TESOL 2012 Presentation

If you are looking for my TESOL Presentation on using iPads and iPods in the classroom, please see my links page.

What worked today...what didn't.

"Mrs. Bowman, you are my people!" That's what one of my students said to me today when I tried to redirect him to question the people in his group instead of me by saying, "I don't know, buddy. I'm not in your group. Ask your people." There comes a really cool point in every school year when the language of many of my students has developed to the point that they can be intentionally funny. Love it. The other day, I asked someone to do something, and another student chimed in, "Me, too!", and a third chimed in, "Me, three!" And the whole class laughed. How cool is that?

After having read Walqui's book, I have started to think more about how to develop group interaction in the tasks I design for the class and how to mix in content instruction with language accuracy and language fluency. I also want to do my best to draw on all four skills during every class day in a very intentional way.

Some things that worked really well today:

Reinforcement of the content vocabulary: Students started studying the content vocabulary words (precipitation, evaporation, condensation, etc.) yesterday. I was surprised when even my strongest students weren't able to pronounce the vocabulary in any recognizable way. Hmmmm. So what worked? I found a song on the water cycle on a video, and I printed out the lyrics for the tune with the exception of the content words. I left those as blanks in the work, and the students listened on their individual computers.  The fact that it was a song made it easy for the students to sing along, and by the end of the activity, I had nearly perfect pronunciation of all the vocabulary words. Not so original, but it worked today.

Here's the water cycle song. It's not on youtube. That would go in the list of things that didn't work well today. YouTube wasn't working at school this morning, so I needed to find the video elsewhere. Slight panic.

Reinforcement of pronunciation: Found this app, Songify on Daniel Bemiss' blog. After the kids did the listening exercise (and singing exercise, really...wish I could have caught the off-key singing. Nothing is better than off-key singing in a room full of kids wearing headphones), they hopped on the iPads. This app allows users to read up to sixty seconds of text, and it converts it to a rap/r&b/"I'm so not cool that I don't even know the style of music" song. So the students got to listen to themselves reading the first stanza of the song from the video into their iPads. Pretty darn cool. (Free app, too!)

Production of academic language: In our afternoon task, I put the key vocabulary from the unit on the boards around the room. In their small groups, students were directed to write three sentences on the board that were related to the content vocabulary. They were supposed to produce something original. Then we rotated through and each group had to work on the next board. Below is a picture of what the three groups produced on one board:

Cool stuff about this activity? No notes. So the kids did all the negotiating in oral English to produce these sentences. No teacher intervention. There's some serious content vocabulary happening here! My favorite thing is the thinking beyond the class-delivered definitions. Gotta love the sentence about the bicycle!

One thing that didn't work well today:

Grouping: It's important to be intentional in grouping, and the groups I put together for the afternoon didn't work as I wanted them to. One had a funky boy/girl dynamic going on. And another had a girl who seemed to have the marker in my hand every time I turned around. Must remember to front-load activities with a little bit of a caveat to ensure everyone writes.

Next up: CLIMBS day 4 tomorrow. Version 3.0. Every time we run this workshop, we run it differently. Same content, different methods. I'm kind of fired up about tomorrow.

iPod Dictations--a twist on an old favorite

Whenever I've done dictations with classes in the past, I've always had to say a hundred times, "I'm only going to say the sentence twice. Two times. I promise, I'll repeat it. And I'll say all the sentences again at the end. I promise. No, I won't go back and do number two. Just stay with me. Please." Yes, a hundred times. And that's for a four-sentence dictation. Tedious.

But I've figured out a way to use the iPods to give dictation a new twist.

First, I write a dictation that is ten sentences in length. Those ten sentences have two key components to them: the content vocabulary that we are studying in class and sentence structure that is familiar to the students. So the connecting vocabulary or verb tenses need to make sense and be familiar based on what we have been studying. At the end of a recent unit on the structure of the United States government, I had a dictation for the students that had sentences like, "The President is in the Executive branch at the National level," and we had studied the key words president, executive, and national. The frame, then, was:

The ___________ is in the ____________ branch at the ____________ level.

There were some other frames mixed in that we had used and studied along with content vocabulary from the unit.

Next, I record myself reading the dictation to the students using iMovie/iSight on my laptop computer. I repeat each numbered sentence twice. I publish the dictation out to iTunes, and it shows up ready to be loaded on the student iPods.

The students take the iPods and listen to my dictation and write down the numbered sentences. For some students, a word bank is a helpful tool for the content vocabulary. I try not to scaffold any of the sight words for them because the goal is for them to have absorbed the sentence frames at this point. After the students have written down the sentences, I have them turn in their written copy to me. This gives me a chance to assess both listening and writing/spelling issues.

For the reading/speaking portion, the students then switch on the camera on the iPod and read the dictation back to me. I give them a typed copy of the dictation to read to me so that if they made any errors in their writing, they don't transfer those errors over into the reading/speaking exercise. I ask the kids to read each sentence twice, and I listen for the best example from each piece. For assessment on this piece, I listen to the students' recordings and draw a line under any of the words that I consider to be major errors--errors that impede understanding. And I circle any specific issues that we are working on in class (right now, my students' focus is on hitting the word endings as they tend to truncate them.) In terms of scoring, I take a point off for every two major errors and 1 point off for every four issues circled.

While I haven't always been a fan of dictation in the past, there's something about adding the iPod into the mix that makes this seem pretty great. First, it allows students to self-pace. They can listen to the sentence as many times as they'd like to train their ear. Second, they can use the recorded dictation to help them practice for their reading. And again, they can hit on it as many times as they'd like. Finally, they can record themselves as many times as they'd like until they are satisfied with their own recording. This assessment is about accuracy, and it's great for the kids to pay attention to detail in their speaking periodically. And really finally (I already used finally), it's easy to give feedback because you have a recording. The kids can re-listen to their recording with your comments in hand and learn from the assessment.

Ipod Use Number 2

Unbelievable that I haven't posted in a month. Unbelievable that that is the first sentence I choose to post in a month. But it has been an insane month. In that month, though, I have found multiple uses for the iPod in the language learning classroom.

Idea number 2... Vocabulary Scavenger Hunt
The kids had a list of something like 40 vocabulary words related to geography tostudy, and we had photos in the class representing those 40 words. The kids had duplicate mini photos in their vocab notebooks to study. So after a night of studying, I put the list of 40 words on the overhead cam for the students. I had each of them randomly choose any 15 words from that master list in any order and put them on a piece of paper.

Prior to school starting, I snuck into the classroom and hid the 40 vocab pictures all over the room. Taped to random places.

I then collected the kids' lists and redistributed them to different kids. The task? Each student had to go on a scavenger hunt to find the pictures of the 15 words on their list. They had to take photos of the images with the iPod touch. The twist? They had to do it in the order that the words were listed on their lists.

Wild. The kids had a great time. And it forced them to really think about the words in print versus the words as images. And when the quickest kid in the class discovered that he had missed picture number seven, he had to delete his last eight photos and go back at it again. It was a fun, fun challenge to see who could get done first.

Security! Security! Security!

So I had my first breach of contract this week on my iPod touch contract. Two breaches, really. The kids took the iPods home to do their video homework, and I had two girls come in the next day without their homework but with iPods with nearly dead batteries. Hmmmm, I thought.

The first flag was that they had changed the settings on the iPods to have a beautiful flowery background rather than the number of their iPod. This was a problem. The kids signed a contract saying that they wouldn't change the settings, and these kids had. (The ipods have numbers as their backgrounds so that I can instantly see what number iPod that I'm using. I also don't want the kids to personalize the iPods because I don't want them to start thinking that these are theirs.)

The second flag was the dead batteries without the homework.

So I went into the internet icon on their iPods, and there was no history. Hmmmm, I thought. What on earth were they doing? Oh, they cleared the history.

What they didn't realize is that there is a separate history for Youtube. And I went into the Youtube app, and sure enough, they had had the time of their lives watching videos all night long.

Now let me say this. I want my kids to have internet access at home, and many of them can't afford home computers. So if a kid takes home my iPod touch and has wireless access at home, I'm all for them surfing away on the web. My students are normally so NOT tech savvy that any trouble they get into is more accidental than anything else.

However, in this case, I was livid. These are two of my lowest students. They make the least effort of all the students in my class in terms of studying and advancing outside the class. And the fact that they had taken home the technology and then used it to watch Burmese videos all night rather than at least trying my homework made me rather angry. And on top of that, the fact that they had changed the settings on their ipods when they had signed a contract promising (among other things) that they wouldn't, also had me rather angry.

I got a professional translator on the phone because I wanted to be clear. I explained that they had violated the terms of the contract that they had signed and that there would be punishment accordingly (they lost free time and had to "pay" me a computer card that they would normally get to use during free time). Then, I asked them about the homework. And the one student (the stronger of the two) actually told me that she didn't know how to use the camera, so she didn't know how to do the homework. I was born on a Saturday, but it wasn't last Saturday. I actually have my students do a practice run or two for their homework and then show it to me in class to make sure that I know they know how to use the technology. Add to that the fact that she had managed to find Burmese music videos all night on Youtube, and she had changed the settings on the phone, and it was just a big, fat lie.

Long story short, they were punished. The rest of the class knew what was going on because I wanted them to know how seriously I took this. But really, what was most revealing to me was the character of the student in that moment. I think the lie is more disappointing to me than anything else.

On another note, I'm going to be posting some iPad apps and activities (and iPod activities) that I'm developing for my kids in the upcoming weeks. The kids just finished their first iMovies, and those are published to Schooltube. It's amazing to see how far they've come.

Ipods and Ipads and all kinds of fun.... oh my....

I spent last night pondering ways to make my students speak English after they leave my classroom. I love homework. I especially love homework when it has more of a purpose than just assigning homework for the sake of having homework. On the other hand, there are days when I do want to assign homework just for the sake of it. I want homework to be the norm and expectation in my class, not something unusual. I think the iPods are going to make it just that.

We are studying adjectives right now. I usually do this in conjunction with some sort of a content-area lesson, but this time I'm just studying adjectives for the sake of studying adjectives. Of course, later on they'll need these words when we are comparing things in science or talking about different countries in social studies, but for now we're just learning some adjectives.

So this morning I had them build a vocabulary notebook of some adjectives I think are most common. We took pictures from a photo dictionary and pasted them into their notebooks, and they wrote the adjectives next to the pictures. Then, we dug through some other magazines to find the words that had not been listed in their dictionaries. Students got to present their photo concepts of young and old and short and tall to the class. We followed that with some practice constructing some sentences orally. "The baby is young. The mother is old." We're not doing comparatives yet. We are just learning the vocabulary.

And then the cool part. I challenged the kids to take their iPod touches somewhere in the room and to videotape themselves making a comparison. They could do any of the vocabulary that we had done in class that morning, and they came up with some good stuff. The keys were to find two things and then orally compare them on the video so that they could be heard clearly saying the sentences. The kids really got a kick out of it.

Homework? Five more comparisons at home tonight. And they have to teach at least two of those words to someone in their family. I'm checking on the video comparison, not on the teaching. But I think it will be good.

So many presentations, and never enough time...

...and the weather of New Orleans is incredible. We spent the afternoon out for a trolley ride, but I'm back at the TESOL conference for a great presentation. I have so many things I'd like to learn about technology now that the iPads and iPod touches have arrived in my classroom.

I should have videotaped the roll out of the iPads. I had a specific plan for them, but I can't remember what the plan was now. I just remember the excitement. And the fact that I told the kids before I handed them out where the magical black button is on the iPad that makes all things go, but some were sp excited that they didn't listen. The despondency over not being able to figure out how to make it "go" immediately was amazingly sweet. And then I gave them about 10 minutes just to play with the apps that I had loaded onto the machines. Amazing excitement.

This week, we got out the iPod touches. The cool part? They have two cameras on them. It's a whole new world for the kids. They took their cameras home for two days this week to get pictures for a project we would be doing at the end of the week, and one student took 293 pictures and a couple of great videos in two days time. I can't imagine what kind of language this is going to generate.

While I'm in TESOL, the kids are making movies of their lives using the photos they took at home. I can't wait to see what they have come up with.

Reporting in from TESOL. More tomorrow.

A Grant! A Grant! We got a GRANT!

Back in early November, my school system announced that they had some grant monies available for employees interested in putting together technology proposals for innovative ways to use technology in the classroom. They left the proposals open: anyone with an innovative idea could apply. I could have applied solo or with a group of people or... wide open.

So with the other ESL teacher in my building I applied for a grant that would give my students iPod touch devices or iPads to take home with them at night. We would integrate these into the classrooms, but the innovation here is that we are going to allow our kids to take them home at night to do work. I know this isn't all that innovative at a national level--there are schools where having an iPod touch for each student is the norm. I used to work at a laptop school where every student and teacher had a laptop to use in the classroom. But for our school system, this is something new. We don't generally send home hi-tech devices with our students.

Well, we made it through the first round. The district got 62 proposals, and they narrowed them down to 17. The 17 had to go over to Central Office to present their proposals to a room of about 15 people. That was January 3, and we had been waiting to hear back until Thursday night when we got an email letting us know the results. They selected five proposals to fund, and ours was one of them.

I'm thrilled. I don't know if that's the right word. I'm terrified and thrilled. This is an amazing opportunity to pilot something that our district would like to consider for the future. But it's also an incredible responsibility as I essentially vouched for my students in front of the board when we were defending the proposal. The catch is that there is no way that my students' families could pay to recover the cost of a lost/stolen/broken device, so the risk and liability falls back on my judgment in terms of who gets to take them home and who doesn't.

I also now have a lot of work ahead of me. I'm going to TESOL in March, and I'm really looking forward to soaking up from other professionals how they are using this stuff. Prior to that, there is just going to be a lot of experimentation. I have been searching for apps, but I haven't found anything that I'm REALLY excited about. I definitely want them to have a flashcard app, but I need to find one that includes an image and sound on it.

We'll see where this goes. In discussing the funding with the project manager on Friday, I found out that we may have the devices in our classroom by the middle of February. What an amazing opportunity.