slister's blog

On the heels of Patrick’s informative email, came another gold nugget…. I should not have been surprised when a return email came from Elizabeth Hanson-Smith (see: http://www.geocities.com/ehansonsmi) on my “Grammar Screencast” idea plea… Elizabeth has been a wonderful supporter of many of my off-beat ed-tech thoughts!

Elizabeth points me to this resource:
Phrasal Verb Video Dictionary  [Website]. (2005). R. Drury, Georgia Tech. http://web.li.gatech.edu/~rdrury/600/oral/video/dictionary.html
saying: “Drury has the students create the videos to express the mean of certain phrasal verbs. The dictionary keeps growing of course, and while it may be most appropriate for vocabulary, a lot of grammar is contextual.”

Elizabeth also suggested I look into “Bull Frameworks” which she explains are, “very useful in composition classes for teaching the use of tenses and tense sequencing. (It) teaches students to use an "axis of orientation" in order to select the correct tense. You can display the Framework, and then walk through a short essay or newspaper report showing how it operates using different colored "pencils" in MS Word. This article by Norris includes the Bull Framework as a table: http://www2.gol.com/users/norris/conditionals.html”

Replies are trickling back from my first “request for interested parties” concerning the idea of Grammar Screencasts.  

One of my former colleagues from Dubai Men’s College, Patrick Colabucci , an English teacher who is now teaching at USC American Language Institute in Los Angelos suggested that the marriage of “Reed-Kellog diagrams and some “bells and whistles of technology” would be a good one".  In a reply to my initial call of interest, Pat wrote, “These grammatical diagrams are a bit old-fashioned, but damn useful ….. (they) have always been excellent learning tools; for EFL. ESL and native speakers alike.”

Not being an English Teacher nor an ESL-type…I had never heard of the Reed-Kellogg diagrams so here are a few sites I landed on to help me understand what Pat was talking about:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed-Kellogg_sentence_diagram - note the discussion about Reed-Kellogg vs. Sentence Tree Diagrams
• http://www.bethyoung.org/ibeth/2004/10/sentence_diagra.html - this is a blog entry with several links to good resources on the topic.

Now that the first phase of the Triple A Approach to Lecture Intervention project has been delivered and since I'm not in a position to go after more funding, I will have to let the beast rest. (You can view a mirror of the Inukshuk learning object here: http://www.newmediaworkshops.com/tripleA/ - it is scheduled to be removed from this location once it is officially launched on the CLOE site)

Left with the decision of either letting my educause blog lie dormant or putting it to another use, I've decided upon the latter. This blog will become a place where I discuss the education technology projects and research in which I am involved.

So...what's up? ..... As I settle into my new homestead for a year (Colombo, Sri Lanka) I've decided to follow up on an idea that blind-sided me at a recent presentation I gave in China on ed-technologies. 

Here's the background information as I described it in an 'invitational' email I sent out:

While I was in China (my final placement with Nipissing) doing a presentation about podcasts and blogging to ESL teachers, I wanted to talk about digital storytelling but could only find a math screencast (like these: http://faculty.uoit.ca/kay/courses/CURS4141/student/2005f/mc.html) to show.  Upon watching one of the screencasts, a few of the participants immediately perked up, as they could see definite application of screencasting techniques to grammar (grammar is really big in China...or so was the sense I got!).  Upon further contemplation, I'm thinking grammar is much like math in that the 'rules' don't change much and therefore, one could get a lot of 'screenplay' out of well-done screencasts on a variety of grammar topics.

We have finally completed phase 1 of our CLOE/Inukshuk learning object – the “Triple A Approach to Lecture Intervention”. 

Please help us to review it here: http://www.newmediaworkshops.com/tripleA/index.htm  . We would appreciate any feedback about our project – you can supply your thoughts it as a comment to this posting.

 

If you review the entire project plan here, in our wiki, http://triplealecture.pbwiki.com/ProjectFlowchart   and then check out the phase 1 learning object…SHEESH!! You’ll see we have a long way to go!

This may be old news but I think there is a lesson to be learned.  I just read an article in the Denver Post, "Student says he fears for safety" where a student doesn't want to return to high school after having received numerous threats in myspace.com* due to the fact that he recorded, and then his father made public, his World Geography teacher's rant about the US President.  This follow up article explains the Teacher's side and follows what ensued including:

Teacher Jay Bennish also promised school district administrators that he would make sure future classroom talks immediately offered opposing points of view, his lawyer David Lane told KHOW-AM radio in Denver.

 and here you can learn what the president had to say besides:

We're coming to the end of our Triple A project - Today, I'm focusing on the "ACTION" section of which one part includes a lecturer's self-appraisal of their lecture based on five domains (visual, auditory, cognitive, physical and verbal) see http://triplealecture.pbwiki.com/Tool3TaskSelfAppraisal (password is "lecture").  For the first phase of the project, we are going to use a rating system linked to points that gives the lecturer a certain percentage within each domain.  The lecturer will receive feedback for each domain as follows:

• Lecturer's % which is based on points assigned to rating for each question divided by possible questions (minus those identified as not applicable) 
• For More information on this Domain visit......

I came across this interesting ( http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/mi/w1_interactive1.html) interactive which assesses and interprets one's propensity for certain intelligences.  I'm thinking we might be able to use M.I Snowflake technique (from the Concept to Classroom website)  for the Lecture Self-Appraisal Tool but I wonder if it would be any more informative than a simple table with percentages....

Are we going to see an increase in the lecturing method on campuses across the continent? Despite my work in the Triple A Lecture Intervention Project, I truly thought lecturing would become instinct as the PlayStation generation hit post-secondary institutes.  I thought the only ones keeping lecturing alive as a viable teaching method were traditionalists who had no interest in applying alternative learning modes. 

 

 Then along comes a medium that attempts to mate dinosaurs and virtual pets. Is podcasting causing a revival in the lecture method?  But we barely got to see a glimpse of constructivism in the lecture hall and co-operative learning methods were just poking their heads in the door!  Now we’re back to information delivery.

I've been busy working on a few different projects - you can peek at one here: Blogs, Podcasts, Wiki's & Screencasts...A Resource from the Jan.24th Workshop (unfortunately, it's only the first installment of 4..the others are on their way!).

So with that done, I turn back to the Triple A project  - where we're working on the Reflection Tool, part of the second "A" Analysis....

"Do it Yourself Reflections" - isn't that the essence of reflecting?  Well, not necessarily.  I love the luxury of having the time to 'free flow' my reflections of life but this is truly a luxury and usually only happens about the third day into a week's holiday.  In the meantime, in the lieu of holidays, I find that reading and commenting on other's blogs satisfies my 'reflection' desires. I'm thinking these are more 'directed' reflexive activities for me - I decide what I'm going to read and then reflect on that topic. 

This is the idea for Reflection Tool for the Triple A project - http://triplealecture.pbwiki.com/Tool2Review1   It is assumed that the lecturer will use this tool as soon after a lecture as possible.  It lists a variety of questions to lead the lecturer's reflection about his/her lecture in several learning domains:  physical, cognitive, verbal, auditory, visual.  The first step, is for the lecturer to review the questions and identify those he/she doesn't feel is relevant/doesn't feel like answering at the time, etc. Next, s/he reviews a draft of their reflection questions (includes a short analysis of the remaining questions in each domain) and now s/he has three choices, they can choose to  print to file / print to printer or complete online. Although the lecturer can write their comments online, in the supplied text boxes, to protect the lecturer's privacy, this tool does not save any of the information he/she has inputted - any inputted text is simply printed out at the end of the process.

After reviewing an excellent Del.icio.us screencast at
http://grail.oise.utoronto.ca/journal/wfreeman/archives/2005/11/getting_into_de.html ,
I decided that I should provide the TripleAlecture Project Team with some guidance about using FURL - a social bookmarking tool that is very similar to del.icio.us .  You can find my FURL screencast here: http://www.newmediaworkshops.com/tripleAlecture/furl/furl.html - It's 6 minutes long and a little sing-songy... gotta work on that!

I have a FURL topic area "TripleALecture" for all the resources I have discovered that I feel will helpful for our project - These links are public and can be viewed here:

http://www.furl.net/members/sl_info?enc=UTF-8&search=browse&sort=&dir=&pos=&keyword=&category=399129&date=0

Last night the Triple A Lecture Intervention team attempted our first online global meeting - Let me say, right off, it didn't work - HOWEVER, it was definitely worth the energy.  We will try again!

I used the Meeting Planner at the Time and Date website here: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html  to figure out a suitable time for our team members who live in United Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland/Ontario/Manitoba Canada.  The most suitable time seemed to 2am GMT (Luckily, we have no one on our team from Europe!).

We were planning to use an Elluminate meeting room.  Here are a few things I will do the next time I organize such a meeting:

1. Provide the illuminate "first time user" link so that everyone can trouble shoot prior to the meeting date/time - (I believe some members may have experienced a Java plug-in problem).
2. Provide a "back up" chat area link so that if the meeting room doesn't work we can jump into the chat room and still 'talk' - ( Last night there were three people in the meeting room but we could not talk to each other... but hey, it was fun playing with the icons!).
3. Have ready a group email so that I can fire off an email to all attendees explaining what is going on.

Well, I'll chalk it up to experience, take a deep breath, follow my own advice and then, plan another global team meeting!