Now I think I know what would be considered valid examples of c,d, and e. But how do I get evidence of them in a digital format? Any ideas?

I’ll brainstrorm a few but if anyone could help or steer me in the right direction, that would be great. Thanks!

interpersonal speaking
Student submits an audio file of a recorded, unscripted, unrehearsed conversation. Could be on telephone or on skype if not in person.
Student submits a video of such a conversation

interpretive reading
Student copies and pastes a real-world reading segment and his or her interpretive response to it.

interpretive listening
Student submits his or her response to a clip of spoken target language. The audio file is included.

These ideas (some more than others) require significant planning and legwork beforehand of course!

I’m a teacher. Another mistake somewhere? After all…teachers relish and excel at multitasking. I dread it and am less than stellar at it. I love a morning when I can think about ONE thing.

Why am I writing this? Well, I’m at it again. Doing fourteen things at once and feeling like I’m not quite covering the bases… The new course is coming out soon. And therefore when a little serendipity comes my way, it is most welcome!

I’m still working on a way to incorporate LinguaFolio into the plan. I was so excited about the prospect of being part of the LinguaFolio online pilot. It was the answer to my prayers I was sure. How much more manageable an online option would make incorporating LF in K12 Distance Learning courses! How difficult a paper-and-pencil LinguaFolio would be to monitor over the miles and miles that separate me from my students.

Well, I just learned today that the online LF is not gonna happen this year. And for the whole afternoon I was trying to figure out how I was going to make this work. Then I checked my twitter page and behold the following Tweet from Mandy Lindgren appeared before my eyes.

E-portfolios! That’s it! That’s what I need! I clicked the link and eventually found materials by Helen Barrett. Check out her blog entry on e- Portfolios here. She’s got an AWESOME slide show with step-by-step instructions on how to create an e-Portfolio. To access it, go here.

By referring to Helen’s instructions, I was able to develop a thinking guide (using Exploratree) that is helping me feel quite a bit more at ease with all of the concepts to consider when dealing with LF. The guide is still quite rough and definitely not finished (see below). But I’m beginning to feel like I can do this.

A new and improved KET GERMAN II course is launching in Fall 2009! The new GERMAN II incorporates a modular approach students can use to customize aspects of their learning. Course participants navigate through a variety of instructional segments which are organized according to theme or topic. The result is a fast-paced—sometimes quirky but always fun!—way to learn. Dramatizations, music, interviews, authentic film clips, and slides shows are all part of the mix. In addition students complete online activities, and converse live with a tutor on a regular basis. This approach presents language in context to help students grasp meaning quickly and begin to communicate in German with confidence. Email John Krueger at jkrueger@ket.org to find out more.

Like most foreign language teachers I know, for some time now I have heard about Linguafolio and how as a portfolio-based, language-assessment tool that has origins in Europe, it can help students monitor and take control of their own learning. The idea always had an appeal to me but unfortunately I never found the time to delve into it and work it into classroom instruction.

Fast forward a number of years: I am now the teacher of an established K-12 online German program that finds itself in a period of rapid transition as we move away from traditional, lecture-based, one-way instruction. Though I had been taking care to include performance-based assessments in the new courses as a way of providing more context and meaning to the student-learning experience, there still were some sizable pieces missing from the puzzle. And I didn’t even realize it — that is,until I heard Ali Moeller from the University of Nebraska speak this past weekend.

Dr. Moeller was conducting a seminar called: LinguaFolio Review and Classroom Implementation for the Kentucky World Language Teacher Network. She reiterated the underlying ideas behind Linguafolio over the two-day event. In my opinion, the following LF requirements for students are especially ground-breaking and compelling:
• Goal setting
• Self assessment
• Self-reflection and self-regulation

All of these components reveal a focus that is central to the Linguafolio design: that the student become more and more responsible for his own learning.

Of course for any educational scenario, such an objective would be highly desirable. But for K-12 distance learning formats in particular, this is just what the doctor ordered: a way to ‘teach’ and/or instill independence in the learner. Of course the devil is in the details. There is a lot of work ahead – I will be documenting our LF path here- but , following the tenets of backwards design, if we start with where we want to end up (in this case: greater student responsibility and autonomy) then we will be able to build a better road to get there. Right?

My life is saved.

Click here for Linguafolio Kentucky

Click here for Linguafolio Virginia, Carolinas, Kentucky, Georgia.

Click here for Nebraska LF Teacher’s Guide.

Resources without traffic linger in the shadows and lose relevancy – which is awful on several levels for learning.

Because a majority of existing educational resources remain locked behind “proprietary wall of publishers and universities” Search Engine Optimization remains only a fragment of what it could be for learning. But Breck is confident that will change: As more and more traffic goes to resources that are online and therefore accessible through SEO, other institutions will open and “publish into the cloud as well.”

I am all for this process of opening up and becoming part of a global network of learning, although I do see obstacles on the way: copyright, for example. As a language teacher, it is extremely important to me that I include all kinds of music, images, and film in my lessons. I do this for the purpose of demonstrating culture and providing context. Or course I always make a point of giving credit to the author of a work. However I frequently use works in a derivative way to increase their educational value for the moment. I might loop a pop song for example or make a clip from part of a short film to demonstrate something for a particular lesson. If I were to do this on the open internet, I might run into legal trouble and ultimately have to refrain from the practice. And so, I continue my mixes and mashups behind the walls of my online classroom.

And what about student work that serves as material for collaborative projects? Should it all be published on the open internet? I do not think that Breck is advocating this…but how many of these “proprietary walls” will we still require?

I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the middle: Online courses and educational institutions will publish content on the open internet in order to build traffic and remain relevant but will also make use of walls to respect student privacy and to allow a place for all of those things to develop that can make the classroom a special place: creativity, intimacy, and community.

In regards to the grouping of the students for collaborative work (on wikis for example), the idea just needs to be tweaked I think to make it work in an environment like ours where students and schools are on different schedules. For example, one could …

• put schools and learners into groups whose participants have similar start dates. They then could work together on certain assignments. (I did this at the beginning of this school year actually. I called the groups Staffeln –squads or teams. It was a promising idea that I think would work with a little closer attention. Again, just need to tweak…)

• have projects that are ongoing and that would require layers of student involvement. Students would be graded not only directly for their work on a particular layer but also on how well they communicated with the students who worked on the project before them and as well as the ones who would come after them. Sure, it would take some time to design such a project….but I think that it would be a great learning experience towards developing skills in collaboration.

Because that’s what it is about after all: allowing students to develop collaboration skills. In order for that to happen of course, they MUST have the opportunity to work together.

Actually, I’ve always looked at collaboration primarily as a means of achieving something else: community—-a very important concern for distance learning. See my C+C=C hypothesis here. But I am beginning to see collaboration more and more as an important end goal in itself. Especially when I read articles like Ruth Reynard’s Web 2.0 Tools and K-12 Challenges in which she cites evidence that today’s employers …

usually comment on their need for employees who have more highly developed “employable skills,” rather than having only content knowledge about specific academic areas.

But what are those skills anyway? Reynard describes them this way:
Students with collaborative skills…

know how to evaluate a problem or situation; assess what information and resources are needed and what others have and can contribute to the challenges; maximize all of the resources and build on what is available to meet and address; and, hopefully, solve the problem or challenge posed.

So, in other words, our students need to be able to do the following when working with others:

Evaluate problem
Assess what is needed
Assess what others have and can contribute
Coordinate and maximize resources
Act! (Meet and address)
Solve Problem.

Wow. That’s what I want for my students. Practice with real-life skills. That’s relevance.

So, ahem, I guess my work is cut out for me. I’ve got to do the following to ensure that my students will have have the opportunity to develop such all-important collaborative skills:

1) Find ways to allow students on different academic schedules to work together on projects.
2) Design projects around real-world problems that will foster student collaboration.

Back to forging a new battle plan…

At the beginning of the school year I had big plans not only to introduce a host of new web platforms into the curriculum but also to get our students c o l l a b o r a t i n g on projects. As I’ve stated before, (here for example) the development of community is of the utmost importance in DL environments. We need to integrate community however we can, ESPECIALLY in DL. There are many ways to do this and certainly cultivating student collaboration must be one of them. If students work together on projects, then after a while they will get to know one another and communicate more and more. Before you know it, a new layer of support will develop. That is definitely where we want to go in Distance Learning because it will help put our students on equal footing with classroom learners.

But collaboration can be quite tricky to build into a DL curriculum when students start their school years at various times and follow completely different schedules. Such nonconforming school calendars can be a formidable obstacle to deal with when attempting to create rich student collaboration activities.

I did not take that into consideration when I based my plans for incorporating student collaboration on a model put forth by Kato and Rosen in the November 2007 edition of The Language Educator. (See my take on it here) Their approach was designed for use in a community college context where students are all on the same course calendar.

In such an arrangement, students from different locations, say: locations A, B, C, and D are put together in groups where they post writing on a wiki page and comment on each other’s work. I attempted this approach this past year but I did not consider that it would be too confusing to monitor and assess since students start the school year at different times.

Well that blunder in organization has since been fixed and we now organize the student work on wikis according to school. But I continue to think of ways to have students collaborate on various projects throughout the year. We will get there. I am confident.

As a friend once reminded me, one of the great parts of being a teacher is that each August one gets to begin anew with fresh ideas.

Perhaps the direct feedback aspect. Working on that one!