sayfun.me | communication is the key!

Teaching Diary: Students write articles

Sascha | NMT — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:48:32 +0000

Here is another hands on example of how to use social media for teaching purposes. You already know how to use websites, facebook, twitter and so on so let’s cover another real best practice. While teaching languages it is obviously important to improve the writing skills of your students. So why not do it in a social media way? Use the social networks to add some motivation to it. The assignment: Write an essay about XYZ and publish it on our website. Spice it up and make it look ‘pretty’. The idea: Beside writing essays students also had to figure out how to use our CMS (wordpress in that case) and how to style articles, how to insert links and media (to make it ‘pretty’). They also could team up with other students / classes to add nice pictures or videos . The outcome: The idea + x. Students did, after a short ‘oooh teacher’ argument exactly what I expected and even a little more. They teamed up with other students, added nice pictures and graphics and even did some videos to embed into their posts. Furthermore they spread the news about their articles via twitter and facebook - so almost some kind of small online marketing campaign. Well done, again please

Teaching Diary: English Communication Scavenger Hunt

Sascha | NMT — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:45:02 +0000

Once more a hands on post about something I tried in class this term. The first time ever that somebody over here tried to pull an ‘interactive’ game off so it wasn’t that easy to get the people involved but in the end it worked out. Not perfectly, but still funny and with the desired outcome. So get ready for the first ever Udon Thani Vocational College English Communication Scavenger Hunt (EC|SH).

So here are a few steps explained. Maybe it’s some inspiration, maybe you simply see what traps are awaiting you when planning such a game or maybe it even scares you off. However I thought the experience is worth sharing.

Intention: Many colleagues asked me ‘why are you doing this? It’s to much work..’ – The simple answer: I think it would be fun and I want students to use their shyness when it comes to English communication. I want them to be able to use English in every day life and in all different kind of situations.

Initial Situation: I told all classes they have to form teams who participate in the game. Then I told them that the game will start on a fixed date at a fixed time and from then on it would all be up to the respective group how fast they’d solve the puzzles. However, to not scare them off in the beginning, I told them that the question will appear once daily. Meaning question number 1 will be appear on day 1 (and then stay visible), question 2 on day 2, etc…This was simply thought to show that the game wouldn’t take to much of their time and that they, if they play, only need to answer one question per day – while setting up this situation I was quite aware of the fact that Thai students are very often very lazy and sure that no group will solve every question as soon as it appears. So I was sure there will be a race as soon as more questions will be visible. And I was right.

Questions / Tasks: When a group would have completed one task/question they would have received a password which they could enter on our website and then they would see the upcoming question. And so on…

Start: I started the game with a post on our own facebook wall.

English Communication Scavenger Hunt - Start

Like mentioned above, from then on the groups had their own pace. And this pace was, at first, quite slow. Since this was something completely knew they were a little stunned by the information overflow but got accustomed to it when motivated once again. When they finally started to realize that ‘playing’ the game really means ‘doing’ something, they had fun, organized groups and got it going on.

Question 1: Which song did we sing / analyze in English class? Name the song and use the fourth word as your first password. – Easy, to get them started using the website for gaming purposes.

English Communication Scavenger Hunt - Question 2

Question 2: What’s the name of the second foreign language teacher here at the college? Go and ask for the next password. In English! – This was quite an easy one but the first question was thought to give everybody an easy start. So that was a no-brainer and the Chinese language teacher was happy to participate in this event (thanks again). Students had to talk English with her and take a picture together with her and then she gave them (like instructed by me) the next password.

Question 3 then was about ASEAN and to figure out a common Thai-English translation mistake. If you translate ‘Boyscout’ (a huge activity group in our college) word by word from Thai to English you will get the expression ‘baby tiger’ which is obviously wrong. So they had to find out how to translate ‘Baby Tiger’ into correct English, find the ‘boss of the baby tigers’ and talk with the boss about ASEAN while naming all participating countries. Luckily the head of our Boyscouts is an English teacher as well so she was happy to participate too and made sure that all the groups really had to talk English in order to receive the new password.

Question 4 was more of a task then a question. Since I wanted all students to be part of the game, not only the ones who speak English quite well, task 4 was: ‘Go planking! Yes, planking! I want 5 planking pictures from around the city – not in your dorm or classroom – upload the pictures on facebook and then receive the next password. – And well, what happened was….great & funny!

EC - English Communication

SH - Scavenger Hunt

Planking, Yeah!

Question 5: Now back to talking English. In question 1 students had to get started using social media, then they had to talk English in question 2 & 3 and now in question 5 they had to combine it. Task was: ‘Find my friend >>NAME<< on facebook or google+ and have a video call with him. Interview him, show him your planking pictures and have a short small talk - he then will give you your last password. Of course it's great to have friends to help me out here. So thanks again to my friend in Austria who was the first to say 'yeah, great idea'. This task obviously needed students to be brave and talk to a complete stranger - but with this question they've already been close to finish the game...of course they had to document their actions again. Pictures and videos can be seen on our facebook page!

Last question / task: When students successfully talked to my friend he revealed the last password and they saw the final task – ‘Perform English in public’. Over the past weeks we learned and analyzed songs tongue twisters, speeches – now it was time to show some action and give a speech, perform tongue twisters or sing English in public. Why? To get rid of the last pieces of shyness and to put all aspects of the tasks before (speaking, social media, doing) together.

Final: The winner was the team of Hotel 3/2 – congratulations! Besides cheering and respect they also got a signed DVD of a TV star I met here in Thailand and ‘a lot of fun and nice memories’ (quote students).

Bottom line: It was a lot of work to set up and think through but it was worth it when seeing the outcome. It really made students to use English on a wider level than only in the classroom and even let them have fun while doing so. I would do it again – however not this term

Teaching Diary: Growing up with censorship

Sascha | NMT — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:12:48 +0000

The past few weeks have been all about censorship (or demonstrations) in the world wide web with it’s peak when Twitter started to censor, or to allow governments to censor, content. For some time I wasn’t able to open links who were send via twitter since the local government blocked them all. Most of my students here however weren’t really bothered by that fact. They said it’s ‘normal’ that the government simply blocks websites….while you could have seen a huge ‘#WTF’ written across my facial expression, students continued to state that the government probably knows best what to do so there wouldn’t be any harm in that. ‘If the americans use the internet for bad things, we shouldn’t see it’. Uhm…brave new world. I get that some people think that way but when asking further, not only students said this to me. University students who actually know more about the world abroad, colleagues and even doctors went along with this opinion. Wow. After thinking more and more about it I came to the conclusion that most people here don’t even know how it is to live without some kind of censorship. Critical decisions have always been made for them and they could always ‘rely’ on a greater force than themselves (I have to be careful how to phrase that) to tell them in which direction they have to march. Left or right around the tree – no need to think, somebody’s gotta tell you. The same now happens with content in the world wide web. Good or not good, don’t think. Somebody tells you what you can see and what not. And everybody accepts it. Now once more the question: Intervene or let it slide? Show them that there is a life outside the box or let them stay inside their small, but easy box? If you open the box they will realize that there is more but it will also bring more choices and possibilities to them as well as decisions that need to made and some dangers as well. But isn’t that what life is about? So…what would you do? Red pill or blue pill?

Teaching Diary: Dreams are my reality? Students forget how to dream.

Sascha | NMT — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:49:47 +0000

This is probably the first disappointed entry in my ‘teaching diary’ here on nomadteacher.org. And it doesn’t even affect social media or student behavior – well in some way it does, but not in the obvious way. The other day I gave an assignment to my hotel management students where I teach ‘English & Internet’. This subject is basically about learning how to use the internet for business purposes and how to use it for communication matters. Since nowadays all kids know how to send emails and stuff like that I decided to take it a little further and see how they handle it when they have to think on their own. Sometimes they did quite nice, sometimes they were to lazy but it worked out. Now, in order to prepare for the final exam, I asked them to present their ‘hotel of the future’. They had all freedom they wanted and could come up with basically everything. And what did they come up with? With 7-star hotels or hotels where you can pay by card instead of real money…that’s not the future, that’s boring (and can be done already). Similar things happened when I gave assignments in other classes where they had to use their imagination. The ‘think big’ gene seems to get extinct. At least on the vocational college level. Unfortunately I lost the link to an article I came across yesterday. The article stated that nowadays more and more students dream, think & invent stuff than ever. However I experience a complete difference here in the colleges. If, at all, students copy stuff that has already been invented. They don’t dream, don’t think, don’t try. They are stuck in their parents daily life and don’t see an escape from that. They are 16 – 20 years old and already accepted that they’ll probably be stuck here forever. And most of them are not trying to fight it. Even if they have dreams, they don’t try to chase them. Last week I talked to my graduating students and asked them where they want to study…they told me they want to go away, abroad or simply to Bangkok…but now that the week of University signings has come, 87% of them signed in at the local University. That is pretty sad and shows somehow that there is still a HUGE gap between students / life in general over here in Thailand (Asia) and the western world. There is internet, social media (all of my students use it and usually have over 700 friends on facebook, so they know about the life outside) and so on but when it comes down to the real life all those ‘magic’ moments are gone. Now the question: Should we, as teacher, intervene here and encourage students to dream & think big? Or is it more important to prepare them for the ‘real life’ that isn’t all fun and dreams? Won’t the find out (or probably already have found out) that on their own? What’s your approach? Dreams aren’t reality – but they could be so easily.

Teaching Diary: Students shoot short stories

Sascha | NMT — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:44:09 +0000

This is just another example of how to use ‘new’ technology (well videos aren’t that new actually – but since almost every student nowadays owns a mobile phone that is able to record a video, things are getting much more easy) for teaching purposes. In one of my social media articles about using youtube for teaching purposes I explained how you can use videos for teaching and entertainment purposes. This post here is now an example for exactly this. The assignment: Create a movie. About whatever you want. Only premisse: You have to speak English. The rules: No rules! I gave this assignment to my ‘English communication’ (while English being the foreign language) classes and wanted them to use everything they learned so far. I gave them my number and told them they could always ask me for help, if they need me, but most groups never took advantage of that. Once more the proof: Give your students space and trust and they will work perfectly on their own. The outcome: Quite different, however mostly satisfying and once in a while overwhelming (always depending on the expectations of course). A little more… Obviously not all classes are on the same level. Furthermore there are classes with ‘high flyers’ in it and classes that consist of mostly ‘average’ students. Besides that there are hundreds of further influences that define your expectations. However, like mentioned above, my expectations have been mostly matched or exceeded. Without talking to much about the sociological component here, students do appreciate space for creativity and their own work pace. When you managed to develop a good and understanding relationship with your class, assignments where you don’t have to set the rules straight but only define an ‘outcome’ or an ‘aim’ will work very well – quite often a lot better than assignments with fixed rules. However, when you are planning a big project, milestones can help to keep track of that. We will cover milestone projects for your class later this year. For now we focus on the ‘make a movie’ assignment. What students learned during this assignment: Project management. They had to work in groups and delegate all tasks within their group. Those tasks included story writing, finding locations, the technical components (filming, cutting, editing) and of course acting (that’s what everybody had to do – after all it was English Communication class). The movie shown above is, of course, not an Oscar movie or the most awesome assignment ever – however it blew away most of my teaching colleagues because they didn’t knew that their students were able to speak or think well enough to do something like this. Even though it’s not perfect (that’s were the teacher comes in later when reviewing it) it leads to one very important thing: Fun with a foreign language. Furthermore, like mentioned above, students increased or gained skills in different areas (cutting, using the pc for editing purposes and so on). After students finished the movie I usually watched it together with them and explained what was good and where they made mistakes. This worked out quite well and students were always happy with this task – even though it meant a lot of work for them (as you can see at the end of the movie above). Side note Besides being fun and a nice experience for your students, creating movies is also a good way to spread the word about your course or school. Students are very likely to share their own movies on social media sites which will lead to a greater awareness of your work. But enough with the marketing thoughts here – my teaching diary is not a place for those thoughts, they will be thought of later in the social media marketing section. And now. Take 2!

Social Media & Education: Teaching with Youtube

Sascha | NMT — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:34:25 +0000

We already had a look on facebook and twitter for teaching purposes and learned how to use a self hosted website/blog for that matter. Now it is time to get some more interaction into the whole education thing with videos! Videos are a great way of interact with students and make students learn without actually noticing that they are learning. That’s wy today we will focus on youtube. Obviously there are other video hosting websites as well (vimeo, myvideo, etc.) but youtube is the best known website and offers you an easy & hands on editing possibility. You can create some nice videos without knowing to much about video editing. So let’s just get started. Before going to deep into the matter, lets just remember what we learned in my ‘brief guide to jump start your social media efforts‘ about youtube:

Using videos for your classes can be of great help. It is not only entertaining and lets students repeat your stuff over and over again on their own pace, it also urges students to interact and be creative. After setting up your own channel you can divide videos into different lists (see screenshots), promote further sites of yours and – one thing I like very much – you can edit videos quite nicely. For editing you don’t need much video editing knowledge since it is quite easy to follow the steps youtube suggests. With these editing possibilities your videos can get even more engaging and interactive (e.g. if you use annotations and links). Moreover, if you are afraid to show yourself or your teaching material online to the world, you can adjust your video settings the way that only you and the people you invite (or the ones that have the link) can see your videos. All power stays with you. So why don’t you just give it a try? Another nice thing by the way: Videos can be embedded into other social networks quite easily. So youtube is a nice add on to all the other networks mentioned here.

Now that we remember that, let’s get more hands on with real world examples and practices. First some useful adjustments and then some basic examples from my English classes over the past months and years.

youtube for teaching - show your videos and present further social media profiles

Show your web presence

As you can see in the screenshot on the left, your profile allows you to link to other social media profiles like facebook and twitter. Furthermore you can add links to your websites or teaching material as well. Spreading the word while providing videos. Nice! Besides that you can also show links to your websites and profiles from within your videos (called annotations). You can add text via the youtube video editor (more to come later) to every video – most video providers use this to show links to their twitter or facebook pages or to announce soon to come events. Furthermore you can theme / style your own ‘channel’ so that it fits the looks and feels of your homepage or your other profiles. An appropriate avatar does the rest…but that’s just basic profile set up.

Group your videos

A cool, very own youtube feature, in terms of styling however is the fact, that you can group your videos into different ‘playlists’ and display them on your startsite. This makes sense since it enables users to find interesting content more easily. You could, for example, create playlists like ‘my lessons’ or ‘English Communication Lessons’ or ‘Assignments’ and so on. You can also choose to display the videos you favorite on your stream – however, selecting this feature should be really thought through. Since you might also favorite videos that you like for yourself but that don’t provide any use for your channel subscribers.

Theme your videos

Theming videos makes them easy to recognize and also helps to brand your channel and different ‘series’ of your content. If you, for example, create videos about paper planes and videos about Vexillology you might want to theme those differently but all videos within the Vexillology topic should be themed the same way. Recognition is an important thing. Just think about your favorite tv series theme. For those of you who are not to much of a video editor, there is quite an easy way to theme and edit videos. Simply head over to youtube.com/create and check some of the online tools there. Most of them are pretty simple and straight forward. Take a look at part 2 >>

Teaching Diary: Dark Horse Classes

Sascha | NMT — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:59:12 +0000

Even though teachers should be unbiased when it comes to ‘favorite’ or ‘less favorite’ classes everybody has classes in which he puts more hope or expectations than in others. We don’t advantage one class over the other but we simply have different expectations. There are those classes that you already know or that have students in it that simply outsmart others. If a class has some of those ‘better than the rest’ students you usually tend to think of this class as ‘good class’ (unless you think closer about it of course). If there are classes that usually only consist of ‘average’ students or ‘not to good’ students you consider them as ‘not my favorite’ – I guess. I say it again: I am sure that most teachers still put the same effort in each class – that’s our job – I am just talking about the subconscious expectations. Now the fun / interesting thing: In each and every term that I taught so far there always was the ‘dark horse’ class. A class that doesn’t have those highly skilled students in it but neither has ‘uninterested’ students in it. Those classes always come, listen and perform ‘ok’ during tests. As time goes by those classes somehow start to sneak up the ladder in your ‘expectations chart’. Due to the fact they always come to class and always listen they all improve on a wider level compared to other classes where all the workload usually depends on the already ‘good’ students. While the ‘good students’ are always the ones who have to help their friends, classes with no overly good students stick more together and try to do homework and assignments as a group. Of course, there are still students in the class that are better than others, but they still see themselves as part of the group and don’t tend to say that they’re better than the rest. Not quite sure if you get what I am trying to say, so let’s keep it short: Right now in each and every term there has been one class that totally surprised me by their efforts & the overall outcome. I didn’t expect them to perform overly well but they stuck together, put work into class and outperformed other classes that were supposed to be on the top of my ‘ladder’. Nice surprise. That’s one reason why I like teaching. Sometimes you really get to whole classes.

Teaching Diary: Sing it out!

Sascha | NMT — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:27:41 +0000

The other day I finally did something, I always wanted to do. I sang with all my English classes ‘Man in the mirror’ by Michael Jackson. While it was far away from being perfect, it still was a great experience for different reasons. First I practiced this song with my classes separately. At the end of each class for about 5 minutes. Slowly but steady they understood more and more (I explained the meaning of course and we talked about it in class) and enjoyed singing it. Furthermore I split the song into different parts so that not every class had to sing every verse. Every class had one verse only. Last Saturday we then met at our college to sing it together for the first time. Like I said before, it was far away from perfect, but it was nice to see how students interact together and how the try to manage working together and making the best out of it. Saying that leads me directly to one of the main purposes of this whole thing. Singing is always a good way of learning a language. It combines fun and free time with education / studies. Furthermore man in the mirror has a nice message (If you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make a change). Besides that songs usually don’t use school English but ‘street’ English. Using such lyrics shows students how English can and will be used outside the classroom and enables them to understand it. Moreover the whole ‘meet with different groups and sing one song together’ is also kind of a project management task. Different student groups came together and had to figure out how to perform this English song best. Was nice to witness how they did it. Long story short: Singing is a great way of making students learn without them considering it studying. Furthermore, when you are finished, you can use the outcome to spread it across your social media presences.

Educate your students – giving out passwords is stupid

Sascha | NMT — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:29:13 +0000

I just came across an article over there at RWW (read write web) which states that more and more teenagers tend to give out their passwords when they are in love. This thought to be kind of an intimate thing – having your significant other on your own facebook (or twitter or whatever) profile, sharing everything and not having any secrets. While this might sound appealing (well, at least somehow romantic in nowadays web 2.0 generation) at first that is, obviously, totally stupid. We all know that only a few of teenage love affairs end with the ‘happily ever after’ saying – the majority ends with terrible break-ups, fights and insults. Obviously everybody thinks ‘we are special, we will stay together forever’ but still education in this area is needed – even if you are special. Giving out passwords without thinking to much about it is like having sex on the first date (or the second, third….at all). It’s dangerous! Teenagers are usually more emotional than we old folks so just think about it briefly. There’s a small fight, one of the couple goes crazy, logs into the other’s profile and posts secrets, annoys friends or even worse…destroys the whole online reputation? Giving out passwords is like giving out the key to your house (and your credit card with the PIN written on it’s back) – it’s just a NO GO! Most of us know this – make sure your students know and understand this as well. There are so many nice ways of being romantic and intimate – there’s no need to chose this stupid one.

Social Media & Education advice for teachers: Don’t take it personal

Sascha | NMT — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:31:36 +0000

This is just a short tip / advice for the ones of you who just start to connect with students in social media. I said it before and implemented it in all of my social media & teaching posts but I say it out loud again: Social Media is not thought to be a controlling instrument! It is a place where you can hang out and interact with your students but you must be aware of the fact that students might hang there out without interacting with or even caring about you and / or your assignments. Social Media (like Facebook and Twitter) is a big part of nowadays free time activities and therefore not only for educational purposes. Students go there to hang out, meet friends, talk about gossip, etc. Doing ‘school stuff’ is only part of the game and quite often not the most important one. And who should blame them? It is important to have time off – just remember what you did when you went home from school. Did you hang out with your teacher? No, probably not. So give your students free time even if you see them online all the time. After all, you are ‘only’ their teacher and even though you see them hanging out online they are ‘just students’ and might forget about your stuff or don’t care about it as much as you do (the usual teacher/student dilemma). So whenever this happens, do not forget: Do not take it personal! They don’t do it to hurt you, they are just living a ‘normal student’s life’.