Sunday, October 19, 2014

Week 2: The ABCD Learning Objectives Framework and Effective Web Searches



Week 2:  The ABCD Learning Objectives Framework and Effective Web Searches





TASK 1.  Learning Objective

According to Penn State Learning Design Community Hub the ABCD method of writing objectives is an excellent starting point for writing objectives (Heinich, et al., 1996). In this system, "A" is for audience, "B" is for behavior, "C" for conditions and "D" for degree of mastery needed.  During week 2, we were asked to write ABCD Objectives for our classes. Here are 3 ABCD objectives aimed at my EAP III Academic Course.

Class description

1) Setting: Universidad Central de Venezuela, School of Education, Distance Education Program (EUS, Campus: Barcelona (VE)

2) Course: English for Academic Purposes (EAP III), focused on reading comprehension only

3) Course goals:
- Review the contents studied in English I and English II in relation to pre-reading, reading and post-reading activities
- Develop in the students the ability to extract the main ideas of a written text
- Develop the ability to produce a summary of an original written academic text

4) Modality:
Blended learning, four f2f encounters a semester. Course materials available online (Moodle)

5) Learners (Audience):
Undergraduate students majoring in Education, Based in Barcelona or surrounded areas located in the eastern part of the country, five (5) hours or more from the capital where the university main campus is.  Age: 30-50

6) Students' needs:
- Understanding academic texts related to Education, originally written in English
- Identifying the text topic and main ideas
- Summarizing main ideas in Spanish

7) Number of students: 18
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ABCD objectives:

Given an original academic text, written in English, (C) the students (A) will

1. identify the text topic and main ideas (B)

2. determine the main argument (B), and

3. write a 300-word summary, in Spanish, (B) containing the main argument and supportive ideas, and organized in five logic and coherent paragraphs. (D) 

TASK 2. Web searching

During this week, we were asked to revise different search engines, analyze them in terms of use in our own classes and share the advantages and disadvantages that they might have.  To do this, in  the Webskills course website, our facilitators shared a very useful site that allowed us to discover new engines to do an intelligent and effective search, forgetting for a while that Google Search existed.

According to Healey (2009) "a search engine is a program that follows certain rules to look through the World Wide Web and bring back information about places that fit what you've asked for". Based on this, many web searchers have been created to help us find what we are looking for, in a fast and specific way. NoodleTools, for instance, provides a long list of useful web search engines. One web searcher is more interesting than the other, which makes very difficult to choose the best one.

I was exploring some, and two of them called my attention as a university teacher. I think they can be of great help for my colleagues and students. One of them is iSEEK Education, a search engine for students, teachers, administrators, and caregivers. It is mainly used to refine and narrow the topic. I typed the word "blog" and I found 226 total entries.


 The other search engine I explored was DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals. I did a search about blogs and this is what I found: 937 entries for the same word "blogs", as shown below.


I repeated the search process several times with a variety of web searchers and the results were very similar. I successfully found incredible sites and  information sources related to what I was looking for.  Definitively, there are many alternatives to Google search; different engines to refine the topic and obtain a specific peace of information. In using this, our students will be exposed to other ways to do web-searching in academic contexts. They might do a more intelligent search focusing on quality instead of quantity.

TASK 3. Describe a class

Another task was to describe a class. It is the step 1 of a final project. Here is what I shared with my course mates.

Describe the student population, setting, course goal, and student needs.

1) Setting:
- Universidad Central de Venezuela (the oldest and largest public university of my country)
- Humanities and Education Faculty
- School of Education
- Distance Education Program (EUS), offered in five university campuses nationwide

2) Course:
- English for Academic Purposes
- 3/3 courses
- Focused on reading comprehension only

3) Course goals:
- Review the contents studied in English I and English II in relation to pre-reading, reading and post-reading activities
- Develop in the students the ability to extract the main ideas of a written text
- Develop the ability to produce a summary of an original written academic text

4) Modality:
- Blended learning, four f2f encounters a semester

5) Learners:
- Undergraduate students majoring in Education, based in Barcelona or surrounded areas located in the eastern part of the country, five (5) hours or more from the capital where the university main campus is.  Age: 30-50

6) English language skills
- Listening: Low
- Speaking: Low
- Reading: Low
- Writing: Poor

-Students will read in English but write in Spanish. They have not developed the writing skills before.

7) Number of students in the course: 18

8) Tech infrastructure:
- Poor
- One lab with 8 working stations
- No headsets
- Old fashioned PCs
- Slow wi-fi connection
- One video beam
- A pair or speakers

The learners:
-Some have PCs or laptops at home with Internet access and some have smartphones.
-Low tech skills

The teacher:
- Based in Caracas
- No PC at work
- Owns a laptop
- Fast Internet connection speed from home, not at the university
- Smartphone
- Medium tech skills
- Web 2.0 knowledge

The university offers:
- Two platforms: Moodle for asynchronous academic activities and Blackboard-Collaborate for synchronous ones
- A small computer lab for students at the School of Education
- No computer lab available for teachers
- Two PCs in the office and a printer for 18 teachers in the Language Department
- Slow Internet connection speed
- Tech support. There is a technician in Barcelona who helps students if needed

9) Students' needs:
- Understanding academic texts related to Education, originally written in English
- Identifying the text topic and main ideas
- Summarizing main ideas in Spanish

Week 1: Creating a reflective teaching blog

Week 1: Creating a reflective teaching blog


During the first week, I was in Chile participating in an event on ICT in ELT; for this reason I couldn't start the Webskills course on time as planned. However, this second week I've joined all online spaces required and read all the information available. I also participated in the week discussions and answered a survey. I'm really honored to be part of such a fantastic course with facilitators from the University of Oregon, the American English Institute and colleagues from all over the world. I'm doing my very best to catch up on all pending activities. One of them is to create this reflective teaching blog, so here I am.

Teaching and learning with blogs is always a great experience, however, it can be  very demanding for students who are not very familiar with web tools; as in my context, for instance. We offer a distance education program in five different regions of Venezuela. Students from many cities travel to those regional centers for classes, advising or meetings with teachers every three weekends. During the week students keep contact with their teachers through email or the Moodle platform. We have a very low tech infrastructure that limits us the use of certain technology, but we do as much as we can. Believe it or not, even in the XXI century, we still use old methods to deliver the instruction. We design and print instructional materials to be mailed to our students. The bright side of the story is that our school gives us the freedom to incorporate new methods, strategies or resources available to improve our academic teaching task. In virtue of this and in spite of the tech limitations, I have successfully incorporated the use of technologies in my classes, mainly based on the Internet and web 2.0 tools.

I have used blogs for many academic purposes, but never for my undergraduate classes. I have used wikis, instead. They have been perfect for my course objectives. However, while creating this blog, I thought it would be a good idea to blog this upcoming semester for the first time. I'm still in the planning process, so this is the right time to include the use of blogs in the program.

Blogs are excellent tools for class reflections. They offer features that allow us to develop the four basic skills of the target language (listening, speaking, reading and writing), but mainly reading and writing. Since I teach reading comprehension, I think I can use blogs as online spaces for my students to make reflections about their language learning process, discuss the readings and summarize them.









Welcome to my blog

Welcome to Webskills 2014 - My reflective blog

 

This site has been created to share my thoughts, ideas, opinions and learning experience in the 
Webskills 2014 course offered by the University of Oregon, Department of Linguistics, along with the American English Institute and the Department of State of the United States of America.
Hope you enjoy my posts.
Evelyn