Making Classrooms Work

So here we are in the 21st Century and still stuck with 18th century schoolrooms and 19th century desks.

I've been exploring different seating arrangements for groups, and still like the easy mobility of wheeled chairs, central gathering places, and ways to quickly create breakouts of small groups that can still see the teacher/board and report back without too much furniture noise.

This younger children's class (described by Amy Spies at TeachingChannel  shows a nice option using the furniture at hand:

The groups of four are open-ended at the side facing the teacher/board, and the space between the desks holds a 3-drawer cabinet with supplies like paper, pencils and crayons:

SteelCase offers a much higher tech option, adopted at the U of Oregon's Yamada Language Lab, that is sleek and classy. Three boards/projection screens allow students sitting in any direction to see what is happening. The teacher is no longer fronting the class--at least in theory--though the computer/projector now seems to be the center:

From the Steelcase video

What students have to say about it is very interesting:

From the Steelcase video

With the flipped classroom, the projection multiplication may be a bit of overkill, but at least there is a strong move to put students' heads together.

Using QR in the Classroom

You may have noticed increasing uses of QR (Quick Response) codes, for example, to make a trail of ecology facts in a national park, or to provide a self-guided tour of a museum exhibition. I've returned to this YouTube video, from the American TESOL Institute channel, several times, as it has some great ideas for using QR (Quick Response) codes with students:



http://youtu.be/V0kdbBTwF7U


The video describes what QR is, how you can make your own, and how you can teach students to make their own for content-based projects, to link to podcasts, to make electronic portfolios, etc. For example, as seen in this image, students can scan the QR with their mobiles to get more information about skeletal structure.





If students construct the content they create reusable learning objects for subsequent classes to read, listen to, and improve.

Thanks to Webheads for finding this great video originally. There are a number of other videos on QR with more ideas in the YouTube sidebar.

EduMOOC

Google's EduMOOC is astounding and fun. You can be in touch with 2500 teachers and learners in the grand experiment in volunteer, free, online learning.

Although the MOOC is just for this summer (July-August), you can use the discussions, videos, and resources (Diigo group) asynchronously. Read all about it at Polly Peterson's Education-Portal blog.
Sign in to Google first to access everything.

EFL CLASSROOM MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

This monthly blog/newsletter from EFL Classroom gives you ideas, resources, and a place to set up your own online classroom. Links to video talks, new online resources, ongoing discussions and blogs, student-created content, ideas for current seasonal holidays, and their own Diigo Group, et al.

EFL Classroom has developed well over the past year or so, and is well worth following.

Teaching Academic Writing

This is a great blog about teaching academic writing. The author, Dr. Rachael Cayley, Univ of Toronto, is obviously an experienced, well-trained teacher of composition. I'm looking forward to the subsequent issues.

Reverse Outlines

I have tagged this post with reading and mind-mapping, as Reverse Outlining is also a very useful technique for understanding academic papers and how extensive texts are organized. I used this technique frequently during paper conferences to help students see where their organization had gone awry.

Be sure to join the CALL-IS Diigo Virtual Software Library to see more on Academic Writing.

Web 3.0

Webhead Moira Hunter tipped me off (see her blog) to this interesting video about Web 3.0, the semantic Web, as seen on Kate Ray's Vimeo site:

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

It gets increasingly interesting as you watch: should the semantic Web have pre-defined ontologies? Of course, Vance Stevens and most Webheads would answer a resounding "no!" If contemporary Web is increasingly about social networking, it is left to developers to help us find and explore new ways of interconnecting.

Teaching Poetry

This great little slideshow, Teaching Poetry, at Slideshare, illustrates many of the types of poems taught by Kenneth Koch in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, my all-time favorite book on how to teach poetry.

Teaching Poetry

View more presentations from mungo13.

You can analyze each slide/poem and then have your students write something similar. It is amazing how rapidly they come to understand what metaphoric language is and how to use it. I have also put some more specific directions and other examples of poetry on my Website at Quicksteps to Teaching Poetry. This was one of the favorite parts of my Liberal Arts Teachers class in English.

A related site, Poetry Tools, offers a nifty little Flash tool so that students can generate some nice little Metaphors right online, or download the tool for desktop use. This is a nice way to introduce the poetry writing sessions suggested by the Teaching Poetry slideshow.


And be sure to get Koch's book if you want to know more. It's available at Amazon.com.

Archival Video Sites

Both OurMedia and the Internet Archive are unbelievably slow and have made their interfaces much more difficult to use. OurMedia just transferred my video to a new address without telling me, and I can't find it at all on the Internet Archive. In OurMedia, a search for tags and for titles and for owner--none of them--didn't come up with the video, but it was still there. Go figure!

I also tried to edit the description in OurMedia to include the Web address of the wiki that also contains the presentation, but with no luck. I was asked to join a group before I could edit my own work--couldn't find any with "education" through the search engine, though I could see a few with that word in the title from a list. I then was told I hadn't completed the CSID (the test of human user), but that box wasn't available at the page where I was doing the editing. No win!

I hope to get the video from the 2008 TESOL presentation embedded here in the blog below. We'll see how long it lasts as a real link!

The address is now http://www.ourmedia.org/node/88432



Another video archive site, AuthorStream is also very slow. My presentation there (no audio) is at
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/ElizabethHS-224813-effect-tech-sla-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/. The sound version apparently has just vanished or was never accepted as an unload because it was too large or the wrong format.

Blip.tv still has the presentation, and seemed to load about the fastest. Unfortunately, it's not a place to take the children...

These sites are very frustrating, and I'm glad I uploaded the presentation to multiple venues. With the economic downturn in 2009, there has been a lot of moving and shaking, and I think there will be more changes in store in early 2010.