Kubbu – a fantastic free e-learning tool

I ran a workshop at MEXTESOL 2009 titled (not by me, in my absence, and without my knowing) Continuous Assessment and Technology.

My objective was to share some free, user friendly internet tools that I have been using with my students and to show how teachers might be able to use them as an additional way of keeping track of learner progress.

The tool that seemed to impress most was Kubbu – a free e-learning tool that I heard for through Larry Ferlazzo’s blog.

5 different activity types to choose from!

If you haven’t used Kubbu yet, it’s great for designing simple quizzes, matching games and crosswords which can be either post on a class website or blog or sent directly to learning email accounts.

There are 5 different activity types to choose from. Here’s a matching game:

A rather cool matching game

Add your students' contact info and mail exercises and games straight to them

What I really like to too is that everything can be easily printed and used in class – the crossword generator is particularly useful in that crossword grids are automatically generated in a matter of seconds (anyone who has ever tried to write a crossword using word processing software will appreciate this function!).

Kubbu also makes it easy to track learner progress but providing statistical breakdowns of student performance – you can see, for example, how many times a student has done an activity, how long it took them and what they scored.

Well done Guillermo!

MEXTESOL: A Prestigious Academic Event

This picture pretty much sums up my MEXTESOL.

Me and the Longman monkey at MEXTESOL

What I’ve learned at MEXTESOL 2009 in Monterrey

Some things I learned at MEXTESOL….well, I had this amazing idea of writing daily blog posts from the MEXTESOL conference in Monterrey as I honestly thought I’d be able to catch at least a couple of talks and workshops eventhough I’m here manning the stand. My thinking was that hardly anyone will come to the stand when H Douglas Brown or Pete Sharma are speaking so they’ll let me go to the talks too…but, as they don’t say in Mexico, no way Jose! (they’d probably say no guëy!) I was wrong. Having said that, I did get to have brief chat with Mr Sharma about, among other things, the challenges of providing feedback on distance courses. He really is a nice guy and he didn’t mind my cheeky question about whether he actually still teaches (he says he does). I really wanted to catch his talk on technology and pedagogy but ni modo – not least as my workshop tomorrow will be on continuous assessment and technology (I wanted to steal some ideas!).

Anyway, if you’re still reading – this is supposed to be a teacher development blog , right? – And all I can tell you is that if you’ve never been to a big teaching conference – you really should – this is my first (major) one and it really has been an eye opener. There are loads really interesting talks and workshops from obvious stuff like technology in the classroom to more thought provoking stuff like sexism in efl.

In addition, there are tons of interesting people to meet and loads of good teaching books to buy, many at quite low prices.

However, after 2 days in the exhibitors hall I’ve been surprised by a couple of things on the commercial side:

1. A lot of people seem to go to conferences to pick up as much free stuff as they can, even if it’s crap like notepads and pens.
2.Major publishers and large chains of language schools go to any length to get your attention – one school, on this occasion, had teachers dancing on tables telling people to “shake it” if they wanted a free t-shirt.
3.Behaviourism is alive and well in courses books for kids.
4.Piracy is affecting the ELT industry – some rather dodgy looking materials are on sale in the hall.

Save time! Do Student Needs Analysis Online

If you are a reader of blogs by any of the more tech savvy teacher-bloggers such as Nik Peachy, then what I’m about to write may not seem that impressive. I don’t claim to be the first to use this web tool for this purpose either. That said, it’s still pretty cool and I think it’s well worth sharing.

Some background
With a new Trinity ISE prep course about to kick off at the end of the week, in an effort to save valuable class time (and prep time), I decided to use Polldaddy – the online polling and survey tool – to conduct a pre-course needs analysis (rather than using up the first hour of the first session of the course doing a paper-based one).

This was my first time using Polldaddy for anything (yes, believe it or not, my son’s name was chosen by my wife and I after I saw him in the hospital for the first time and not by asking blog visitors to choose their favourite from a shortlist of 5 or 6 possible names!) and so I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out.

Making it happen
As it happens, it worked out very well. Let me take you through it step by step.

After registering (ah yes, you do have to register first) with Polldaddy, the first stage, writing the survey, was a breeze. It’s a case of simply dragging and dropping question types into your survey (there are plenty of options including multiple choice, matrix grids and open questions, for example). I then added in question and response text as appropriate (exactly as it is on my paper-based version of the survey). Polldaddy also lets you insert links to websites and files if you so wish. The only down side here is that free account restricts you to 10 questions.

Once I’d written and saved the survey, I copied the link which Polldaddy generated and pasted it into an email which I then sent to all the course participants. When they click the link the survey opens (no need to download anything) and they see something like this:

Possibly the best thing is the way the results are presented. Responses to closed questions are presented in graphs and so I can instantly see for example, how many people can do an hour or more of homework each week, what percentages of participants are happy doing pairwork etc. Take a look:

In addition to the quantitative information, I can quickly browse through qualitative data from open questions:

Happy, happy
What can I say – a great tool which is easy to use and has saved me some serious time. So good in fact that I’m going to use it to carry out in-course self-assessment surveys and a post-course student satisfaction survey.

Try it!

CENNI – Is Mexico Finally Putting the TOEFL in its Place?

When it comes to official language tests, TOEFL is king in Mexico. Sad but true. And I’m not talking about the oh no the server’s down, we’ll have to cancel your exams for today kids iBT. No. It’s the paper-based version, the PBT, which is the most widely accepted proof of language proficiency in this country.

A national obsession
Learners are obsessed with scoring 500 to 550 on the TOEFL. Employers ask for TOEFL as proof that potential employees can speak English. Universities stipulate that in order to graduate students need to “pass” the TOEFL (whatever that means!). All of them apparently oblivious to the fact that the TOEFL is designed to test English proficiency for studying at U.S. universities rather than general commuicative language ability and, more importantly, that there are loads of other superior tests out there.

To make matters worse, language learners, employers and universities seem equally as oblivious to the fact that there are official and unofficial TOEFL tests and TOEFL test scores. Consequently, language schools make money from offering TOEFL and TOEIC tests that they’ve photocopied from practice / prep books. In addition, jobs are offered, promotions are awarded, and degree certificates are handed out on the basis of scores from exams that, for all we know, were done with a copy of Swan and decent dictionary at hand.

CENNI
But maybe things are about to change. The Mexican education department, the SEP, in conjunction with a number of other stakeholders, has been working quietly for the last few years on the CENNI – the national language level certificate. The CENNI is an effort to establish a national framework of language proficiency qualifications. Drawing heavily on the CEFR, the SEP has established a 20 point scale which describes communicative abilities in foreign languages.

At the time of writing, 40 different language tests, testing 8 different languages, have been provisionally benchmarked to the CENNI scale. ESOL tests include the usual suspects – the IELTS; our beloved TOEFL and her ugly little sister the TOEIC; the trend setting Trinity ISE and GESE exams; and, last but not least, those darlings of private Mexican schools, the Cambridge ESOL exams.

Here’s how it’s going to work: test takers will take an official language test at an official test centre and (assuming they pass) receive an official certificate to prove it. With this certificate in hand, they will be able to go to the SEP and get a free CENNI certificate corresponding to the score or level of their official exam certificate which they can then show to perspective employers or universities.

Of course, the CENNI is voluntary and it remains to be seen how language learners, employers and universities take to it. Furthermore, you can be sure that Mexican government will do their best to make actually receiving the certificate a bureaucratic nightmare (you’ll probably need a notarized copy of your grandmother’s birth certificate, signed by Pancho Villa or something like that!).

But hopefully, some time in the near future, language institutes will stop promoting themselves on the back of offering unofficial TOEFL and TOEIC exams which prove nothing, and Mexican learners of English will be obsessed with getting, say, CENNI level 14 rather than TOEFL 550!

Looking for cohesive devices?

Apparently, according to my blog stats, a lot of people have found their way here as a result of searching the terms cohesion and cohesive devices. Well, those people must have been utterly disappointed to find only a passing reference to cohesion in a post about using songs in the classroom. I do apologise – as a fellow teacher, I’ve spent hours painstakingly (e)rummaging through websites in search of exercises, articles, pictures etc. to use in class. Are my tags misleading? Do you feel like I’ve been wasting your time? I’m sorry.

In order make amends I have uploaded a couple of worksheets on cohesion. One focuses on lexical cohesion. It’s based on two newspaper articles about food in New York and Mexico City.
The other focuses on grammatical cohesion – ellipsis to be precise – and is based on a recent David Letterman interview with Johnny Depp. You can watch the interview here:

Both are fairly challenging and are aimed at learners at B2 (CEFR) level learners and above. There’s also a collaborative writing activity on car safety which works on cohesion on my materials page. More exercises on cohesion to follow.

For authentic listening material, just Ask!

In a recent discussion with a group of Mexican teachers about the importance of using authentic listening texts in class, I was surprised to hear someone say that finding such material is difficult.

Surprised because it seems to me that never before has it been easier for teachers to expose learners to real language in the classroom. The availability of so many free web-based audio and video streaming, recording and editing tools combined with the popularity of all kinds of different reality TV shows means that we can easily get our hands on messy, idiomatic, ungrammatical real language or samples of different world Englishes.

“Old hat!”, I hear you say
Now, obviously I am by no means the first to write about using reality TV in classroom. Here’s an excellent article from the the Internet TESL Journal, for example. Meanwhile, Gary Denness, author of the excellent Mexile blog, was actually on Big Brother talking about teaching with Big Brother.

What I wish to bring to the attention of teachers here in Mexico and beyond, however, is this:

Jing screen shot of Ask & Record Tool Bar

The Ask and Record tool bar. It’s great! It allows you to record live any audio that is playing from your computer.

Yeah, and..?
You may be wondering what the point is – after all, you could just play the Youtube or Dailymotion video in the classroom, right? Well, what I love about this is that you can record just the segment or snippet of the video that you want to focus on. I mean, sometimes you don’t want students to watch the whole video; perhaps only a few turns of a conversation are really of interest; perhaps students will be distracted by the visual information when you really want to work on their listening skills; perhaps there’s no internet in the classroom; perhaps you only have access to a CD player…Whatever, this is a very cool tool for teachers. You can download it here.

Over egg it, why don’t you?
Unfortunately, you may have to sit through hours of mindnumbing, crap telly in order to find something you can actually use in class. But do not fear, help is at hand – I set up a Posterous page with some snippets of real English so that you can see what I mean. Please take a look here. Feel free to use it and contribute.

New Blog Title

Exciting news! I just changed the name of my blog.

As you can see, it now has the catchy name Milk Makes Cheese, rather than the marvellously dull English. Teacher. Mexico.

Same URL though – a fact which apparently is a bad idea in SEO terms, but never mind – and same kind of content (just in case my 2 regular readers were getting worried!).

“Milk makes cheese” is an example of the kind of utterance that comes out of students’ mouths in English classrooms where they are fed a diet of grammar and nothing more.

The Reading Process Riddle

Yesterday, my wonderful and beautiful wife (who, incidentally, is also an amazing photographer) forwarded me an email containing the old “Count the number of F’s” brainteaser. Of course, I didn’t fall for the puzzle this time, owing to the fact that I had done it before. However, it occurred to me that the puzzle does a great job illustrating a couple of important points for language teachers about the reading process.

The Puzzle
But, before we get on to the boring teacher stuff, here’s the puzzle, in case you haven’t done it before:

Quickly count the F’s n the next text – how many are there?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

Most people only count 3, failing to count the F’s in the 3 Of’s. There are actually 6 F’s (I think!).

For Language Teachers
Now, 3 reasons why I deem this to be worth blogging about:

1. It shows that when fluent readers read, they don’t process texts letter by letter, word by word – rather they take in all the letters simultaneously, recognising all the letters in the word at once. Furthermore, research suggests that we recognise related pairs of words more quickly than unrelated pairs or words.

2. It demonstrates that fluent readers don’t process all of the words in a text – according to studies, we process fewer than half of the function words (words such as of, the, and to which don’t contain lexical meaning) in a text and around 80% of the content words.

3. More generally, it highlights the inadequacy of bottom-up approaches (on their own) for explaining the reading process and provides support for the view that reading more is likely characterised by the continuous interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing skills.

As Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) point out:

“Good and effective reading must…be viewed as combining both rapid and accurate recognition and decoding of letters, words, collocations, and other structural cues with sensible, global predictions related to the text as a whole”

There are obvious implications here for work that we do with written texts in the classroom.

Now, what about the one about the colour and the tool?

Teacher Motivation

A recent post on the excellent Kalinago English blog raises a question that is relevant to absolutely all teachers in all teaching and learning contexts – how do we keep our learners motivated?

Interestingly, the first comment on the post makes the point that, first and foremost, the teacher needs to be motivated – if the teacher is motivated then it will rub off on the students.

That certainly seems to make sense, but in a job where burn out is not uncommon, where pay could be better, and where subject matter can be quite repetitive, it’s easier said than done.

So how CAN we keep ourselves motivated? I think that the way that we prepare for our classes is an important factor – more specifically, we need to preview the upcoming chapters in the coursebook with a critical and innovative eye.

Here are 3 questions to ask yourself when preparing for classes:

1. Can I you make it more interesting for my learners and for me by supplementing the coursebook material with additional tasks and activities? Ideally, ones which will go down well with this particular group. Perhaps something along lines of recent suggestion on the very same Kalinago English page appointments would do the trick – using learners’ smart phones to make appointments.

2. Is there a way of working with that language area that I haven’t used before? It’s all too easy to rely on your tried and tested explanations and techniques and we all do it from time to time… but if it becomes a habit then watch out! Try out a new approach or dabble in an alternative methodology (without neglecting learners’ needs and interests, of course!).

3. Can I learn more about the theme of the chapter in order to stimulate more personal interest? This one is particularly pertinent in an ESP context. When I was teaching in multi-national companies, I knew I could get by teaching the chapter on, for example on advertising, with my non-specialist knowledge the subject area but it was much more motivating for me if found out, in this case, about how the company that my students worked for advertised.

I’m sure there is more that can be said on the topic. For ideas that go beyond day-to-day teaching, I refer you to the recent “Spread Your Knowledge” guest pieces in Burcu Akyol’s thought provoking blog.