My English language institute offers tutoring services for international students in two forms: classroom tutoring and one-on-one conversation partners. The tutoring program has recently requested that an orientation program be designed for the university students who have signed up to be classroom tutors. As a group, we have met for about 3 hours together on December 6 and 17 and completed individual tasks outside of our meetings to bring this oral skills classroom tutor training orientation together.

Along with the tutoring office, my colleagues Beth Sheppard, Britt Johnson and I have drafted together an orientation program that includes explanations for where students’ listening and speaking skills are in each of the seven levels of our intensive program as well as some general information on professional conduct, basic pronunciation problem areas for our biggest populations of students, and how to properly handle situations of cross-cultural conflict if and when they present themselves in group discussions.

I have enjoyed designing this training to help classroom tutors understand more about their role as professionals as well as how to navigate the waters of cross cultural conflicts.

I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado from November 5th to 9th, 2012. For those who are unfamiliar with EDUCAUSE, they are: “a nonprofit association and the foremost community of IT leaders and professionals committed to advancing higher education”. This year I attended several interesting sessions on iPads, learning analytics, and effective online assessment. Here are some of the conference highlights that are most useful to teaching faculty in my department.

Note: I’m going to post several links below which might require registration for an EDUCAUSE account in order to view. Registration is free for most and definitely free for UO affiliates.

Poster sessions

I presented a poster session about the pedagogical benefits of video-recorded assessment and it was a great opportunity to not only discuss, but glean resource ideas from technologically-savvy conference participants who work in higher education. My session was only an hour long and I only wish I could have spent more time interacting and sharing ideas with participants. There were some other poster sessions that I found to be very interesting and potentially relevant in the context of higher education.  You can view most of those posters as well as my own by clicking on this link: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/poster-gallery

Webcasts

Several of the sessions were recorded and will be available to view for the next 90 days or so. You can login to EDUCAUSE and view them here: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/E12-private-recordings

One of my favorite sessions that was geared towards teaching and learning was Effective Online Assessment: Scalable Success Strategies. You can view that session here: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2012/effective-online-assessment-scalable-success-strategies

2013 Annual Conference Call for Proposals

If you are an ed tech enthusiast/nerd like me and you’d like to share your ideas about how to effectively use technology in your teaching, I highly recommend attending this conference. In both years that I have attended, have been very impressed with the level of organization, communication, and professionalism put forth by the conference organizers. The 2013 conference will be held in Anaheim, CA in mid-October and the deadline for conference proposals is: February 4, 2013. For more information or to submit a proposal, here is a link to their website: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference

If you have any questions about EDUCAUSE, feel free to comment on this post or email me for more information. EDUCAUSE is a great professional organization to be involved with if you are interested in technology in higher education. The UO is well-represented with IT leaders at these conferences and it would be great to see more UO teaching faculty represented too!

My colleague Beth Sheppard, who teaches teacher training courses in distance education, invited me to be a guest speaker in her online course, PALSS (Practical Applications in Listening and Speaking Skills). With her help, I gave a 45 minute webinar on what has proven to be my topic for summer and fall 2012: pedagogical benefits and challenges of video-recorded assessment. This webinar took place on Tuesday, November 20, 2012.

This webinar was delivered during real time via Blackboard Connect. It was a new experience for me to use this interface to connect with eight or so English teachers from around the world. Although they could only hear me speak, they were able to participate via synchronous chat. While I gave my talk and showed my PowerPoint slides, Beth posed questions and highlight key points from my talk in the chat interface.

Since the discussion in this interface is lecture style, one way that we were able to make this webinar more interactive was through the use of polling. Every few slides or so during my talk, I would post a question and multiple choice answers that the participants could select. As a group, we could all see the answers that every participant gave. It was interesting and very relevant to use polling as a way of gauging audience knowledge and future application interest on a given topic.

After I was finished with my talk, the focused turned to the online course participants. I was pleased to see that a few of them regularly use some sort of video-recording component as evidence when assessing their students. A few were motivated to try it and the discussed turned towards ways that they could fully or partially implement this task into their own pedagogy.

After attending EDUCAUSE and hearing about the ways that participants around the world use video in their assessment of speaking task, one key phrase that stands out in my mind is BYOD: bring your own (mobile) device. This philosophy of technology use in education encourages institutions to have students utilize the mobile devices that they already own as opposed to spending money on technology initiatives to provide the same centralized service. It’s a very interesting topic for higher education, especially for the majority of university students who I teach, whom often have one or several mobile devices at their disposal. I hope to expand more on this topic another time.

My colleague, Robert Elliot, invited me to be a guest moderator in his distance education course: Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web during the week of November 4th to the 9th, 2012. I have had the pleasure of guest moderating this same course taught by him in previous terms and this term was equally interesting and beneficial. English teachers throughout the world are the participants in these distance education courses.

What I enjoy most about this course is the content; engaging teachers on how to utilize technology effectively in their pedagogy is one of my professional passions. I find it so gratifying to teach educators how to incorporate and enhance their curriculum with technology. This passion began when I was a university student at the UO, I worked at what is now called the UO Help Desk. I was responsible for helping students, faculty, and staff with their email accounts and their technical problems with their computers. I found that I loved being able to support faculty and staff do something more efficiently or more effectively and thusly making the educational process more interesting and engaging for students. Teaching technological skills is very hands-on and I find that it gives me a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when I can help educators become comfortable with and develop a sense of ownness of their own technological skills.

There are pedagogically-related themes throughout the course and the week that I moderated the topics were student-centered large classes and interactive PowerPoint. I found this topic and the readings associated with it to be very relevant to what’s happening to several universities worldwide including the UO: increased student enrollment to cover the lack of support for public universities. This topic was highly relevant and the international participants, being no stranger to large class sizes, were able to offer some creative solutions to make ever-growing language courses more interactive and student-centered.

Since I was guest moderating in this course during the same week that I attended the EDUCAUSE conference, my ears were tuned in for readings and resources that I might be able to share with these students. Engaging students by having them answer multiple choice polling questions on their mobile device was a big trend at the conference, so I linked them to an article on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) from EDUCAUSE. Additionally, their materials included some videos from Garr Reynolds who is most famous for his Presentation Zen principles on well-designed professional presentations. Here is one of the videos that I have used with my students in the past as an example of what not to do in a presentation:

It was great to be able to participate in this course and I hope I will have the opportunity to participate again in future terms.

A group of my colleagues and I have been working together since 2010 on the topic of evaluating what speaking and listening skills that international university students need in order to succeed in American university classes. Beth Sheppard, Jennifer Rice, Brendan DeCoster, Korey Rice, Nate Soelberg, and I have self-referenced our team and our project as NARTs (Needs-Analysis Research Task).

Together we designed an instrument and set out to observe several university classes, targeting the classes which had high enrollments of international students. We put our qualitative observations together and made some recommendations to our own teaching faculty in December 2011.

In March 2012, our observations were presented about at CaTESOL and again at NAFSA in May 2012.

In October of 2012, our proposal was accepted for TESOL 2013. These are the words that most English teaching professionals hope to read in October of every year:

Congratulations! Your proposal titled, “Re-evaluating the Speaking and Listening Demands of University Classes,” has been accepted for the TESOL 2013 convention program, held on 20-23 March 2013 in Dallas, Texas USA. Being accepted is quite an accomplishment; the acceptance rate was only 26%.

Additionally, we are waiting to hear back from TESL-EJ to see if our journal submission was accepted.

Exciting times for the NARTs!

On September 27, 2012, I had the privilege giving a 20 minute workshop to 26 former online participants in the Access Teacher Development Online Program (ATDOP). This group is comprised of English teachers from countries all over the world who visited the UO as part of their online course from September 24 to October 16, 2012.

I gave a mini-lesson on the pedagogical benefits of video-recorded assessment. I showed two video examples of how this technical practice can be effective and they made some great conclusions during their break-out together about the content of the entire workshop and how they could apply it to their own teaching. Being English teachers, they were active participants during the lesson and also during the break-out session afterwards. I was especially impressed at their level of engagement and enthusiasm in the workshop since many of them had traveled to the USA only a few days prior; if they were jet-lagged, they didn’t show it at all.

The ATDOP participants made the most of their time at the UO and the surrounding areas in Oregon. The weather was very cooperative and beautiful for them; mostly sunny skies and cool temperatures. They traveled to many beautiful locations near Eugene and attended some UO athletic events. They even hosted a few cooking nights in the new Global Scholars Hall to share food from their cultures, which I am very sorry to say that I didn’t have the chance to attend. The food in all of the photos looked delicious!

At the end of their two weeks in Eugene, there was a farewell party for the participants before they went began the next part of their journey to Washington DC. It was great to spend time with and learn the perspectives of these English teachers who are committed to their professions and who are committed to teaching English in a variety of different environments.

Thank you ATDOP Fall 2012 participants for sharing your culture and your zeal for English teaching!