'Zoooooom' the learner, not the teacher

                    Making online teaching a personalised learning experience. part 1 

Like we said earlier, with less than 24 hours’ notice, we were asked to start teaching online. Support came later. Many colleges, schools and universities hurriedly offered teachers help with teaching – to match textbook content with e-content, deliver lectures online, give homework and conduct exams.

Just like in a classroom, the teacher enters, opens the textbook, delivers a lecture, asks questions, gives notes, assigns homework and schedules tests. 

Do we see a pattern? We were repeating the very familiar pattern of the face-to face classroom in online contexts. That’s where we went wrong. 

We attempted to replicate the classroom model using tech resources. What we couldn’t replicate, we brushed under the carpet. What we should have done instead was adapt.

In this and the next few posts, I’ll talk about how technology can augment and better classroom teaching. How we can use technology to do what the teacher cannot do. And that's why we CALL it TELL. It's no longer computer assisted language learning, it's technology enhanced language learning. 💥     

The first couple of days of covid lockdown and live classes using Zoom, I observed my son’s teacher going on fervently about polynomials, and students in the class busy arguing about PUBG. Discussions raged on which is better - Kar98k or Vector; how to tame a zombie in Minecraft; who one can trade football cards with; who was whose latest girlfriend… anything except polynomials. And, in the midst of all these, suddenly someone pipes up, “Ma’am, there’s a bird on your window sill” and yet another, “Ma’am, whose picture is that on your wall?” and "Ma'am, is this white board in your house?"  

And the teacher struggled to get back to polynomials.  

Less than three days of live video classes, the school realised the dangers of allowing students to chat or use the microphone. So, they disabled student chats, videos and muted microphones. We silenced them. 

And, the students found other things to do; they went on to do things that interested them – some ate, some played music, some drew, some read storybooks, some played digital games, and yet others played with their dogs 😉 I saw this in my home too.   

                                          With Pretzel while a class is in progress  

Now, if we pause to think, we realise that replicating classroom lecturing using Zoom (or any other synchronous videoconferencing or meeting tools) does not serve the same purpose as face-to-face classroom lectures. Disabling students’ chat, video or audio is equivalent to stopping two-way communication that is the core of all face-to-face classrooms. Let me explain.

In classroom lectures, the teacher speaking to students is the primary channel of communication. There’s also a second channel from students back to the teacher. This is the feedback that the teacher receives. 

Face-to-face classroom lectures revolve around feedback of various sorts. We constantly look for signs of comprehension – a nod, a frown, a distant look, open mouth, crinkled eyes, furrowed brows, puzzled eyes, shaking legs, doodling, a smile, gazing out through the window… everything tells us if our students are comprehending or not interested. At times we also ask questions to make sure students understand what we teach.

Backchanneling is a part of this feedback. Backchanneling is a more active or conscious feedback that a listener (here the student) provides the  speaker (here, the teacher) to convey that they're following what you're saying. Backchanneling is often communicated through words, phrases and interjections like “right” “I see” “yes” “Ok” “uh-uh”, “hmm”, “alright” etc.  

Backchanneling is one way of sending feedback to the speaker Image credits 

The point is, backchanneling is essential and this is what we cut out when we disable the chat, mute the microphone, or stop student videos. 

What we need to do online then is adapt our teaching to newer models. Adaptability is an unsure word, right? It’s tricky, does adapt mean to let go of the original identity? 

To adapt is to modify to newer conditions.  It augments. It transforms.   

Here’s a recent example.

After reading my blog, a very dear teacher I admire hugely WhatsApped me an appreciation. It meant the world. I didn’t think before I texted back.

 

                                                         I blurted back, right? 😉

Now, imagine if I were to email the same person. 

There’s something dignified about emails. More sanctimonious than texts. I’d have sat down, and started:

Dear ma’am

Thank you very much for your kind words. I was really happy to hear from you.

How are you?

And so on...

Now think about if I were to give a speech, a vote of thanks, to the same person.

Ladies and gentlemen, honourable guests on the dais

And so on... 😂

What I’m pointing out is that, the potential of each medium is different. And so are the expectations. We choose a medium depending on the message and the receiver, and we adapt our language to the medium.  

A face-to-face course doesn’t become an online course just because all the course content – textbook, handouts, notes, worksheets, etc. are typed and put up on a website. Or when lectures are transacted through a videoconferencing tool. An online course is more than that. We need to learn to adapt our materials to suit the online medium. 

There are things that face-to-face courses can do that online courses cannot, and then there are things that face-to-face courses cannot do that online courses can.  I always say this, use technology to do what the teacher cannot do. 

And, what technology cannot do, the teacher does.

Teachers are burdened with online teaching; they say online teaching is three times the work. And students are disgruntled; they say they aren’t learning anything. This is what we can address if we do more than merely replicate in-classroom experience using tech tools.

In this post, we'll look at how teachers can deliver productive classes using synchronous videoconferencing tools – whether FB, YouTube, Zoom, WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Google meet, etc. 

How do you adapt your face-to-face class lectures to meet the demands and exploit the potential of live videoconferencing tools? 

How can we enable backchanneling in online lectures?   

I'm going to talk about two teaching strategies or techniques that can make online classes meaningful - two, nothing more. Chunking and Interactivities (interactive activities). These can help deliver effective classes without using additional web tools. 

Strategy 1: Chunking. This isn’t a new concept. It’s been a favourite with instruction designers for almost 70 years. Read more here

You want heavy-duty theory about why human working memory can’t be bothered with more information? Then visit this

For those who are still engrossed here, bottom line is this: human memory can’t hold more than 5 - 7 bits of information. (You can go up to 9, there is a 7 +/- 2 instructional design rule of the thumb that's got your back).

Anyway, the first thing to remember is students (even the most motivated adults) cannot listen to a 40- or 60-minutes lecture session in one go. So, chunk your lectures. It’s here that bulleting helps. Before you go live, convert what you want to teach into bullets. Write them down. The time you reach 5 - 7 bullets, chunk your instruction there. 

  Bulleting and chunking: Earliest evidence of sound instruction design. (And then he had to break it! 😅) Image credits   

If you cannot condense the text into bullets, you can still chunk your lecture into 15-minute sessions. Which means you pause your live lecture either after completing 7 bulleted points or at 15 minutes' timestamp. Such pauses are called interactive pauses because during this time you allow your students to do something with what they've just learnt.  

Once you pause, what can you do? Introduce interactivities. 

 Strategy 2: Interactivities 

1. Ask questions  

Questions are the most interactive technique available to us as online teachers. (Yes, I agree they're intrusive, nagging and damaging too. But remember Socrates?) 

Questions have always fascinated us. They still do, in webinars especially 😈 Source: A WhatsApp forward. 

Learn to build questions into your lecture. Ask frequent straightforward questions, rhetorical questions, brainstorming questions, leading questions, roadmap questions...all kinds. Such questions not only inform students, they also trigger prediction, thinking, organising, connecting, etc.  

Some things you can do are ask

• a quick recap question 
• students to mention something new they learnt 
• students to share a question that they have about what was taught
• them to state how they can apply what was learnt
• them to find something to support a statement you made  

Call a student’s name and ask them to answer your question. (Keep a list of student names next to you every time you start a live lecture.) Or ask students to type their response in the chat box. Use the chat function of the tool you're using for live lectures. Believe me, if you don't use it, they will. 😆

Make this a game, ask students to choose the best response from peers.    

2. Share notes  

• Share your notes with students and ask them to write it down. Give them time for this.
• Skeleton notes – create a handout with key points of the lecture on the left margin, leaving space for students to fill in notes during lecture. 
• Systematic note taking - provide a template like the following to encourage taking notes during lecture  

        Share templates for while-lecture note taking Source credit

Book: Representing important facts, Light Bulb: Representing new ideas, Tick: Representing actions, Question Mark: Representing doubts

Such templates can be shared as word docs before class. Once completed, students can share their notes as pictures on class Facebook page or WhatsApp group. Or, if you want this to form a part of your assessment, ask them to be emailed to you. 

• Promote collaborative note-taking. You and your students can summarise the lesson into bullet points together. Google docs is wonderful for this. Keep adding important points to the same doc as the class progresses. (Google docs is such an integral part of my life that I almost don't count it as a technology tool, hence pardon its mention here. It's like saying Pretzel isn't a dog.) 

3. Link lecture with text 

If you use a textbook, always link your lecture with the textbook. 

• Before you start your live lecture, give explicit directions, say, “open your book, page no. 18, paragraph 3” etc.
• While lecture, keep connecting your lecture chunks with the corresponding paragraphs in the textbook. Stop every fifteen minutes and give students time to read. 
• Keep linking your lecture with previous chunks and lessons 

4. Post-lecture interactivity  

At the end of your lecture, you can use exit slips to conduct  informal assessment to measure students' understanding of the topic taught. They can be collected as  written responses to questions that can range from factual, reflective, evaluative or application-oriented. 

Did I say anything new here? Not a thing! All of us do these every time we teach, don't we?  

All I’m doing is reminding us how to do these consciously via live lectures since we don’t “see” or “hear” our students anymore. 

Go on, zooooom the student. 

Three of my favourite web 2.0 tools

                                        Voicethread, Spiderscribe, Padlet 
Fi.na.lly!!!! 
I've been dying to write about these three web 2.0 tools. Truth be told, I started the blog for them. They've been my constant companions these last 5 or 6 years. I confess I've spent more time with them than with Ramakanth (the husband). 
These web 2.0 tools were also huge hits in every workshop I conducted. Most teachers went on to use them quite successfully in their classrooms. (In fact, you can access most teacher accounts on these tools with combinations of kshemamadam or kshemaeflu as passwords. Just kidding :))   

Joking aside, there's a large amount of research conducted in the use of these three tools in the ESL classroom. 
Do you need more reasons? I could honestly go on. By the way, did I mention that these tools are free?  

A quick recap: The advantage of web 2.0 tools is that they make communication collaboration, critical thinking and creativity (4Cs) more possible in a learning setting. Read this post for details. 
Let's get down to using these tools. 
But, before that a word of caution: All, or most web 2.0 tools ask you to "register" or "create an account" before you can use them. (Just like Facebook does.) When you create an account you'll be asked for an email and a password. Take a look at the screenshot of the page for opening an account to use Voicethread. 

                                     Screenshot of register page of Voicethread

Please enter your email id, but DO NOT enter the password of your email account here. What they want is a password you'll use to open the voicethread account once you create it. So, please do not share the password of your email account here.     

Voicethread: Would you like to look at an example first? Here's a voicethread to develop speaking skills. Here's another one to teach giving directions. (You might have to register before you can view them.)   

Okay, here goes. 
A Voicethread is a free web 2.0 tool that allows you to create tasks to teach, practice or test all the four language skills - listening, speaking, reading and writing. 
First upload your material to the slide. Then type or speak your instructions. 
Once a task is created, you can share the Voicethread with your students. Students can post their responses in spoken or written format. 

Here's another sample Voicethread to teach direct speech to young children. On the first slide I uploaded a picture from my computer. Then I spoke a few sentences as an introduction. On the second slide I uploaded the story as a Word document. I gave instructions in both spoken and written formats. The last three slides are created for three groups of students who will record their responses on the corresponding page.  

If you want more information on Voicethread, please Google. The web has loads of resources, or visit guidelines to create a Voicethread. 
Here are some sample ideas for using the Voicethread web 2.0 tool in the ESL classroom.

I have also used this tool to make my students create multimedia assignments and to hold group discussions.   

Spiderscribe: Mind mapping or drawing web diagrams or spider graphs has always been every teacher's favourite activity for brainstorming, teaching reading comprehension or as a pre-writing exercise. 

A mind map created by Dr Arul Nehru, my PhD student using a digital tool called imindmap (extracted from his thesis) 

Now, instead of gathering information from your students and putting it up on the blackboard, what if you and your students can create a mind map together? A colourful one? One where you can easily make connection among different points? Where you can justify your view with additional images or texts or videos? Spiderscribe allows you to do all these.  

A warning: You might be asked to download flash. Please do. Click on Get Flash.
Or your system might prompt you to run flash - Allow or Block. Please choose Allow. 

Flash will keep threatening you that it will shut shop in December. Don't worry. Keep using it till December. I love the tool so much. 

Okay, let's get back to the tool. As a teacher, you can create one bubble that is the central concept. Take a look at a spider graph I created for my students to discuss 'how can use of technology enhance classroom teaching'.  The bubble in the middle in red is what I wrote. After that I shared it with a batch of postgraduate students. Eight students in the batch drew eight branches and added their ideas. As a second step, I asked each student to respond to a peer's idea. And after this, I added a language trainer from the corporate sector who commented on each student's response.  

Given below is a screenshot of another Spiderscribe created to teach students use of Wh-words. Each student is asked to draw a branch and write a sentence using a specific Wh-word. 

                  Spiderscribe created by a BEd student, screenshot from my collection 

My digital native students find Spiderscribe too ancient. So, here are newer alternatives and these don't require flash

https://www.mindmeister.com/

https://coggle.it/

https://bubbl.us/ 

Honestly, there a 100 more! 

Now to the last web 2.0 tool in this post. (Which means I'll talk about more tools later :)     

Padlet: Aren’t we all familiar with post-its? Some of us call it sticky notes. Usually yellow in colour, they now appear as digital versions on our computers too. 

                                                 Sticky notes or post its Image credits 

Now, imagine a digital whiteboard or a notice board where every student can post a sticky note? That’s Padlet. 

Take a look at an example.  I created this for my students to share their opinion on 'why do we need to teach digital literacy in the ESL classroom.' Each student was also asked to share a related web resource and explain its relevance to the topic. Four batches of students (from 2015 to 2019) have contributed to it already. Look at the wealth of resources I have!  
This Padlet works like an inside-classroom library for us now. The fourth batch consulted these resources to make their presentations and write their opinion papers. Imagine the time we saved! That's the beauty of web 2.0 tools.   

Padlet can be used not only for students to share their ideas and resources they find, but also to post their responses to a question. Here's an example. 

A final recap on how the 4 Cs are delivered through these tools: 

• Communication - all three tools allow students to communicate with each other 
• Collaboration - all three tools allow collaboration with a larger community of users    
• Critical thinking - is facilitated when we open up discussion with a large community and make available multimodal resources 
• Creativity - these tools 'tickle' students to come up with new ideas by giving them multiple options to write/doodle/ share an image or video/ speak, etc. 

Before I wind up, I'd like to share this resource of web 2.0 tools from Nik Peachey.  

A handsome chap, Nik Peachey, he's worth an entire post, not just for his earring that I fell in love with. (I was a young girl then, around 40 I think, when I met him and was too shy to ask for a picture :)) 
But seriously, he does a lot of amazing stuff with digital tools. And, more importantly, he writes about them. Download the free resource from the link I shared above. The book lists 11 web 2.0 tools and explains how to use them in the classroom.  
This, we like. Right? A big shout-out to Nik Peachey.