Teresa

Hub digest – 11th March, 2022

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The Wednesday Question this week has had more comments than any other, I believe (except perhaps the one about purple). It would be wonderful for more people to add what they’re doing to combat native speakerism so keep those comments coming! 

We’ve also had questions this fortnight around time management, giving feedback in training and AI bias. Rachel Roberts shared a link to her Festival of Freelancing, coming up next week, along with a question about where freelancers need most support. Plus there were questions around repurposing flashcards and how you approach first lessons with one-to-one learners.

We also had a fabulous webinar with Paulina Woźniak on flipping the classroom and our regular coffee breaks.

Teaching through the senses

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Teaching through the senses - with Fiona Mauchline (webinar)
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Fiona Mauchline joined us for a fabulous session to get learners using different senses in the class. Fiona is an ELT superpower: teacher, materials writer, teacher trainer, #SIGTweetMeet host on Twitter, EVE co-founder and much more. You’ll also spot in Fiona’s session that there were a few images taken from ELTpics, which she co-curated. We started off with a chat about networking online during the pandemic and a return to face-to-face conferences.

Around the ten-minute mark we stopped nattering and moved onto Fiona’s topic (!) and she talked abut the importance of memories and how our senses can be suddenly triggered – in fact, we can even trigger these sensory memories without needing to experience the actual sense. 

These are examples of episodic memory, one of the three types of memory we have. Declarative memory – the memory of facts; procedural – the memory of how you do things which becomes second-nature (like muscle memory); and episodic memory which we use the least in the classroom. This is the memory of events which calls on all the different senses. If we were to use it as much as we use declarative and procedural memory in lessons, it would make the language learning process much more memorable for our learners.

Around the twenty-minute mark, Fiona went on to talk about the areas of the brain used in language learning and how they’re connected: the caudate nucleus, amygdala and hippocampus. It’s really interesting to think that grammar and lexis are ‘stored’ in different areas of the brain and that depending on when these different areas develop, learners are more or less effective in remembering concepts.

Neurologically speaking, we have six senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and proprioception – the sense of place and movement. This is the sense which enables you to walk around the house at night in the dark, or to touch your nose with your eyes closed.

Fiona shared an activity then called the Improv Box – you put your hand into a position and your brain decide what you’re holding (as opposed to imagining you’re holding an apple and moving your hand into that position). It’s a great activity which works as well on Zoom as in a face-to-face classroom. 

Another activity is a memory map in which you give learners a blank map to fill with vocabulary. Then one learner closes their eyes and their partner leads them around their map giving a tour, “On the right there’s a courgette and if you continue walking, you’ll see a sandwich at the end of the street.” After leading them through the map, the learner who had their eyes closed retraces the route, giving the direactions.

Next up was an idea to use your inner nose. Before the lesson, think of three things which trigger olfactory memory for you. During the lesson, have learners close their eyes and introduce the first ‘smell’ and have learners write down some words they associate with it, such as an adjective, an object, a place and so on. Fiona’s three typical starting points for this activity are coffee, freshly-cut grass and swimming pool. Give learners time to compare their words and then put them all on the board in feedback – you can then use this as a starting point for a creative writing activity. For example, you could have learners imagine they’re in one of the places which came out of the wordpool.

For touch, you can use the old classic of taking an unknown object into the class – such as a spurtle – and have learners speculate about what it is and what it’s used for. You can also use pairs of items and have learners compare them. For example, it could be two stones – and learners don’t even need to feel them themselves to imagine what the differences between them might be.

To trigger sound, you can use visualisations using your voice or music. I absolutely love visualisations because they’re so easy to incorporate into the lesson and are great for emergent language and personalisation. Fiona highlighted that this is a great opportunity to bring L1 into the classroom as well, as translation triggers the caudate nucleus. It’s easy to bring the different senses into the lesson and you can make the visualisation as big as you want and have learners explore a small area or a much larger space. 

The next idea would work much better in a dark face-to-face class rather than in the onlne environment as the activity plays on the 3D nature of the elements involved. You start with a single item, such as a lit candle, and have learners make notes about how it makes them feel. Then they close their eyes and you add another element, such as a doll. Again, learners open their eyes and make notes on ow the story they’re imagining is developing. When they close their eyes again, you remove the doll and add another item such as a half-full or half-empty glass. When learners close their eyes the final time, you blow out the candle.

The next idea with sight involves showing three pictures for learners to choose from. It’s good to choose three different images to give learners more choice, and also to choose images which doesn’t have declarative knowledge in it, i.e. if you have three places, choose locations which don’t show exactly where they are so learners won’t have background knowledge of the place. You can do the activity as well using just three words, e.g. forest or baby buggy.

Such inspiring ideas to try out in our classes! Thanks Fiona 🤩

Hub digest – 25th February, 2022

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Two months of the year gone now here in the Hub! It’s been a great couple of weeks with another Wonder-ful coffee break as well as a fabulous session from Fiona Mauchline on teaching through the senses.

We had some interesting questions popping up in the Facebook group too. Our Wednesday Questions focussed on self-esteem and backchannelling, and there were also questions around structuring 1-to-1 classes and standardization and bias in oral exams. There was also another fabulous lesson plan from Silvina Mascitti together with Bhavna Gupta on World Englishes, a query around using have or have got and a call for volunteers for the Candles of Hope for Afghanistan project.

Hub digest – 11th February, 2022

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Hello Hubbers! It’s been a fabulous couple of weeks in the Hub, although unfortunately our webinar with Elena Soboleva had to be rescheduled…details of the new date coming soon!

We had some interesting Wednesday Questions, one inspired by Emily Bryson and the fabulous #drawingELT fortnightly challenge on what CPD means to you, and the other coming from another of our top Hubbers, Charlotte Giller, on how people are bringing fun into their classes this February.

There was some interesting chat as well around the future of coursebooks, teaching visually-impaired learners and a lesson plan on Fleetwood Mac’s song about perseverance, Don’t Stop.

We also used Wonder for our coffee breaks this fortnight and we’ll try the same format again for a few more sessions and then see which people prefer.

A Conversation about the Metaverse and Virtual Reality Language Learning

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A conversation about the Metaverse and virtual reality - with Nergiz Kern (webinar)
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This week we were joined by Nergiz Kern with a fascinating chat about virtual reality. Nergiz is Head of Research at Immerse and investigates how VR can be used in immersive language teaching.  Back in 2008 after Nergiz did her DELTA, she explored online teaching and discovered EVO – Electronic Village Online, an association which has been running an online conference for ELT teachers since 2001. Through attending one of their sessions, she found out about a virtual world called Second Life which many teachers were using in language education. Second Life is an online environment you can create and use for teacher training, teaching, socialising, networking and more. To read more about Nergiz’s experience in this virtual world, you can check out her blog. Nergiz mentions that one of the appeals of Second Life for teachers was that they could create the environment they wanted and that rather than being a game, it was a space to use. That’s not to say that games can’t be used in a pedagogically sound way and Nergiz highlights that a vrtual world has quite a playful element as you can design your own avatar and it might have a more cartoon feel.

We chatted briefly as well about Minecraft, which is also an environment created by users and has been popular with many teachers for langauge and mainstream education. Minecraft has developed an educational version of the platform and Cambridge Assessment have also created some additional features within Minecraft to support English language learning.

Then we went on to talk about the metaverse, and Nergiz introduced the idea of Gartner’s hype cycle: when there’s a new piece of technology, there’s a period of hype and then a ‘trough of disillusionment’ – tools, devices and apps which survive this trough then become normalised. Nergiz says that virtual reality is now normalised in many areas outside of education, but it has also grown in use in education in recent years.

The metaverse is certainly nothing new but perhaps with the pandemic the hype is back, with companies investing heavily in VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). However, Nergiz was quick to point out what the metaverse is not: it’s not virtual reality, although this is one way of accessing it. AR, which can be accessed through tablets and phones, is also part of the metaverse. And the metaverse is a single entity: an iteration of the internet, the internet as a 3D space.

This will happen gradually and nobody knows exactly what it will look like as yet. Although people have been researching it for the past couple of decades and there are hopes it will be a fully-developed reality in the next ten years, the development will take time – so we won’t suddenly wake up one morning in the metaverse.

“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

This quote from Matthew Ball, which thankfully Nergiz explains in more detail around the 18-minute mark, is a concise definition of what the metaverse will be.

A very good question which Nergiz brought up is, “Why do we need to know about this as teachers?” And the answer is simple: this is going to become the internet and we won’t be able to avoid it. It’s not going to be another app or tool which you might not need to use, it will be unavoidable. This doesn’t mean that you need to devote all your waking hours to learning about it! But it can make teaching and learning more interesting.

Nergiz mentioned a pilot course which had been done with Japanese students by a teacher at the University of Sheffield who felt optimistic about his experience using VR in education. You can read about his experience here. 

When you hear VR, you might think of different things. For example, you can find 360º videos which are a form of VR and with Google goggles, you can access these environments in a cheap way. Nergiz shared some other hardware which people are using and also said that the tech is developing so that you no longer need to have hand-held controllers as cameras on the headset pick up your movements and transmit them to your avatar.

Currently, there isn’t a lot of VR in education. Second Life is still popular, and there are government- and EU-funded projects ongoing, but it takes time to develop your environment and onboard learners. The Google goggles and alternatives are popular and some have been designed with learning programs inbuilt so there’s no need for an internet connection with the headset. There’s also a company called ImmerseMe which is developing self-study language-learning programs through VR. There are some other environments which can be accessed for free, such as Mozilla Hubs and AltspaceVR. 

Immerse on the other hand is a teaching application in which there are different scenes a teacher can take their students to. But within each scene there are fixed and placeable objects, such as a board, and Immerse gives you the opportunity to monitor learners far more easily than on videoconferencing platforms as you can send learners to areas and thanks to spatial audio, you can hear them quietly from a distance or ‘physically’ move closer to them. However, you can also place learners on different audio channels to allow you to listen in on their conversations without interrupting them – a teacher’s dream! There’s also a feature which allows you to rally learners, i.e. bring them all back to focusing on you after an activity 😄

A further benefit is that lessons can be recorded and then viewed from different angles, enabling teachers to develop as they can focus on learner participation or motivation and really analyse moments of the lesson.

We went on to chat a little about the possibility of the introduction of VR and the metaverse widening the divide in education. Nergiz highlighted that there are some apps which can be used offline or which have a low data requirement. There are also options for the VR experience to be a part of the physical classroom so teachers could have a set of headsets and incorporate VR pair- or group-work as part of the lesson whilst other learners are completing a different task. It is also possible with some headsets to cast the experience to a screen so whilst a couple of learners might be experiencing VR, others can be involved and perhaps offering support. 

She highighted as well that many programmes can be accessed via different devices at the same time. So for example, a learner could access Immerse with a VR headset and interact with another learner who’s coming in via the desktop app.

A question came in about what we need to consider before adopting VR. Nergiz points out that there will be some training involved with teaching through VR, similarly to how you learnt to teach in the physical classroom or online. She’s also keen to point out that VR is an experiential platform and that you wouldn’t take your learners to this environment to lecture them on grammar. There should be active learning, with learners manipulating objects and actually doing things within the environment.

As with all tech, there will be some teething problems and you’ll need to help students with audio or other issues. It is also currently more difficult to write in the virtual environment, though there are developments happening in this aspect. With a desktop version you can type, but with an immersive VR experience, you would need to consider how to incorporate this skill into your lessons.

A couple of questions for you to consider:

  • How would you like to use VR in your lessons?
  • Would you prefer for it to be an element within the physical classroom or a fully remote lesson?

It was an incredibly enlightening session - my mind was blown by the possibilities! Huge thanks to Nergiz for the chat 😁

Hub digest – 28th January, 2022

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There’s been lots of interesting chat in the Hub this past fortnight. In the run-up to Nergiz Kern’s Conversation about the Metaverse and Virtual Reality Language Learning, we asked what different environments people had experienced as a teacher or student in a Wednesday Question. And the following week, we asked about delegating – both as a teacher and in management roles. 

Hubbers have also been sharing some great content: there was a post with an IPA version of Wordle and ideas for low-prep online activities for young learners.

Speaking of young learners, this week we’ll be joined by Elena Soboleva to talk about early years literacy. See you there!