The rate at which amazing educational tools are being created and refined in just the last months is beyond comprehension. I hope by now you have come to terms with the fact that there is no way that you will be able to keep up with it all– especially if you are a teacher (i.e. you ALREADY have no life.) The good news is there are some great edtech bloggers out there who do a lot of important investigative work for you. My favorites are Will Richardson and Wes Fryer. In the end however you will have to decide on your own which technologies work the best for your unique circumstances.

Where to start? Well, what are the priorities you’ve set out for yourself in your teaching?

As a world language teacher, the idea of helping my students establish connections with young people in the target culture has long been a central part of my approach to instruction. But now that I have gone into distance learning, connections play an even bigger role. Connections are part of what has become the triumvirate of top considerations for me when deciding the road ahead. The formula I’ve come up with goes something like this: connections+collaboration= community. For years, research has shown us that community is essential to students’ feeling of success and satisfaction in distance learning. See here. Thus we have to urgently seek out means of connection and collaboration for our students to ensure that a community can establish itself.

New web technologies provide us with so many great tools. In the last month I have narrowed my focus down to a small assortment that I’m monitoring closely, some older and more familiar than others: Facebook, Ustream, Voicethread, Gabcast, Mindmeister, Google Earth, Yugma, Skype, and Second Life. Though the list is long, I think that each platform offers something unique..and yet is easily accessible and user friendly (Second Life may be a bit of an exception here.) Many of these tools and platforms can be used in conjunction with others. I’ll be commenting on my experiences with them in future posts.

Doubts? Plenty. I do worry about what happens if the community that we’re aiming for does not materialize….Students seem so “maxed out” these days. Will they be willing to set aside time and get actively involved?

How to avoid failure? We’ll build towards community slowly. Providing students opportunities for connections comes first. Of course we will push the opportunities through incentives…. And then collaboration will be required as well.

The need for students to be able to add text comments to class content –like on the youtube site or on Chinesepod (see below) — seems more and more inevitable. The advantages cannot be overlooked…. especially for K12 distance learning where we have to overcome geographical obstacles and work to ensure that students perceive a special sense of belonging and community. In K12 distance learning it is just as important that instruction be delivered with a personal touch as it is in the regular classroom. By writing comments, students will begin interacting with each other and –before you know it–teaching one another. The teacher can chime in too of course.

If that is indeed where we are going then it will be important to draw up a list of expectations and etiquette for acceptable Web 2.0 use. I am not sure if this has already been done, but a colleague sent me this link from the Des Moines Register where they have established an etiquette policy for their readers that evidently has been quite successful.

What we’ll allow and what we won’t.

Spelling out a few rules.

So much to do. I’ve decided that I’m going to borrow from others…

Susan and Thomas describe the Personal Pizza project as a fun way to get back into the language and vocabulary that students learned the year before. That would fit perfectly into the review and intro unit that I plan to start off the new KET German II program with. The Personal Pizza could be the first “event” of the Ger II year and provide a context around which the language (themes/ functions/grammar) to be practiced could be organized.

For the project, the students use (or construct) a pizza box which, when opened, shows a pizza–a personal pizza, mind you–that like any normal pizza is divided into slices (I have just 7 listed below.) In each slice the students provide artwork representations –no writing!–according to the following instructions:

1. describe self

2. describe activities you like to do and activities you dislike to do

3. describe 4 things about school

4. describe your favorite season

5. describe the upcoming weekend (using words perhaps / sometimes)

6. describe a typical day

7. complete the thought After school…

For the event Susan explained how she interviews each student one at a time (usually out in the hallway, while the other students work on something else.) Each student must bring his or her pizza box and point to the artwork while talking about each slice in the target language. The teacher uses a rubric that she checks off as the student presents.

Why is this so exciting? We can now do this in a DL context. Web 2.0 platforms make it possible. I can think of many possibilities, but Voicethread and UStream would be two very strong choices. Both are web-based, user friendly, and interactive. Simple podcasting would work too of course.

I was flipping through cable channels the other night and suddenly hit upon something that immediately made me stop. Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” was resonating out of my TV speakers. What was this? I sat dumbfounded for a moment before I realized what I was watching. A music video? MTV? No, it was the Weather Channel. Just a routine forecast for the week. Only this time instead of the usual generic, soulless elevator music, David Gilmore’s haunting four note riff : tum – tum – tum – tum” of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” was the accompaniment. I was mesmerized and watched the remainder of the forecast segment–probably with my mouth open. A commercial came on and snapped me out of my trance but I waited patiently to see what would come on afterwards. The forecast returned. But this time we were back to the weather channel of old. The dream was over.

I remember scoffing back when André Agassi made the famous statement: Image is everything but I finally have to give him credit for recognizing how the human psyche works. Packaging counts.

Over the weekend I attended a great workshop at the Kentucky World Languages Association 2007 Fall Conference called: Putting the Spotlight on Student Performance(s). Susan Marnatti and Thomas Sauer were the presenters.The topic is nothing new. Teachers have long been encouraged to use performance events for assessment in place of traditional tests. This workshop made compelling arguments why they should in fact do so– student achievement increases dramatically! –and provided a handout with prompts for actual events (or as students refer to them: projects) that Susan has used in class. Participants were also advised on ways to begin integrating performance events into instruction. How to begin? According to Susan, one should begin ……at the end.

If you begin planning a unit with the end in mind, i.e. what should students be able to do after they have completed the unit, you can easily create an “event” through which the students can demonstrate their newly acquired abilities. Susan and Thomas recommend writing down a list of “can-do” statements as a way of determining what those abilities should be. Once the event is created, it becomes the focal point of instruction. Everything else falls into place.

What about grammar?

Well, how much grammar will be needed for students to successfully complete the performance event? Do they need to have the ability to use a number of verbs, say about 10-15, in the past tense? If so, then during instructional time students should have ample amounts of practice using 10-15 verbs in the past tense. Everything proceeds in anticipation of the culminating project when students can show off their skills.

There are many advantages to concentrating instruction around such events. One advantage not to be underestimated is that students seem to be AWARE of them . In fact according to Susan they actually LOOK FORWARD to performance events and afterwards even REMEMBER them. Susan related that she frequently hears a comment like “When can we finally do the Doll House project, Frau?” and never one like: “I can’t wait till we take that test on dative prepositions!” After the performance project is completed, the whole class should complete a short list of open-ended statements that the teacher has prepared beforehand. In this way students “can reflect on what they have learned and where they are headed.”

I had seen Susan present a couple of years before about performance assessments and how they tie into the Linguafolio. The newer session had a lot of the same core material from that earlier presentation. The message and discussion are so important however. We need to continue to revisit this topic . Especially so since I would guess that most foreign-language teachers today still use pencil-and -paper, classroom-isolated tests. It’s understandable. After all, a teacher carries such a heavy work load as it is. Additional tasks are heaped on every day…how can they be expected to create curriculum and assessment pieces on their own too?

That question brings up one of the most fundamental messages of the workshop, I think: that the teacher should tailor the performance assessment idea to his or her teaching. Susan stresses how these events should be incorporated into the curriculum one at a time (perhaps one year at a time?!!) Otherwise we risk the danger of teacher overload. We don’t need more work! We need more success! Do one of these a year. For the following year, revisit and tweak the original and try to add another for a different unit.

If performance-based assessment is so good—and I believe it is–the question is how can we get all teachers to integrate it into instruction? Certainly there must be a push from the state and district level. Teachers should be expected to include more and more performance measures in their courses. And yet I would have reservations about steps that imposed teacher compliance all too firmly or in a sweeping manner district wide.

In Virginia, Fairfax County Schools have taken the lead nationally in embracing performance measures by developing a vast resource bank of performance-based tests over the years, the well-known Performance Assessment for Language Students (PALS.) There are two basic types of PALS: written and spoken. For each level of language study, students are expected to complete one written and one spoken PALS for every quarter of the school year in addition to two summative PALS(one spoken, one written) at the completion of the course. Fairfax teachers are encouraged to submit their own PALS prompts according to a template in which proficiency categories are listed: level of discourse, comprehensibility, vocabulary, etc, etc… The pool of ideas is awesome –perhaps FCPS can be convinced to go “open source” with it? (smile) Think how many learners would benefit!

Because the Fairfax County school system is so gigantic (the 13th largest in the country with over 164,000 students) the decision to go with PALS as a district requirement was a massive–and bold– undertaking. But I wonder if a slower approach that leads to gradual integration and teacher ownership would somehow be possible. I know that some Fairfax teachers grumble about the PALS requirement. Large school systems have so many complicated and thorny issues to deal with and I am not presuming to know the answer.

How to incorporate performance events in a K-12 distance-learning curriculum? With the help of technology, there are more possibilities than ever before. I will be drawing up some concrete plans in the next weeks.

If you haven’t checked out Chinesepod.com, do so. A friend pointed it out to me. I have recently been exploring it in the last couple of weeks and have been impressed for several reasons. For one, it’s got a lot of appeal. The overall look is hip and fun and the moderators conduct lessons with pleasant voices full of warmth and humor. Hey, no distance here in this distance learning site! Chinesepod is an inviting place that makes one feel encouraged to give learning Chinese a try.

Another big plus for me is the organization of the content. I know, I know…..it’s old-hat knowledge by now that subject material can be organized by tags (“meta-tags” is the correct term as I have been told) which make everything easily accessible for the user. But for some of us older non digital natives (am I that old?) these things aren’t so obvious. I had an “aha” moment when I realized that this was what we needed for our distance learning program. Course material is tagged by level, theme, and function and is very easy to navigate through. A friend of mine pointed out to me that such a tagging system allows the student more control to self direct learning. Yep. Exactly. Of course. I knew that. It’s all so obvious now.

Another big moment for me with Chinesepod (less of an “aha,” more of an “u huh”) was when I noticed a feature on their site called “the Fix.” The Fix is a short audiocast that helps students practice and retain vocabulary. The approach it uses is much like the Pimsleur method which has the student anticipate the translation for something stated in English before the speaker gives the answer. This causes the learner to quickly access memory and retrieve the word that has just been learned and to say it before the speaker gives it away. You have to think quickly to keep up! After a time through with the new vocabulary, the process is then repeated at a faster pace which further solidifies the learned words in long-term memory.

Having tried out the Pimsleur method last year while trying to learn Russian— ??, ? ?????? ??????? ??-??????!— I was familiar with this approach and have been thinking about it for a while. Actually methods using translation have been a faux pas in the high school classroom for years (the exception here is TPRS ) because of the fundamentalist zeal of immersionist teachers. (Don’t get me wrong….I love immersion, but most high school classrooms do not offer immersive environments.)

My idea was to have some sort of rapid fire translation practice at the end of each lesson. Now that I see that they are using such a technique on Chinesepod, I am encouraged. The question is, will high school age learners buy into it and actually make use of such practice.

The answer? Yes!…that is, if it works. We have to let them self direct learning, remember? They’ll figure it out what works for them.