Wikis

Like blogs, wikis are great places for learners to share work online and help foster classroom community development.

This year with English language learners in Spain, I have set up a ‘school wiki’ using wikispaces which is free to educators. The school wiki was primarily used as a discussion forum with over 350 members taking part. During this time, I’ve become more aware of the possibilities wikis may offer English language learners, while learning hard lessons about taking on such ambitious Web 2.0 projects. In my next post I will be sharing with you the highs and lows of this digital journey.

If you would like to have a go at creating your own free wiki with your learners click here to register with wikispaces. Perhaps before you do that you may want to try out these video tutorials or take a look at some of the featured wikis at wikispaces. But you might want to wait until you’ve read my next post first!

Art Space

Class blogs or wikis make great digital spaces for learners to share their own digital artwork. This image was created by a student using free online image editing software.

The Yoza Project

A literacy project in South Africa seeks to exploit the use of mobile phones to encourage reading and writing with young people.

The Yoza Project, originally known as m4Lit (mobile phones for literacy), set out to explore the viability of using mobile phones to support reading and writing by youth in South Africa (SA). If mobile phones proved to be a legitimate alternative and complement to printed literature then their potential for increasing youth literacy practices of reading and writing in SA, and indeed the developing world, would be significant. Most developing countries are book-poor and mobile phone-rich, after all.

This is an interesting example of how digital technologies can provide greater access to stories and literacy which would otherwise be though books.

Me and my movie

Since becoming more interested in using video with ESOL learners I have been searching around for basic student guides on making short films.

The best resources I have managed to find so far are from the Children’s BBC . CBBC were running a project aimed at children making their own videos to upload to the BBC. Although winning several awards it seems, unfortunately to have come to an end (I could be wrong here but can’t find anything on the site). Nevertheless found a teacher / parent pack and student pack still on the Internet. The links to these downloadable resources are below. However, I was wondering if anyone out there knows of any great film-making resources that I might be able to adapt for use with second language learners?

student

teacher

Further Resources from teachertrainingvideos. com

Windows Moviemaker: Tutorial 1 Tutorial 2 Tutorial 3

InsightShare – Participatory Video

In my last few posts, in particular the ‘Fallas Interview’, ‘Making Videos’ and ‘Island Voices’, I’ve been referring to an approach called ‘participatory video (PV).

InsightShare are specialists in this and summarise PV as follows:

“Participatory Video (PV) is a set of techniques to involve a group or community in shaping and creating their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories.

This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take action to solve their own problems and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise marginalised people and to help them implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.”

Based on my experiences of using a participatory video approach, I fully go along with what InsightShare have to say here. In relation to education I think media such as video offer wonderful opportunities to learners, teachers and researchers alike. To my mind, what is significant here, is the way in which video media provides a different kind of platform on which to bring in and place greater value on personal knowledge, which in classroom contexts can often be missing.

Click graphic link above to view some of the fascinating work by InsightShare

‘Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean’

Gordon Wells from the ‘Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilan’ project comments on the ‘making videos post here on Web2literacy.com

This approach doesn’t work just for language learners, of course. But it does offer another point of contact whereby both long-settled and new community members can meet, work together, and find out more about each other. Here’s another example from the local day centre for adults with learning difficulties or needs:

This has proved very popular in the community. It gives people an insight into a local centre of which we’re all aware, but don’t necessarily know much about. Donald’s voiceover gives the piece real immediacy. He’s a star – and currently on the front page of Am Pàipear’s website.

I am really grateful to Gordon for this, which I believe shows the power of participatory video techniques in gaining an understanding of lives and communities and the role it can play in building bridges. 

Learners with an Interrupted Formal Education (LIFE)

The acronym ‘Life’ is one I picked up on from a Canadian organisation for literacy practitioners – ESL Literacy Network who work with adult migrant learners who have had little access to formal schooling.

When it comes to talking about migration and literacy language can be a sticky issue. I like this term because it says what ‘being illiterate’ actually is i.e. never having had the opportunity to go to school (or possibly only to a limited extent). It therefore goes to demonstrate that being illiterate is not the ‘problem’ of an individual but rather an issue of social construction, based on life’s opportunities for an individual. Following this argument then, the issue is to give people, in this case adult migrant learners, the opportunity of an education that they never had.

This is what many ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes aim to do in countries where English is mainly spoken e.g the UK, USA, Australia etc. However, there now emerges another serious issue, that is, although such provision is set up to ensure migrant learners have access to learning English, many LIFE learners are excluded from access as firstly the classroom practices are often based around written texts and therefore the learners need to be able to read and write, equally they are then assessed through examinations, that are again mediated by print literacies (including speaking exams). Furthermore, funding for such classes is based on ‘achievement’ in tests. So what happens? It’s not difficult to guess – provision for LIFE learners becomes unavailable as they don’t attract funding, while classes are directed to those who can pass exams. To rub salt into the wound, ESOL provision will be further cut next year when students have to start paying higher fees for classes at an unaffordable cost.

So we see from this that people who were unfortunate enough to be denied an education the first time round are denied again. In my opinion what amounts to a violation of human rights.

Despite this background there is some really good work going on by second language / literacy practitioners. Below I illustrate this through the work of Heide Spruck Wrigley, a leading literacy educator based in the U.S. In the video Heide is developing a form of reading assessment with a migrant learner from Kosovo that she basis on what she terms ‘Environmental Print’. By this Heide refers to the texts the learner will see in her everyday life. I like Heide’s approach here because what she is doing is valuing the learner’s personal knowledge and in doing so building trust. Here we see the ‘participatory ethos’ being applied to teaching that I am arguing for in this blog.

To watch video, click graphic below and then play through the source web site

Inside Classrooms Outside Lives

As a teachers it’s often amazing how little we really know of the students that attend our classes.

Ron and Suzy Wong Scollon, great educators and leading researchers, concerned about educational change, wrote in their book – ‘Nexus Analysis and the Emerging Internet’ (2004)

“Ron first talked for about twenty or thirty minutes about himself. He told students where he was born, some of the characteristics of the house he grew up in, the surrounding land and how it had been a cranberry patch in his mother’s time but he had only known it as a suburban plot with a lawn and squared off with fences. He then gave a personal history of his education giving actual names of important teachers and the places he had done research. He finally gave the quite personal history by which he had come to be teaching that course at that time.

After this personal history, he asked the students to take out a sheet of paper and write down whatever they felt he needed to know to be able to teach them. The response was in every case that students wrote a lengthy and personal view of their own past and how they came to be in that class and indeed information that was relevant to the teaching of the course”

I couldn’t agree more with this approach to teaching. However, when working with learners of English for Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) who may have limited access to English and literacy, such a task is more challenging. Of course that is where Web 2.0 media, and in this case a video clip comes in.

In my class, on Mondays every week, I would ask the students what they had been doing over the weekend. One girl, we shall call Frehiwet,  would say – On Saturday I stayed at home, On Sunday I went to church. One day we were in the computer room and the students were busy embedding music videos from YouTube into the class blog they were creating. Frehiwet embedded the video below of a church service she had attended. Now when she says – ‘I went to Church’, I know what she means…

A Fallas Interview by Susana Ferrer Renovell

In this 5 min video Susana finds out about the Fallas festival by interviewing her mother.

Living in Valencia, I wanted to find out more about the famous Fallas Festival that takes place in March every year. Certainly Susana has helped me to understand many things about the festival that were not clear on the surface.

Interviewing family members / friends / people is a really interesting and productive way of exploring topics in and out of class, moreover, in this personal way, I believe learning can be more meaningful and memorable. Watch this space for more videos by Susana on the Fallas festival. Have you had any experience of making videos with learners? If so I would love to hear from you.

Further Resources from teachertrainingvideos. com

Windows Moviemaker: Tutorial 1 Tutorial 2 Tutorial 3

Learner video projects – Fallas costumes by Paqui Moya Sanchez

The video above is a piece of work by an English language learner in Spain.

I’m living in Valencia at the moment and I was curious to find out all about a famous festival that is held in March. So as a class project the learners made their own PowerPoint presentations. The one presented here focuses on the costumes with the Valencia Hymn as a sound track. I feel connecting to the lives of the learners in this way is not only beneficial in terms of their language learning but also in giving the learners a platform from which they can speak in class and be listened to by others.

Further Resources from teachertrainingvideos. com

Windows Moviemaker: Tutorial 1 Tutorial 2 Tutorial 3

HIV / AIDS and Youth: An African Performance by Penina Nafuye

This clip shows both the power of video and poetry in enabling Penina Nafuye to deal with a serious issue in her own way.

This is so far from how such issues may be studied in classrooms but drama, poetry, music and art could be so valuable in giving these young people a voice – Found the performance of the poem very moving.

‘The Internet in Society – Empowering or Censoring Citizens?’ Evgeny Morozov

In this video Evgeny Morozov questions the ‘myth’ that increased connectivity promotes democracy while at the same time illustrates how dictators and regimes around the world actually embrace it as a form of surveillance. Some real food for thought here.

‘Changing Educational Paradigms’ Sir Ken Robinson

I don’t go along with everything Sir Ken Robinson says in this video clip – but based on his way of thinking about education I don’t think he would want me to.

In this talk he illustrates the curious relationship between ADHD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and a rise in standardised forms of testing and moreover the consequences of children growing up in a digital world that has never been so stimulating. He uses this illustration effectively to expose the false paradigms and myths of education and what he considers needs to change. Enjoy

‘Identity, Literacy and English Language Teaching’ Bonny Norton

Bonny Norton, as always, having something interesting to say at the IATEFL conference in Cardiff, 2009.

Professor Norton has done some really interesting social research on migrant women learning English in Canada. She has many publications on the subject of identity and language learning, if you are interested in finding out more about her work I do highly recommend her book (2000) ‘Identity and Language Learning’ 

In this lecture Bonny talks about how we need to give learners in classrooms a position from which they can both speak and indeed be listened to. She discusses how she feels the learners’ use of digital media could help learners better invest in classroom communities and in doing so more able to construct positive learner identities. To view video click graphic above and then scroll down the page a little to play video.

Mobile Learning

I enjoy watching and listening to how teachers use Web 2.0 media in the classroom.

This video features a British Council teacher, Chris who is talking about how he uses mobile phones with his learners – particularly like his ideas using photos and digital voice video recorders in class.

Making videos

Making videos with learners is something I’m getting really interested in at the moment. But of course there is so much to learn!

Here I have embedded a video featured on ‘Island Voices’ a web site that documents life in the Hebrides lying off the north west coast of Scotland. Gordon Wells who has created the site writes about how and why a group of ESOL learners created the video.

This was a project for English language learners from Poland and Latvia who wanted to make a film about their life and work here in the Hebrides.

First of all they had to agree the contents of the film, and what sort of pictures they wanted – scenery, animal life, the places where they lived and worked, and particularly the different things their work involved. Then they borrowed the camera to take the pictures. After that they edited a picture sequence together using Windows Movie Maker, simultaneously developing IT and language skills.

Finally, the learners themselves scripted the voiceover commentary (with some help from teachers) and recorded the narration. All in all, it was a very fruitful learning process which helped to build the learners’ confidence in using the language in new situations.

It’s this kind of work we want to develop bilingually in the next stage of the Island Voices project – recognising also that, for some, audio recording or written work will be a more comfortable jumping off point. Am Pàipear is Community Newspaper of the Year again. Wouldn’t it be good to see multimedia materials from the community on their site!

I think this video work is really great – why? Because it really lets the learners say something about their lives and who they are. I fully plan to do some of this next year, when I have time! If you have got any suggestions on how to make videos etc, would love to hear from you

Further Resources from teachertrainingvideos. com

Windows Moviemaker: Tutorial 1 Tutorial 2 Tutorial 3

a class debate

By Richard Gresswell from ELTbites

This is just one way to set up and manage a class debate on a topic of your choice. You can also use it as lead-in to writing for/against essays.

1. First of all, decide on your topic, as an example here I am using ‘private transport vs public transport.
2. Next, ask students if they prefer to use ‘private’ or ‘public’ transport in general based on answers split class into two groups but try to create similar size groups.
3. Then, each group brainstorms as many ideas to defend why public or private transport is better, one person in each group is nominated to write down group ideas, give students 10 – 15  minutes for this.
4. After that, call class together, nominate one person from one group to read out one of their suggestions, nominate someone from other group to attack, repeat this process with ideas from learners lists (you can chair or ask a student to chair the debate), you could monitor and record language that comes out of the debate and then put on board afterwards.
5. Later, you could use a simple debate like this in order to generate ideas for a ‘for and against essay’ perhaps as part of an exam class.