Voki for my CATESOL Workshop

What topics, up to 60 seconds, could your students create Vokis about?

Language Instruction via Mobile Device

A lot of interesting discussion going on now about mobile learning. What's the difference between c-learning, e-learning, and m-learning? One quote I read from John Eyles described classroom learning as a well-balanced meal, e-learning or online learning as a sumptuous buffet, and m-learning via cell phone or other mobile device as a power snack. And there are a lot of times when you could really use a power snack!

My interest was piqued by a presentation at the CATESOL Conference by Voxy, a start-up delivering language instruction to Spanish speakers using shortened news stories. You can choose from three different story sets - headline news, pop culture or sports. (Personally, I could skip sports, but that's just me.) You download the iPhone app (Droid app coming soon), and then select the headline of the story you want to read (headlines in Spanish), read the story, select vocabulary to see definitions and add to your list to study later, and answer some comprehension questions. There isn't much instruction here, and there doesn't seem to be any organization in terms of grammar, language functions, or vocabulary. But the exciting thing is the experimentation they are doing with the mobile space.

There are several features that I think aren't functioning yet, but they're working on them. One is location-based content. Walk by a bank, and banking phrases in English become available if you click on the icon of the bank. Same for a restaurant or movie theater. This could be a fun homework assignment for students with iPhones.

Another one was item recognition through the camera. The presenter (and CEO), Paul Gollash, took a picture of my shoe. The app identified it as "black leather shoe." How did it do that?? This could be such a useful language app. Although the company wants the app to be an instructional tool, not a utility, the ability to identify items in another language instantly is pretty intriguing.

Student Videos to Promote Voting

Susan Gaer's ESL class at Santa Ana College Continuing Education made this video encouraging people to vote! It's part of a contest on the Easy Voter Guide site. There are quite a few other student videos from other community colleges in California. Check them out and get your students to vote for the one they like best!

Getting Ready for CATESOL

I'm getting ready for the CATESOL state conference in Santa Clara on 4/23-25, and hoping there will be good attendance!

There will be two labs for the Electronic Village, and many great tech presentations. I'm on two panels, and creating a one-page handout and a wiki for both.

The first one is on Distance Learning: The Future of English as a Second Language. This panel was organized by Kara Rosenberg, Principal of Palo Alto Adult School. We are covering a wide range of topics, from data on distance learning to creating a distance learning program, curriculum, and opportunities for professional development. All our materials and references are on the wiki. It's on Friday at 9 in Convention Center 204

The second one is for the Adult Level Workshop, and the loose theme is Transition. The four presenters will talk about strategic planning for adult education in California (Vittoria Abbate-Maghsoudi, Mt. Diablo Adult Education), the role of technology in transition (me), transitioning students from non-credit ESL to credit ESL at the colleges (Greatchen Bitterlin, San Diego Community College District), and the importance of professional development (Karen Dennis, Santa Ana College). Right now just my part is on the wiki. The Adult Level Workshop is on Saturday, 1:30 - 3 in Grand Ballroom A.

Other OTAN workshops are:
- Moodle (Penny Pearson, Friday at 10:45 in the Great American Ballroom)
- OTAN Resources (Branka Marceta, 9 am on Saturday in Convention Center 205)
- USA Learns (Evelyn Fella, 9:45 on Saturday)
- Connecting with Picasa (Penny and Branka, 1:30 on Saturday, Convention Center 204)

Hope to see you there, California!

Three Funding Opportunities

Here are three funding opportunities I learned about at the COABE/Proliteracy conference in Chicago:

1. Adult Numeracy Instruction Professional Development Program - will be announced soon. Two states will be chosen to participate in the pilot of this professional development. Each state will train a team of two instructors and one administrator from 10 agencies. For more information, contact Kathy Chernus at MPR Associates, kchernus at mprinc.com

2. Teaching Excellence in Adult Literacy (TEAL)- up to 12 states will be selected through a competitive application process to receive intensive professional development and technical assistance on research-based practices in effective instruction, beginning with a focus on proven strategies in writing instruction for ABE Learners. State Directors of Adult Education have received applications by email this month. Applications are due in May. States will be selected by June 2010. There is a wee bit of information online, and the contact for more information is Mary Ann Corley at AIR, mcorley at air.org

3. US Citizenship and Immigration Services is offering $4.5 million in grants to agencies for expanding local capacity to prepare legal residents for citizenship. There are also grants for increasing "the capacity of members or affiliates of national, regional, or statewide organizations to offer citizenship services in underserved communities." These grants must have between 2 and 4 "sub-applicants." There will be five of these $500K 2-year grants.

The Inauguration and Adult Education

Wow, what a momentous day that was! The photos posted by the Boston Globe are really wonderful, showing how people were engaged all over the earth.

Larry Ferlazzo collected some good sites about the inauguration to use with students.

Christina Nivens created some interesting ESL activities, including a venn diagram about Barack and Michelle.

At the Sacramento County Office of Education, which provides Internet service to the school districts in the county, we had the highest demand on our bandwidth ever, twice as high as normal. I think every school in the county was trying to stream the inauguration!

Wikis in ESL

I attended this event on Saturday purely as a participant, which was a nice change. I had time to listen and observe more than I have in the past. And things have definitely changed. There were two or three presentations on wikis. A year ago, most ESL teachers hadn't heard of wikis, so this was a welcome evolution. One of the most interesting was by Cassie Piotrowski, who teaches academic writing at San Jose State. It was interesting because she was not a high tech person herself, and struggled with some of the technology in her presentation, but nevertheless she was fearless in implementing a variety of Web 2.0 activities for her students.

In her Culture and Current Events class, she has her students divided into teams, and then from each team page she created a student page for each student where they post their slide show, video of their presentation, and other assignments. On her home page, she has all assignments with links to resources and documents.

On her Writing Class wiki, look at the links to the student pages and their assignments, which include Bubbleshare slideshows, Vokis, and Wordle assignments, in which students enter a list of significant words and Wordle creates a graphic of them.

Here is a Wordle of my delicious bookmarks.

Edutagger

Just saw this on Twitter, a social bookmarking site just for educators. It might be a good way to introduce students to social bookmarking. Looks like the content is reviewed before being posted, as not all posters have 100% of their submissions published. It's a new service and needs support, so check it out and see if it would be useful for you.

The biggest drawback - it's K12. Why does everyone think only kids are learning to read and do math? I found an amazing site on Edutagger, ESL-Kids. Unfortunately, yet again it's designed for kids, but it's free and has a worksheet function that lets you pick a topic, generate a random word list or select your own, and then choose from 18 different worksheets. It's very low level, for example some worksheets are for tracing or copying the letters, but this could work for non-literate students and those from other alphabets. Musical instruments has a nice selection of words, and so does weather. Worth checking out for beginning low ESL.

Serious Gaming

You know, games could really teach anything. I'm sure I learned first about capitalism and our economic system from Monopoly. Most games involve strategies, planning, sometimes teamwork, coordination, etc. IBM has created a game called Innov8, "an interactive, 3-D educational game designed to bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders in an organization." Now there's a worthy cause. In the field of adult education, and education in general, as elsewhere, we are constantly experiencing the tension between IT and educational goals. That tension is built in to the conflict between the need for information and access, and the need for security. Hmm, just like life!

There have been some interesting forays into simulations and gaming for adult education. I saw one from I think Ireland demonstrated several years ago at the TESOL software developers fair that allowed students to be a waiter interacting with customers. It had what was for that time sophisticated voice recognition and branched responses. The problem is the expense of developing these simulations. But maybe with Second Life and other MUVEs we are moving into an era of many more simulations and games.

So many blogs, so little time

According to statistics posted on the BlogWorld conference site, 12 million Americans maintain a blog - is that possible? I guess we all like to get our thoughts and opinions out there and hear from others. But 1.7 million list making money as one of the main reasons for keeping a blog. Hey, I think I'm missing something here!

Over 120,000 blogs are created every day. This is definitely information overload. But each one is a part of its own community - home schoolers, chihuahua raisers, artisan cheese makers, travel bloggers, fat bloggers, political bloggers, tech bloggers, scifi bloggers, our personal curiosities and our was of connecting with each other are endless. For adult educators, it's important that our learners understand this phenomenon, if they don't already. They can participate in it, become a part of and build national and international communities.

One more statistic, blog readers spend an average of 23 hours per week online. That sounds about right. Here's a chart of the number of unique visitors to the different blog hosts, comparing Q1 2004 to Q1 2005. Old numbers, but Blogger is still by far ahead of the crowd.

There are more blogs in Japanese than in English, but they are close, and far ahead of other languages, although it looks like all languages are participating. Chinese is third, with 8%.

Branka and I are doing a pre-conference session at CATESOL, and several other conferences, on blogging for language teaching and adult basic skills in general. The key is supporting learners to find their community of interest. There's something for everyone out there, and each person has their passions. The ability to connect with others who have the same passions is what got me excited about technology 15 years ago, and the root of it all is still the same.

Adult Education Learning Community

Check out this blog, Adult Ed Matters, by an adult education administrator in Southern California, Martha Rankin. I just added her to my blog roll, and I encourage adult educators to see how she is using WordPress to create community, and focus on technology, among teachers in her program. It looks like the focus is on ESL, but it could be related to any program area.

I hope that her blog and her community thrive. I like that Snapshots feature of WordPress too. Does Blogger have that??