A digital class:
incorporating elements of distance learning
into everyday teaching practice.
By Lev Abramov
Distance Learning Center
Achva Pedagogical College
Israel
Distance education provides an effective solution for those who, due to various reasons, cannot enjoy regular university classes. Some live too far and cannot travel. Others are chronically ill and cannot take regular classes at the university. Yet others just cannot foot the bill: they have to quit their jobs or work fewer hours in order to study for a degree or a diploma in a traditional manner. Family obligations are another reason for not starting (or, what’s even worse, for quitting) undergraduate studies. And the list is growing. No wonder that today more than a third of the courses offered by American universities is available online.
We believe that the school system must take this into account. We must consciously prepare our pupils to be able to resort to distance education once they realize that their situation calls for it. They will no doubt appreciate it: the skills thus obtained will enable them to start learning online as soon as need be, without having to take some sort of preparatory courses delaying the actual beginning of the learning process.
Should we be doing it solely for the benefit of the learner, it would be very hard to convince most of us to invest more effort without getting some sort of reward for ourselves. Fortunately, the reward is obvious: as soon as our pupils acquire the skills necessary for distance education, we can use some of these in order to shift our teaching style from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction.
How many times did you leave a classroom frustrated because a well-planned lesson was shattered into pieces by the pupils who had not brought their textbooks, could not participate in the lesson and soon became bored and disruptive? How often have you wished you were elsewhere, not in the classroom, because of severe discipline problems?
Yet the solution was quite easy and readily available. Today you can teach your pupils without having to solve most of the class management problems inherent in traditional face-to-face instruction. But before you do, you have to teach them how to do their part of the job. It may take a while; it may require some efforts on your part as well as theirs.
Let us briefly review the main aspects of distance learning mode and of the skills necessary for maintaining it:
· browsing the Web;
· Web searching;
· filling out online forms;
· posting to message boards;
· creating, editing and saving documents;
· sending and receiving e-mail messages and attachments;
· participating in chats and similar synchronous activities;
· taking quizzes, tests and exams online.
Most of the above skills can be effectively used to promote the four EFL skills.
It is generally believed that distance education requires special programs and platforms that are expensive, time-consuming and hard to learn. We believe that this is entirely wrong. While such platforms have certain benefits and, if used by the right teams to create educational systems, can yield wonderful results, there are other approaches (let’s call them minimalist) which can make distance instruction no less effective, but at the same time do not impose such software requirements nor turn the teacher’s involvement with computer-aided instruction into a full-time programmer’s job. Let me briefly describe what such minimalist approach involves.
The first thing to do is to create a local website (on the school intranet) – MS Word will do the job just fine - and teach the pupils to point their browsers at it every time they come to the computer lab for an English lesson. You have to update it regularly with the materials which you intend to teach and which would otherwise be taught frontally.
· select the unit to be taught this week;
· scan and digitize it;
· split the unit into separate web pages;
· add and/or edit whatever materials you think necessary;
· hyperlink and upload them;
· place a shortcut to the main page on the desktop.
With this model, you become textbook-independent: your pupils do not have to bring their textbooks to class anymore. Besides, your pupils will be using computers instead of the textbook, which may somewhat improve their motivation. Textbooks symbolize teacher-pupil interaction which implies inequality: the teacher at the top, the learner down below. Computers, on the contrary, are controlled by the learners, thus giving the latter a feeling of superiority.
Let us start with reading and reading comprehension. There is a number of approach models in this area. The simplest approach to this task is to use the course materials “as is” (after all, you must have selected the textbook because you thought it was suitable for your class, right?). The text (which has to be converted into a Web page or Adobe Acrobat Reader file) can be read off the computer screen just like it is read off the printed page. Pupils can copy the comprehension questions that follow (by copy/paste) to a new file and answer digitally. The output file can be delivered to you for grading/checking either on a floppy or, preferably, over the intranet (dropped into Teacher’s Folder), or by e-mail.
If you teach lower levels which mostly involve True/False or Multiple Choice type questions, then you can further digitize your instruction process by creating automated interactive quizzes. One of the best programs to be used for that is, no doubt, the HotPotatoes suite ( http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/). The output file is a web page by default, so all you have to do is copy/paste the existing questions into the form fields, save and post.
The same program can be used to generate vocabulary quizzes and closes, so if you need some vocabulary reinforcement, you can use it as well.
Students taking higher levels usually have to answer open-ended questions, so you need some tool to check/grade these answers. There are two effective solutions available.
The first one is using the Reviewing toolbar in MS Word. It permits Change Tracking and Comment insertion. By combining these two, you can both correct the mistakes and explain what’s wrong. If you teach your pupils to use it, then you can also assign error correction exercises.
The second tool – which, we believe, is suitable for teaching writing as well – is MarkIn32 ( http://www.cict.co.uk/software/markin/index.htm). It is a dedicated text processor created specifically for grading papers electronically. The set of annotation buttons that comes pre-configured with the package is rich enough to cover most of the marking situations; however, it is fully customizable, so you can add your own buttons should need be. The software outputs files in .rtf, .doc or .htm formats.
The beauty of the approach is, of course, in the fact that each successive draft can be created without having to rewrite the whole passage, and that drafts can be stored digitally and compared on screen. You will appreciate it if you teach advanced writing, composition or translation: this will free your desk of piles of paper. A fail-safe naming convention and backup system must be adopted, of course, to ensure you do not lose someone’s paper – but then, it fully applies to anything you do on the web.
Listening is the next skill on line. You can record fragments of text using MS Windows Sound Recorder and a simple headset with a microphone, but by default the fragments will be no longer than one minute. There are other sound recording applications, of course, which permit recording longer fragments. The same HotPotatoes software will enable you to create various listening comprehension exercises.
You can also download the existing listening comprehension exercises which can be found in abundance on the Web. However, I would like to demonstrate yet another wonderful option which enables a teacher to airplay text files without having to actually record them as sound clips - the so-called Text-to-Speech engines. Quite a few of these have been developed lately; the one I like best is ReadPlease ( http://readplease.com/).
Besides using this program as a text-to-speech generator for listening comprehension activities, one can use it in the framework of assistive technology. Take, for example, pupils suffering from such learning disability as dyslexia. For them, ReadPlease can become an invaluable tool helping them reestablish the lost connection between the visual image of a word and its audio representation.
Needless to say that it goes true for vision-impaired learners who can immensely benefit from using this software.
With speaking it’s a bit trickier than with the rest of the language skills. Using Internet telephony, it is possible to conduct voice communication on the one-to-one basis with acceptable sound quality, provided the line is fast enough to support the streaming audio. But teaching a class to speak using the digital approach is not currently a viable option, in my opinion.
However, if we consider the two main aspects of speech, namely, its fluency and its accuracy, there is a web-based communication mode that closely emulates speech: chat. Being formally a written exchange, chat is by its nature very close to speech. Its elements bend the rules of grammar and spelling and make the typed words look more like their transliteration – an attempt to render the words phonetically, the way they sound, rather than the way they are supposed to be properly written. Chat communication requires prompt replies which do not have to be grammatically correct. So as regards fluency, chat definitely promotes it – at the expense of accuracy. Well, accuracy can be taught in other ways.
Here we come to an interesting crossing point: e-mail that accompanies all the exchange of materials on the intranet. Your pupils start their day with the message they get from you and get their initial instruction. They can read it, or use headsets to listen to ReadPlease read it for them. Then they start working according to the assignment they get. The e-mail window remains open, thus providing them with a concise lesson plan. Whatever the specific assignment – reading, writing, listening or chatting – they will be using computers for study and communication. They can communicate with each other (that’s where chat comes in handy); they should hand in their papers as e-mail attachments, and you have to teach them how to write accompanying e-mail messages properly. In other words, they will be doing exactly what an undergraduate student does when taking a distance learning course.
We should bear in mind, though, that it is still a class of school kids, who may at times need individual attention. There’s no need to play the game by strict rules: you can – and should – move around from one pupil to another, just like you do in a regular class during a lesson, in order to give some individual help. But with time, your pupils will learn to rely more on asynchronous communication.
It is extremely important to nurture in your pupils the feeling of a learning community. Group assignments and teamwork should be promoted. This refers equally to class work and home assignments, hence it is desirable to provide remote access to your website in order to ensure they can continue their work at home and hand it in from home. But if this is impossible, they can use a floppy to copy their files and take them home. Of course, “a virus has erased my floppy” sounds just as innocent as “the dog has eaten my notebook”…
Last – but not least – is the job of keeping the score. There is a great number of programs for that; the best-known of them is MS Excel, which can generate .htm output files to be posted on the intranet. However, it would be wiser to use a program which caters for the needs of teachers in a more specific manner: GradeKeeper ( http://www.gradekeeper.com/) which also permits .htm output, but password-protects access which enables each student to see his or her grades only, without being able to view the grades of other pupils. All you have to do is update the database file every time you finish grading a batch of papers, and there will always be a current final grade available.
Let us briefly revise the programs you need to know in order to make this transition to digital teaching possible:
I. Programs your school most probably has:
a. MS Word 97/2000
b. MS Excel 97/2000
c. MS Internet Explorer 5.50 or Netscape Navigator;
d. MS Outlook or any other decent e-mail client;
II. Programs you can download from the Internet (freeware or shareware):
a. HotPotatoes ver. 5.2
b. MarkIn32 ver. 2.1
c. ReadPlease 2000
d. GradeKeeper ver. 5.2.
What you have seen is a comprehensive overview which, though not in any way exhaustive, presents a wish-list of a sort. In real life, you can use one or more of the elements described to enhance your instruction; the more – the better, of course, but only as much as you are ready for.