary, it is vital, it is essential, etc.
3. Passive voice with non-referential it
4. Focus more on concepts than the authors
5. Using modals
6. Dictionaries and encyclopedia citations and references
6. APA
1. Last name and year for citations
2. Direct quotes no more than 15%
3. References: capitalization and italics
7. Punctuation
1. Serial comma
2. At least three references and six citations
3. Five to eight sentences in each paragraph
4. Subject-verb agreement: check each (main, subordinating, and relative) clause.

Academic Research Podcast 1 (#arpscholar)

Article

Cooper, G. (2008). Assessing international learning experiences: A multi-institutional collaboration. Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 88(1), 8.

Problem

Implicit: relying on standardized testing or one-shot assessment practices that lack a broader understanding of a learners knowledge, skills, and attitudes/dispositions.

Purpose

To apply learning outcomes and assessment rubrics to international learning experiences.

Method

Participants

Undergraduate students from various disciplines that included six different participating institutions: Michigan State University, Portland State University, Dickinson College, Kalamazoo College, Palo Alto Community College, and Kapi'olani Community College.

Instruments

Eportfolios and an online student survey (i.e., Student Portfolio Information Form (SPIF)) was used in this study. The survey included both demographic information as well as information related to eportfolios.

Procedure

Data collection: Students (participants) included a variety of artifacts to be included in each respective learner eportfolio.

Analysis: Assessment rubrics were used to evaluate knowledge, skills, and attitudes of learners using the following scale: inadequate, minimal, moderate, and extensive. Knowledge, skills, and attitudes were then cross-referenced based on subjects, experiences, backgrounds, and fields of study.  A cross-tabulation of data approach was applied.

Results and Discussion

Thirty out of forty students (or 75%) who studied abroad scored extensive on the specified criteria while only fifteen out of sixty students (or 25%) who did not study abroad scored extensive. Possible conclusion: students who study abroad have higher scores in recognizing the importance and validity of others' perspectives.

Conclusions

• Method and purpose for others to adapt study to local contexts (strengths)


• Light on theory and results (weakness)

Hashtag: #arpscholar

What are you researching or planning on researching?  Have you conducted a similar study?  Leave your comments below or use the Twitter hashtag, #arpscholar.

Researching OERs and Open Education (#OpenEdMOOC)

Listening to Week 5: Research on OER Impact and Effectiveness gave me pause for several reasons.  What's lacking in the literature that supports OERs and open education more generally is the vast number of ways to

 

chronotopes

 

Considerations for a Content and English Language Learning Course

Next week I will be meeting with educators about what to consider when planning and implementing a content and English langauge learning course at the university level.

Connective Challenges for the Creative Curator

I present 30 connective challenges for the creative curator (aka educator).

 

1. Educational philosophy: Develop an educational philosophy that best represents your outlook both as an educator and learner. Publish your educational philosophy online.


2. Determine or fine tune your personal learning network (PLN): Find individuals who you wish to follow, and reflect on why you chose them.  Allow yourself to drop them and pickup others over time.  People who you choose to follow are those who contribute most to your own personal learning.


3. Information and communication technology (ICTs): Find the social networking software that allows you to aggregate information from your PLN in a way that is most useful for you.

Purpose statement

Talking with Tyson about Teacher PD

Hashtags: #MEXTESOL, TESOL, TEFL, TESL, EAP

https://blab.im/benjamin-l-stewart-teacher-pd-chat-ffsi0a

Yesterday, I read Klein's (April 8, 2014), Longtime Substitute Teacher Leaves Job After Being Told To Unfriend Students on Facebook, and didn't think much of it

ççYesterday, I read Klein's (April 8, 2014), Longtime Substitute eacher Leave

Longtime Substitute Teacher Leaves Job After Being Told To Unfriend Students On Facebook

 

Teacher Learning Cast #1: Getting Started

TLC Socials

Piry Herrera

Benjamin L. Stewart

Facebook | Twitter #tlcelt | YouTube Playlist

Creative Commons

• About CC Licenses 
• List of licenses, icons, element, and types
• Example of embedding Creative Commons badge in website
• Four elements of Creative Commons
• Attribution
• Non-derivative
• Non-commercial
• ShareAlike

ICTs as a Tool to speed up Processes in Education

General overview of how the incursion of ICTs speed up communication processes in Educational Tasks. (focusing on TLC as an example) (UNESCO)

The Sharing of Weekly Experiences

• Combined Strategies in a presentation for a large class
• Creative Commons and ePortfolios

Anatomy of Creative Commons

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHbJMgPx6iI]

 

Three layers of Creative Commons

Legal Code

Each license begins as a traditional legal tool, in the kind of language and text formats that most lawyers know and love.  This is called the Legal Code layer of each license.

Human Readable Deed

Since most content creators are not lawyers, we also make the licenses available in a format that normal people can read - the Commons Deed (also known as the "human readable" version of the license). The Commons Deed is a handy reference for licensors and licensees, summarizing and expressing some of the most important terms and conditions.  The Commons Deed itself is not a license, but rather a user-friendly interface for communicating a particular license.

Machine Readable Metadata

The final layer of the license design recognizes that software, from search engines to office productivity to music editing, plays an enormous role in the creation, copying, discover, and distribution of works.  In order to make it easy for the Web to know when a work is available under a Creative Commons license, we provide a "machine readable" version of the license - a summary of the key freedoms and obligations written into a format that software system, search engines, and other kinds of technology can understand.

Four Elements of Creative Commons

 

Six Types of Creative Commons Licenses

 



 

Creative Commons Options: Non-Commercial & ShareAlike

Should I use choose a Creative Commons, non-commercial license option when sharing content with others?

When choosing to create and share content licensed under non-commercial Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC), the user (i.e., the licensee) allows others to copy, distribute, display, perform, and (unless NoDerivatives is used) modify and use work for any purpose other can commercially unless the licensee gets permission (from the licensor) first.  However, there are a few details one should consider in order to know whether this is the best Creative Commons option when (re)licensing content.

Non-commercial depends on how the content is being used and not on the licensee

Regardless whether a business is not for profit or for profit (assuming the business has issued the Creative Commons license), deciding on a non-commercial Creative Commons license will mean that the user (the individual) is not profiting from the content.  

Defining exactly the type of content covered as non-commercial

Currently, digital file sharing is the only type of use explicitly stated to be noncommerciial (Creative Commons, 2013).  Also, it can get complicated when determining what kind of situation constitutes a commercial/non-commercial circumstance: incentives, YouTube ads, favors, transportation costs, gifts, etc.

The attractiveness of the term, Non-commercial

Many licensors will immediately be drawn to a non-commercial license even though it is not the most open/free license available (e.g., CC-BY).  Creative Commons licenses rank from the most open to the least, so although non-commercial sounds good, it is not sustainable in and of itself. One can argue that non-commercial provides more protection on the part of the licensee or user, but the argument goes the more open and flexible a license is, the more individuals will benefit overall.

Should I use choose a Creative Commons, ShareAlike option when sharing content with others?

Choose a Creative Commons ShareAlike option when you want to make sure that the licensee(s) continue to respect the same type of license - CC-BY - down the line.  Like the attractiveness of the term, non-commercial, ShareAlike sounds appealing because it gives the impression that by forcing others to maintain the commercial option, that the creation of content will remain more sustainable.  However, a ShareAlike automatically restricts the degree a license may remain open.  For instance, a CC-BY-SA is less open than a CC-BY, and thus may restrict its use.

Choose wisely when deciding between commercial and non-commercial and sharealike options by thinking about the sustainability factor of the content being shared. How one makes this decision will depend a lot on an overall philosophy of contributing to the greater good of society.