Blended provision for our students - announcement

With the re-closure of schools in Nagano prefecture, and the increasing nervousness of some of our students and parents (as well as us!) we have decided to do two things as of Monday, April 13th:

1. Continue to teach small classes in the school with even more enhanced care over disinfecting surfaces, sanitising visitors'/teachers'/students' hands on entry/departure etc, and making sure students are seated as far apart as we can manage without being 'weird'! We are avoiding activities which require students to share things, and encouraging YLs to wear masks (prevent fingers going in places more than bugs!). We are obviously asking anyone who has a temperature or who is feeling unwell to avoid coming to the school.
2. Offer students who are concerned about using public transport, or who not keen to be here in a group, the opportunity to join their class in real time via Zoom. We are all new at this, but we can all try and learn something new together :) We will also record the lessons and share them within our class members on Edmodo (an LMS we have been using for years but has hitherto been very under exploited). We will continue to do this for as long as needs be.

We will be making an effort to also share with students and parents more than ever, additional resources/ideas/apps/activities withing Edmodo. Any one can join that 'class ' but you do need to join. It's free :)  Join here >> https://edmo.do/j/fgcrjx

Matsumoto Castle - not recent!

As ever we will do our best to keep you up to date - check your Edmodo class regularly please?

We will continue to share via our Facebook page - click here

Of course we will also be answering the phone! 0263-34-4481 & talk to Rinka, Emi, Yukari, Yuka or Eri.

We can also look after students who want to 'observe' a lesson (but don't want to physically come!), or even students not in our neighbourhood. Tell us which level/age, and we'll put you with a suitable group as a guest.

We are looking forward to making sure our students can continue to get the best English language education we can provide...just going to have to do it a bit differently for a while. Don't panic!

Jim

Evaluating apps in class - crowd sourcing problems!

Prepping for Successful Meetings

It's not often you get to a class and the students are already doing exactly what you wanted them to do...but that's exactly what happened for me this afternoon and I really want to give my class a pat on the back. So, Chinasa, Reiko, Yumi & Tomoko - well done!

I was going to give them a telling off, truth be told, because I could not see any evidence of them having done the homework I'd asked them to last time - to create & then share, do, vocabulary quizzes. But here's the thing, between us we figured out that the app we were using on our iPhones & Android was not up to scratch and was letting us down. While we thought our work in-app would show up online, it was not doing so. Likewise, material we wanted to share we were unable to (except in one case where the creator had gone to her PC and worked around the short-coming).

I was delighted, because we'd all byod (brought our own devices) - which these in-company students are otherwise told to leave in their lockers - and were finally using them instinctively (and not falling at the first hurdle failing to remember passwords etc!). Will they take their text books on a business trip? Nope. Dictionary? Nope. Phone? You bet - and there's so many different things we can make available for ourselves to make the job & the learning easier!

Negotiating pronunciation (an app for that too!)

So, now they kind of generated their own need to do an extra homework, which is to write to the app developer and point out their disappointment/frustrations with the tool, and to ask for improvements. Nothing like realia!

I look forward to hearing what kind of replies they get (I was going to write myself, but figured four end users sound louder than one intermediary!)

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - graded reader + intergalactic app

Yusuke's Water Planet

Personalising irregular verbs

Another day, another graded reader (I know, I do go on a bit)...

A recent reader leant lots of practice to irregular past tense verbs; cool for teacher, bit of a pain in the neck for the learners "Why are they different?" Erm, well, the Vikings & Anglo-Saxons.....

Imagine you were a spaceman and went to another planet; draw it and describe it. 

Already dark outside, I asked my lads to turn around & look carefully out the window. What could they see - 'stars' a fairly glum response. Yes, but no. That bright one is not a star lads. Your book is called "Red Planet". Any ideas what that particular one is? Penny dropping. Don't believe me? OK, let's check with Star Walk app on my phone. Shock & consternation as the screen shows a live image of what the heavens should be looking like - including constllations, satellites, and...(coming to that) as you move it around. Very cool :)

What planet is red? OK, let's search for Mars. Presto, arrow navigates us to rendez vous with our celestial neighbour, with the cursor exactly over there. Now you believe me?!

Can you see Mars?

OK chaps, what can you see in the sky next week? A "suissei"? You mean a comet? What's it called? OK, let's search for that. Navigated to a spot in the carpet under the board. Oh! Can we see it yet? Why not?! Decent speculation and then a prediction for where it might be next class - come back and find out!

I love this app, as it lends itself to all sorts of searches, besides helping you walk into lamp-posts at night :) I even saw Father Christmas last Christmas Eve!

Old MacDonald - ever been more fun?

A crowd pleasing app can give a teacher 'thinking time' to get the next activity cued up, or help you manage to stretch out a topic and refresh batteries. We were reviewing animals and there was a request for Old MacDonald (and I love the app developed by LoeschWare)...aim of the game is to choose farm animals and not wild ones - like tigers, sharks & camels, which if chosen are variously dispatched to many giggles.

Shinshu JALT and apps for the classroom

 As Programme Chair for Shinshu JALT, I had asked Cambridge

University Press to sponsor an evening

of professional development for our chapter on Saturday evening.

You can find a full description of that presentation by Asia Senior Sales

Manager Rob Habbick right here. As I have personally known Rob for

over 15 years, it was a pleasure to finally get him up to

Matsumoto again in his professional capacity and to share his wealth of knowledge & catalogue of
online tools with us (Rob & Ritsuko Nakata presented our very first Cambridge YLE certicates to
our children back in 2000 - a very good friend of Luna's!). Rob gave everyone plenty to think about, as
well as codes to access some online tools for free over the next fortnight.

The second half of our evening was given over to mini-presentations. I had intended this to be a mostly

local effort from new speakers; few answered the call despite Tonya Kneff's best efforts to rally the ALT

crowd. However, we had interest form further afield - Andy Boon came all the way from Tokyo to tell us

about Facebook...as he explains:

 

"As a global phenomenon, Facebook has established itself as the

de facto Social Networking Site. With its various utilities to connect
people via the Internet to  post messages and comments, start
discussion threads, upload photographs and videos, and chat

via IM or video, the pedagogic potential of this tool to encourage
and facilitate language learner  use of the L2 outside of the
classroom setting is being realized by educators worldwide. In this 

short presentation, we will provide an overview of how setting up a Facebook group with a 

2nd-year intermediate university class in Japan has enabled group members to interact with one 

anther by posting and responding to comments to work on course assignments or just to say hello 

to classmates in English. Data from the Facebook group will be provided to highlight activities 

that may be of use to other educators wishing to set up Facebook groups with their own classes."

Mike Honywood teaches at Shindai in Ueda, and awed us all in 

presenting an app he developed to help second language learners. 

Obviously a labour of love and a lot of fun, Mike's presentation 

explained not only how his app works but how he got into making it, and

the technological changes that are making that challenge less 

complex/more exciting and accessible to non-programmers.

Our Chapter President Mark Brierley went retro with an egg timer app

and a quick round of "Just a Minute" - audience challenged to avoid
hesitation, deviation & repitition
on the topic Spain v Italy. Yours truly won, leaving a late challenge with 3 seconds left to talk about the

football tonight!

Fred Carruth (our Membership Chair) explained what an EBM

(Executive Board Meeting) is & what happened at the last one in
Tokyo,  last weekend. Fred is retiring as Chair of the Presidents' Liaison

group after 4 years, where he has helped keep Shinshu on the map.

Dave Callaghan demonstrated an app (SayHi) that claims to
automatically translate
between about 45 different languages. Given Dave's demonstration there is very little
chance that any of the participants will be using this or any other auto-translate app any
time soon.

Me? Of course I have loads of ideas of apps & iOS solutions for classroom hiccups! I
demonstrated two which I had to use earlier in the day. Snapguide and Sock Puppets. I used Snapguide for the first time earlier this morning, when a student asked me for assistance in preparing for a video conference call she was to be involved in next week. This is what we came up with.I think you will agree it is clear and simple? It was very easy to make, with the app on my iPhone following a simple template, with photos very easy to incorporate and annotate. The voice recorder is a cool tool if you are not hands free eg hands covered in chocolate or something! I love to use Sock Puppets to enliven dialogues - there's a 30 second time limit (on the free version) which is just fine...encourages students to hurry up & allows us to have to have another go! Students also tend to let go of their books to touch (activate)/move their character around the screen.  You have a choice of characters & backgrounds, props. I think it's great, and our students love using. Check out this sample - it has lost some lustre in rendition :(

Team reading - first draft

listen to ‘New trainers on Friday’ on Audioboo

I am not a big fan of 'team reading' - tends to be at the speed of the slowest and 'pronunciation by consent'. As you listen (press play) you can hear that the children get quicker & more 'into' the material. You can't hear me moving my arms around like a windmill to gee them up!

This did help me fogure out which words they needed a bit more focus on (which ones did you identify?) and we did just that next with a board race. After that, I read it through and made some atrocious mistakes ('cow' instead of 'now', hungry/angry, nappy/happy, mad/sad, daddy/dirty etc) which was mildly entertaining and increased the volume significantly.

Image via CrunchBase

What iOS apps do you use to get more out of your classes?

Check out some other experiments with my AudioBoo here

Find this recording/download it at http://audioboo.fm/boos/847176-new-trainers-on-friday

Slideshow on the fly - Animoto via iPhone

My class needed some extra practice with the dreaded drilling; they really do not produce any 'extended' language unless I use a taser. No, we don't have one, but...

When we used a teacher's book resource lately we had an absentee, so I joined and made one myself (OK! I like a quick colouring in as well!). This week the retrieval system the children use = half a dozen knackered, ripped, squashed, battered and lost artifacts. Hmm.

Have already made the flashcards available on Quizlet (click here)for the unit we are doing (but I don't think the mums bother, which is a pity - especially as they ask vaguely "how come there does not appear to be a great deal of progress being made"). So, in between classes I quickly photographed the surviving artwork on my iPhone, and then opened up the (new) Animoto app. Imported the pictures, changed the muzak, added a title & left it to cook. Whole process took less than 5 minutes (the colouring took longer!) & I had a nice 'job done' email by the end of my next lesson.




Now the free version of Animoto only gives you 30 seconds, and a limited choice of music. For more flexibility I like Stupeflix, and am happy with the paid up version as good value for money. For this,very much on the fly, a free 30 second cobble-job better than a poke in the eye I say.

What are your experiences with making slideshows in a hurry?

Talk to the cat? Learn with a sock?

A lot of people think that childrens' apps in iPhones etc are 'just games'. Well, they can be, if you don't take advantage of them.

A while ago I used a voice recorder in class for a couple of different tasks, and I was pleasantly surprised that the students were very keen to hear themselves. Not only that, they were also critical listeners (much more than me). They got competitive about the time taken, and passing the recorder around in a question/answer drill accellerated the activity nicely too - more fluent and natural.

There is quite a debate about the pros and cons of reading out loud. Yes, it is not a usual feature of English usage, but there's little other way we teachers can monitor what the children are able to read/pronounce. NB Not 'understand'! I have always asked my students to read their homework after we have checked/marked/corrected if necessary. I don't like the whole class speaking at the same time - how can I hear everyone (and for the same time I don't speak when they do)? Instead, I will repeat the sentence after the students, to reinforce their pronunciation. If I model first, they are not reading, are they?

Reading a lot out loud is counter productive. I do not want a performance - so we do not do this with our graded readers. Readers are for fun & internalised consumption (instead, I really like to milk the workbooks/quizzes etc which we use for follow up, vocabulary development, finding grammar patterns, spotting rhyming words etc)

A big bugbear here in Japan is conformity. In my classroom, this manifests as everyone trying to speak at the same speed, pitch, cadence. The dreaded katakana-isation. One of my classes does this so much I pulled all my hair out last week - extending the last syllable in their responses in a falling sound which is horribly unnatural. Still trying to iron that particular issue out, but my one hour a week versus the rest of their exposure to badly done English = feeling a bit like King Offa with his dyke.

Talking Tom, and a number of other "Talking...." apps are very useful indeed. Basically a voice recorder with attitude - an animated cat does a few moves and doen't like being poked or punched (who does?) - so children are allowed to do that after they have done the job. And the job is? Read your sentence through, from start to finish, without pausing. If you pause, the cat will repeat what you just said. Daft? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Judgemental? No. Does it work with longer utterances? Not really. All I want with my young students for now is for them to get to the end of their sentences once they start. The cat repeating their production is funny, but not useful for pronunciation (the voice is distorted). It IS useful for intonation though - usually very difficult to provide feedback on. It picks up all chatter and giggles, which is nice as it breaks the ice...it also means everyone has to take a breath before they start. Good. Students realise they need to preview the entire line that they are going to say, and you can see them nodding their heads as they practice internally with the beat they want to use. So we are getting word level stress and sentence level? How cool is that?

(Our pre-school age learners enjoy Talking Tom et al as well - it encourages them to speak up and try out silly phrases because the cat is just as silly as they are. They love to hear their own made up words repeated perfectly! Very shy children will talk to the cat much more quickly than to me or another adult!)

I wanted to share a Sock Puppet video too - but to do that I have to pay Y85 per scene. What a rip off - lots of fun and very creative, but could get expensive as we have a lot of talented actors at Luna. I like this tool because it has to be collaborative, planned, and quickly executed (30 second limit on the free version). Hope to share somehow, soon.

What's the best use of a voice recorder you have found?

Confessions of a twitter stalker? Meeting Shelly Terrell

Shelly Terrell addresses the tech converts, JALT 2011

The highlight of my weekend was meeting Shelly Terrell, even briefly, and to see her present two workshops at this year's JALT Conference in Tokyo. I have been 'following' @shellterrell for some time now on twitter; she is a very healthy spider in the middle of an extremely useful network of teachers/ideas/links & inspiration.

And in person, she's a delight. It's always a bit uncomfortable meeting fellow twitterers in person - "Hello, I follow you" makes you sound like some kind of stalking perv! A good friend of mine was once approached in Tamita Gumtree with "Hi, I've been watching you from across the room". To which he replied "Well you f*** off back to the other side of the room!" Fortunately, Shelly is more approachable : )

A lot of people, especially here in Japan I think, don't "get" twitter. I did, very quickly, after overhearing Barbara Sakamoto (@barbsaka) at JALT two years ago, and deciding that if something was working for her, it should be worth investigating. Since then, following the likes of Barb and Shelly has opened up my professional horizons beyond all imagination. I am trying hard to make sense of and share on (if that is good English?) the useful bits and bobs I come across.

On Sunday I saw Shelly present on using an iPhone with learners - something I am particularly interested in as my daughter mastered my iPhone from the age of two. I would LOVE it if all of Luna's students could arm themselves with an iPod Touch - or even better, iPads...as it is, lending my phone to students is the best I can do, and on a limited basis as there is only one phone to go around. Whatever we do with it needs to be co-operative and simple.

Shelly mentioned a number of apps that I am familiar with, and a couple of others that I downloaded immediately afterwards! I also had the pleasure of finding myself sitting next to a former ESOL examiner trainer & ongoing football fan, and catching up as best we could in between furious note taking and app sharing ideas! Here is one link to take you the rest of the month to research. Find out what and how Shelly shares her great ideas here, and find her kitchen sink over here.

One thing I will be searching out for our YLE preparation is the Story Robe app and key words "learner autonomy" & "collaborative stories". You can see our Monday students working with a couple of these apps in use here...would love to hear some feedback.