Webinars – Page 9

@Jane Austen: from heroines to media influencers

August 24, 2022April 8, 2022 by Teresa

First of all, apologies if you can’t watch the video – there are some clips of a web series and other adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. This was Romina’s second webinar in the Hub and you can catch up on her first session, Stories to Transform Challenging Behaviour, which had ideas around how you could use storybooks to work with behavioural problems in the young learner classroom. In this session though, she was looking at working with older learners on a transmedia project.

To begin, Romina talked about how storytelling has evolved over the years, from oral expression, graphic storytelling, written narratives to screens and shared a wonderful idea of a museum of storytelling from Carlos A. Scolari. She then gave a definition of a transmedia story:

“one that is told across multiple media and platforms, but some of the receivers do not limit themselves to consuming cultural products, but take up the task of adding new texts to the story.”

Transmedia tells that the content of a story can be found in other media: a series, a game, a toy, a podcast, and so on. For example, in the Star Wars franchise, there are films, TV series, fan fiction and fa films, comics, books, video games, toys and tabletop games.

Romina went on to talk about the reasons for using multiple media: each different channel or format will reach our students in a different way. Many of our teenage learners spend a lot of time online and see stories through their social media so Romina wondered how we could include this digital practice in the literature classroom. As Carlos A. Scolari highlights, there is a “digital dissonance” between the ways teens use media outside school and the structured ways they use it inside classroom settings.

We then watched the introductory line of Pride and Prejudice from a YouTube series which retells the story in the 21st century, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The character of Lizzie Bennet is making a video in her bedroom and this in itself creates a more relatable setting for our teenage learners. The series itself has evolved into other formats: as well as 100 episodes on YouTube, there are two books and various social media accounts. As Robert Pratten highlighted in 2011, “In transmedia storytelling, engagment with each successive media heightens the audience’s understanding, enjoyment and affection for the story.” Through social media, consumers can also interact with other consumers, posting comments, asking questions and sharing ideas.

Romina played an audio recording from one of her students explaining what she had gained through engaging with the content of the story in different ways and went on to talk about how the topos, mythos and ethos of the content are shared across different media. The mythos relates to the struggles the characters encounter in a story. The topos is the setting on the story – which may change without affecting the core storyline. The ethos is the code of behaviour that characters and society follow. Analysing the final episode of the web series, Romina pointed out how the mythos had been adapted by the writers to maintain the core principles of the original story (an independent woman looking to find her own place in society) in an updated setting.

Romina then suggested how we could incorporate different strategies and Bloom’s Taxonomy through using transmedia projects: learning by doing, problem-solving, simulating, evaluating, creating and more. Before watching one of the videos her students had created, Romina shared some useful questions for students to consider when creating their own content: Who is the audience? How can I organise the information? What communication strategies will I use?

She also shared some questions learners could answer when consuming content, such as:

Do you idenitfy with any of the characters?
Can you imagine a particular scene in a different context?
Would you write any part of the story in a completely different way?
How could the story be adapted to another format: play, videogame, comic?

To finish, Romina shared some examples of projects her learners had created through genially, which allows you to create interactive images, and Canva, which allows for a more structured presentation.

We ended with a clip from a video with Henry Jenkins about storytelling and how the public have more input in media. The owner of the story has changed as consumers become prosumers (combining produce and consume) and the audience add their own ideas to expand the stories they encounter.

Romina ended by saying that her students had been highly motivated through the projects and found them an appealling way of engaging with classic literature.

What’s Your Status? On the Relationship Between Mental Health Education and ELT

August 23, 2022April 8, 2022 by Teresa

What's Your Status On the Relationship Between Mental Health Education and English Language Teaching - with Daniel Becker (webinar)

Daniel Becker, a lecturer at the university of Münster, joined us to talk about mental health in ELT, a topic which has been largely neglected in research in our profession so far. He started off by talking about the current romanticisation of mental illness – a trend on social media in which mental illness is a character trait and provides emotional capital. However, he highlights that for all the posts which romanticise it, there are as many posts fiercely criticising these posts. He feels we can learn a lot about the place mental health has in current discourse – it’s more destigmatised now and teenagers will much more readily discuss their mental health in public. Unfortunately, research from WHO in 2021 identified that around 14% of teenagers suffer from some form of mental disorder, such as anxiety and depression. There was also a significant increase in teenage suicides over the past decade.

Improving Mental Health Education (or mental health literacy) is one step that experts are taking in order to raise public awareness around prevention, early intervention and treatment and say that schools need to fulfil an educational mission to support teenagers and their vulnerability to life stress.

EFL and Mental Health Education: some potentials

Daniel suggests there are four levels at which we can find potential to include MHE:

Linguistic level – the fact that interactions take place in a foreign language may help us to feel more comfortable discussing more difficult topics in an L2. We have a fundamentally different relationship to our L1 and have a much more emotional connection to it. The EFL classroom also tends to be a safe space for learners to speak.

Textual level – learning doesn’t happen in a cultural vacuum and we can introduce a variety of different texts, including young adult fiction which deal specifically with mental health. Daniel highlights texts such as 13 Reasons Why as a slice of teenage life which enables our learners to build empathy. Literature has the power to bring complex topics to the stage and provides access to them.

Cultural level – language teaching also involves the teaching of cultural competence and it’s important to recognise that in different cultural contexts, the topic of mental health may be addressed differently. Daniel talked about how our view of the world is a social construct and that how we approach mental health very much depends on our cultural background.

Discursive level – all the skills that we learn enable us to participate in discourse, both understanding and creating it. Daniel highlighted that this discursive level is quite an abstract concept but as an overall goal of the EFL classroom we should be discourse-able.

Current barriers to Mental Health Education in EFL

Daniel continued with an overview of three potential barriers:

Teacher level – if teachers feel uncomfortable with the topic, it’s likely that it won’t make it into the classroom. Teachers in a 2015 Canadian study identified that they felt ill-equipped to deal with mental health issues. This lack of knowledge and methodologies means that teachers are more likely to leave it out of the classroom rather than include it, feeling a lack of mental health literacy themselves. With the topic still be fairly stygmatised, many teachers might feel a risk of offending their students or evoking emotional conflict in students. You may not know who in the classroom has been affected by issues and it can be dangerous to trigger students, or the teacher themself – student and teacher wellbeing are important.

Material level – even if teachers want to include the topic in their classes, there may not be appropriate materials to do so. Most textbooks from established publishers don’t include mental health in any capacity. Some textbooks do make (explicit) reference to mental health. For example, Daniel shared an image from a book called Lighthouse 2 (2013) in which a character is dealing with her parents’ divorce and showing symptoms on the spectrum of depression, and a text from Camden Market 6 around bullying and feelings of anxiety stemming from it. An issue that he highlighted is that we don’t have experience of tasks which can accompany difficult topics to deal with them effectively.

Curricular level – mental health as a topic is there, yet not there, in German curricula guidelines. For example, they should be taught language of ‘expressing feelings, including happiness, sadness and mourning’; however, there is also the idea of the language teacher following principles of a global market framework and how the focus shifted from input to output in terms of meeting certain competency levels. Daniel asked whether the concept of an ideal intercultural communicator leaves any room to deal with particular topics.

Moving forward: solutions (?) and future directions

Daniel is optimistic that mental health will continue to grow in importance in EFL as there is already research being down in non-ELT contexts. He shared a blog which deal with tough topics and provide tasks and structure for potential lessons. He also mentioned research carried out by Hannah L. Weisman in which experts were invited to come to a school for a week-long programme to share their experience and expertise with a group of students. The students learnt about stigma and taboos and created posters to raise awareness. Although there are fewer EFL materials, there are other materials which could be adapted, such as Psych 2 Go which has short videos to improve mental health literacy. Daniel also shared the news that a group of adolescent students contacted one of their politicians highlighting the importance of the topic after witnessing friends and classmates dealing with mental health issues.

To finish, Daniel suggested that the EFL classroom is quite liminal – there is potential, but there are also a number of barriers. We can follow in the footsteps of Hannah L. Weisman and cooperate with mental health experts, or take courses to increase our own understanding of mental health.

Please feel free to share any links in the comments!

I flipped and ellos fliparon

August 23, 2022April 8, 2022 by Teresa

The fabulous Paulina Klaudia Woźniak joined us to share what she’s been doing with her teen classes. You can catch more of Paulina’s ideas on her YouTube channel, blog and on social media. After a very enthusiastic welcome, she kicked off with a definition of what the flipped classroom approach is:

Flipped learning is a methodology that helps teachers to prioritize active learning during class time by assigning students lecture materials and presentations to be viewed at home or outside of class.

People have been talking about a flipped approach recently, but it isn’t a particularly new concept – for example, in the past we might have had a biology lesson and the teacher would ask us to read the following chapter before the next class.

To start with, Paulina talked about three of the fears she had before incorporating the approach into her teaching.

Time: preparing classes is already time-consuming, but making videos for the flipped approach might take more time, particularly at first.
The “cool” factor: what if the students don’t like the content?
Students’ engagement: will they watch it for the sake of watching it or will they really engage with the content?

Time

With experience, Paulina says she can now create videos in five minutes. She uses presentations and narration, some of which she can borrow from coursebooks, and has a great tip that you can save PowerPoint presentations as video, which you can immediately upload to YouTube. Canva is also a great site for creating visually-appealling presentations.

Paulina tends to use a screencasting programme, such as Screencast-O-Matic – you can record up to 20 minutes and add background music. Adobe Spark (now Adobe Express) is another option and offers a special deal for educators, though you need to have an email address from an official institution.

Another option is to set up a camera or ask someone to record you whilst you do the presentation at the board.

You can of course always look for precreated content as YouTube is filled with videos of other teachers explaining grammar points. Through YouTube as well you can check the analytics to see how many people have viewed a video and from where.

The “cool” factor and students’ engagement

Paulina shared three tricks such as mentioning students’ names, something that happened in a lesson or including statements about the students so they have to listen and tell you whether what you said is true or false. Another trick is to purposefully make a mistake and tell students to keep an eye/ear out for it – this also helps as it’s good for students to see that we make mistakes as well. You can also give students a task, for example ‘How many times did you see … during the video?’ Adding a sound they have to listen for is a sneaky way of getting them to listen to the content as if they’re looking for something visual, they may not concentrate so much on the presentation. It’s also worth highlighting to the students that this is homework instead of doing activities from the workbook – hopefully if students can access the content on their phones, there’s less of an excuse for not doing the work!

What happens if they don’t watch the video?

You can put students into pairs of who did and didn’t watch the video so they can teach each other.

You can watch the video again in class (though Paulina says she’s not keen on this as a solution as it takes up classtime). She tends to set extra work if they have to watch the video in class so students see the benefit of doing the preparation work.

Some other things to consider:

You can link to other videos on YouTube at the end of your content. This can be other content that you’ve prepared, for example a higher level video to encourage students to do more or it can be further examples of the same point from other creators.

When creating the video, consider whether you’ll want to reuse the video in the future (and how much you want to personalise it to that group).

The flipped approach doesn’t only work for grammar. You can also use it for your exam preparation classes, looking at the different parts of each paper and sharing exam techniques.

You can also use a URL shortener, such as bitly, to make it easier for students to access the content. Check with your centre what the policy is for contacting students (e.g. with a WhatsApp group or following them on Instagram).

Teaching through the senses

March 3, 2022March 3, 2022 by Teresa

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 🤩

A Conversation about the Metaverse and Virtual Reality Language Learning

February 4, 2022February 1, 2022 by Teresa

A conversation about the Metaverse and virtual reality - with Nergiz Kern (webinar)

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 😁

Graphic Facilitation

January 14, 2022January 14, 2022 by Teresa

Emily Bryson joined us to share how graphic facilitation – using simple visuals with our learners – can really help with communication in the classroom and beyond. Emily uses simple graphics in a huge variety of ways: doing social media posts, lesson planning, making Christmas or birthday cards, getting students to reflect – there are lots of ideas on her blog for how to include more graphics.

After a quick introduction (using visuals, of course!), Emily shared her ideas as to why drawing is such a handy skill for the classroom:

it aids memory
it’s great for facilitating peer feedback and checking understanding
it’s supportive and stimulating
it uses your whole brain
it’s fun 😁

As Emily mentioned, it’s particularly useful for students who are perhaps illiterate in their own language or who are learning the Roman script alongside learning English. It’s also great for helping develop fine motor skills and building your students’ visual vocabulary. You can start with very simple, basic icons and then build on them to develop a visual dictionary.

Feel the fear and draw anyway

There are a lot of visual templates available online as well as the Noun Project which has a huge bank of simple icons. The quality of the drawing is less important than the communication of the idea, so Emily says you shouldn’t worry about creating a perfect visual representation of something. Emily shared a couple of activities to highlight how much more visually appealing notes and the whiteboard can be incorporating drawings into them.

In terms of drawing during the lesson, Emily mentioned using a visualiser, an app called CamScanner or using a whiteboard or flipchart – the benefit of which is that you can reuse some pages, such as your classroom rules.

Then we went on to try out some activities. This one on the right is a simple relfection activity that students can use to think about different things that happened to them in the previous year. Alternatively, you could change the date on the signpost and use it as a looking forward task for students to think about what they hope to achieve this year. On Zoom, students could annotate the image or you could share it on Jamboard and have them add sticky notes for each point. Emily also suggested giving them more choice: allowing them to choose which areas they would like to reflect on or giving them the topics and having them design their own icons.

Another template she shared was for students to think about goals for the year and then their bigger dreams and ambitions. Again, very simple with a bullseye (circles) and then arrows or stars. She also showed a stepping stones template to think about one goal and what you need to do to get there.

We did some drawing then, with Emily highlighting how all drawings are made up of simple lines and squiggles. She noted that the alphabet is made up of lines and squiggles, so if you can write the alphabet, you can draw 😁 And as she says, when you do something for the first time, it’s unlikely to be amazing, but with a little bit of practice, your icons will become much easier and quicker to draw. We looked at drawing a couple of animals and then thought about some classroom icons, such as a lightbulb, reflection, read, listen, write and so on.

Emily is running a six-week course to help teachers and other ELT professionals to develop their graphic facilitation skills and it’s filled with live sessions, video tutorials, tutor support and lots of practical ideas for the classroom. The next course is starting Monday 17th January, but check out future course dates on Emily’s blog too.

You can also develop your drawing skills and get ideas from peers with #drawingELT on social media – Emily posts a theme every fortnight for people to share their ideas.