E-Portfolios in EFL Assessment

In Europe over the past 5 years there has been a lot of debate on e-portfolios substituting conventional exams. Although the Council of Europe has enacted the relevant legislation the EU countries have been reluctant to apply it probably due to the fact that societies aren’t mature enough to embrace such tactics. For more details click here.

The rationale behind this initiative is that when applying for a job, a university course etc you don’t have to sit for a high stakes exam (e.g. IELTS) but instead you present a portfolio of the best work you have produced so far that is representative of your capabilities in the foreign language. The broader the range of writing genres one includes, the more reliable and sufficient the portfolio is.

This practice is on the onset and several decades will have to elapse until we start applying it on a regular basis. 

Transferring portfolio assessment on a virtual environment through Livebinder

There are multiple applications of Livebinder. In this blog entry we will focus on creating one so as to host a student’s e-portfolio.

Initially, you will have to register for the site. Then the following page appears and you click on create a new binder.

Then you will encounter the following page

Since we are talking about e-portfolios, I suggest that the student types the genre of the essay (Agree/disagree essay) under the name, under description write the title of the essay. One can choose to make his e-portfolio visible to the public by clicking on “public”. I chose to keep it private since I have chosen an essay that has been already publish at IELTS buddy.  

The first time you attempt to create a binder you will get a quick 7 step tour that looks like this:

The essay that I uploaded as a doc is here. 

Then I can decide to share this essay from my e-portfolio on my google/facebook/twitter account. There are many more interesting features on Livebinder on how somebody can organize the information in tabs and sub tabs. For more details on this procedure click here. 

Apart from e-portfolios, Livebinder lends itself as a professional profile. One can upload not only his curriculum vitae but also one can display his achievements and experience through videos (e.g of humanistic actions that he has participated, or interviews people have taken from him) or another website that one has created so as to promote and enhance his professional image. Hence, in this digital age, portfolios aren’t restricted to written essays.

If the EU’s initiative ever comes to practice, Livebinder will be a great tool for e-assessment because of the following advantages:

• The potential employer/university/any other institution will have immediate access to it when applying for a job/course and generally will become acquainted with your professional profile if you choose to add additional features to your binder.
•  Your professional image isn’t restricted to a one-to-one interview with the employer/institution. The potential candidates for a job or a course will have all the time they want and a wide array of options to enhance their professional image and prove their eligibility for the course/job.

There can be several limitations by exposing your work online:

• Mischievous individuals may attempt to copy your work. Solution: When you create a binder you have the option to make the binders public or private. If you chose private, you can choose who will see the content of your essay by sending them the access key that you have created. This access key functions as a password that the viewers will have to enter in order to view your content.
•  The marking criteria will become more strict. Since portfolio assessment occurs in a less threatening environment the person assessing it will have very high standards of what your written work should resemble. Hence, you will have to make a better effort to produce a good piece of written work.

    I can assure you that we will reach a point that traditional exam driven societies will have to change and embrace portfolio assessment.

 

Don’t wait for e-portfolios to become a fad so as to apply them in your EFL classroom. Have the courage to be a pioneer even if your surrounding environment refutes this practice.

Go ahead!!! Make the difference!!!

Flipping the EFL Classroom with Screen Capture Technology (Snagit)

For those who aren’t familiar with this terminology or technique, in the flipped classroom the students become familiar with the theory before going to class through a video or a reading that the teacher has assigned for homework. So the first exposure to new material is done outside the class. This allows more time in class to practice the theory extensively.

We should bear in mind that the flipped classroom is neither a language theory nor a methodology but there are theories that underpin in. The most prominent one is Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning. In the pyramid bellow the low order thinking skills are positioned at the lower end of the pyramid. These less demanding cognitive processes take place at home where the students become acquainted with the theory and comprehend it through a video or a reading that the teacher has assigned for homework. 

As we proceed up the pyramid higher levels of cognitive processes take place. This high order thinking takes place in class. 

In more detail, during the application phase, students apply and practice in the classroom what they learnt in the video/reading at home. 

The teacher can conduct many class discussions and analyze a topic from multiple perspectives. I believe this is ideal for the EFL classroom because EFL learners are given abundant opportunities to speak the language, thus practice it.

The evaluation stage provides students the opportunity to present their take on the topic. 

As we reach the top of the pyramid, students co-construct knowledge (e.g. through collaborative writing). This is not always feasible. It is accomplished depending on the task that the teacher has assigned. This creation stage represents the essence of learning, where you make use of the theory that you have learnt and practiced in the previous stages and create your own piece of work which depicts your distinct perception of the world.

Benefits

• Saves teachers time
• .Less theory based lessons.
•   Focus on practical issues. Practice the language through task based tasks and group activities. => Learning occurs through interaction and not in isolation. 
•  Explore a topic in greater depth

Limitations

• Cannot directly check student’s understanding when they are watching the video. Solution à Revisionary Quiz, Drill ect. in the beginning of the lesson
•  Some students may have limited access to the internet. Parents tend to restrict the access to the internet because of the hazards that are hidden on the internet.
•   Lazy students may avoid watching the video or the reading that was assigned for HW.
•  Some societies aren’t mature enough to embrace such approaches. They might accuse the teacher for not working enough in the classroom. 

In this blog entry we are going to create a video through Snagit and upload it on youtube

Let’s assume we are going to teach an essay topic on national holidays and we want to save some time from our actual lesson, so we have decided to flip the classroom by creating a video on national holidays. To save some time I created a pdf presentation of what I wanted to speak about in the video. You can choose to do it in a different way. Once you have downloaded Snagit, it will always appear at the top of your screen. So every time you place the cursor over there the application will pop up as illustrated in the picture below.

After you have clicked on video (from snagit), you select the area that you want to record and click on the red button to start recording. This is illustrated in the picture bellow.

Once you have finished with your recording, save your video and click on the youtube icon and “send to youtube”. Bear in mind that you can access you tube from you google account. This is illustrated bellow.

 

You can find the video that I created here.  Notice that I finish the video with thought provoking questions so they can commence brainstorming for ideas to discuss in class and to include in their essay.  

When you try out this technique please come back to this blog entry and leave me a comment on how it turned out. The dynamic of each class is different so every time you apply it turns out differently from the previous time. I am very curious to read your experiences about flipping the classroom with screen capture technology.

Teacher’s Self-development

In this ever-changing world, a good learner is a life-long learner. How can we expect our students to be efficient learners when we don’t cater for our own self-development as teachers?

To begin with, it is crucial to realize that expanding our EFL knowledge and teaching skills is something that we do throughout our lives. It is not something that we do once. This is the reason we need a tool that can inform us without going through a hassle. In my opinion the social media can function as an information tool.

As digital immigrants, we should to try to align ourselves with this era, even though our upbringing is rather different. Since we are living in this digital age, where the social media have conquered every aspect of our life, it is a natural outcome that our professional development may derive from such means. Hence, this blog’s entry will focus on how teachers can expand their ELT knowledge through the social media and especially through Twitter.

Bear in mind that when you sign up for a Twitter account you cannot change your name. So the is no messing around with it…

By default Twitter doesn’t lend itself to socialize. In particular, the chat won’t pop up at at the bottom or on the side of your Twitter page. To enter the chat you click on the icon and the whole pages switches to your chat room. So, there is no chatting and browsing simultaneously as in facebook. 

Don’t panic, if you think that you have to visit all the 20-30 pages of people or organizations that you have chosen to follow. Thanks to the RSS news feed you can choose which sites you want to receive updates automatically without visiting them. That way you can keep track of any upcoming book, conference, seminar and workshop that is related to our field.

Here are some Twitter ELT eminent figures that I suggest you follow:  

Pros

• You expand your Personal Learning Network through online chats with other ELT professionals. This gives you the advantage to learn from other teachers so as to enhance you teaching skills or deal with challenges that arise in the EFL classroom as well as share resources (e.g. grammatical worksheets etc). Twitter facilitates this compared to other social media tools because it is predominantly used for professional purposes. This provides the opportunity to exchange experiences and support each other.

• You become acquainted new teaching approaches that enable you to refine you teaching skills.

• You receive updates regarding examinations, new course books, conferences, seminars etc.

Cons

• You get informed provided that you go online regularly. For those ELT teachers who are under the category of the “digital immigrants” they should radically change their stance and remain connected.

• Some claim that other sites like facebook are more efficient because more people log in on a daily basis for entertainment. Indeed, by including professional information in such sites at times gets the message across much easier compared to sites that function mainly for professional purposes.

Though many EFL teachers don’t realize it, the social media can act as an invaluable tool for a teacher’s self-development. It all depends on how open-minded you are to embrace such unconventional means of self-development. 

I believe that EFL teachers are quite cynical when it comes to the social media and they lose from it. 

Let’s all open-minded EFL teachers pull together and sensitise them to change.

Word Clouds in the EFL Classroom

The best teaching and learning occurs in a stress-free environment when we combine learning with fun activities. In this blog entry we are going to focus on revising vocabulary in a rather alternative and fun way through word clouds. 

More specifically, we are going to focus on Wordle which is a tool that extracts all the words from a text, then randomizes them and then organizes them in a word cloud. You basically copy/paste a text in the Wordle and click on “go”. You have the option to change the shape of the world cloud and play with the colours.

For a detailed tutorial click here. 

Applications of word clouds in the EFL classroom

Example 1 => World clouds work best in group work. A typical instance of this could be that a student describes or acts out a word and the other student tries to find it from the word cloud.

Example 2 => Word clouds function very well as warm up activities. Let’s assume we have inserted the text that we intend to teach into Wordle and created a word cloud. Before proceeding to the actual text we present the world cloud to the class. We give the students half a minute to read the words and start guessing the topic of the text and what it is about. Such guessing techniques trigger the student’s attention. Bellow is an instance of this. The original text is here.

Does example 1 ring any bells? Can it relate to any teaching methods that you have consciously or unconsciously used in the past?

With reference to the Total Physical Response (TPR) teaching method, example 1 is a good instance, as one student acts out the meaning of a word and the other student associates the action with the actual word. Proponents of this teaching method support that learning is more successful by associating a meaning of a word/notion with motor activity.

Additionally, this teaching method facilitates Kinesthetic language learning. Kinesthetic language learning is about experiencing what one learns using his body. Although kinesthetic language learning is frequently associated with learning difficulties/differences, it is beyond doubt that ordinary learners proliferate a great deal from kinesthetic learning.

Benefits

• Applying a variety of teaching techniques in a lesson not only maintains student’s interest in the lesson but expands their attention span. In more detail, including multiple teaching techniques (as mentioned above) keeps the student’s awake. Any new technique that you introduce or recycle throughout your lessons will attract the student’s interest because of the human’s innate desire to discover something new. Hence, they will concentrate better to anything new and exciting you bring in the lesson.

Drawbacks

• Such activities can be time consuming when you are following a school syllabus. Especially when you have large classes and you want to give equal opportunities to everyone to participate.

All things considered, technology can be easily integrated in traditional teaching methods (e.g. Total Physical Response (TPR) teaching method).

It would be a great dismiss for you, the EFL teacher, as well as your learners not to incorporate such great teaching techniques in your EFL classroom.