Materials for Week 3, March 5-11 - Online Portals for Blended Learning Classrooms
As we come into the final week of this course on Creating and Using Blended Learning Classrooms, I am struck with how timely this course is, as it coincides with a time when, in many countries in the world, governments are trying to contain a global pandemic in part by delaying the start of school terms. This is putting teachers, particularly in these countries, in the position of having to quickly set up online learning for their student, on short notice. As Julia Hollingsworth points out in a blog post Feb 29, 2020, in CNN Business, Millions of children across the world aren't going to school. Her article is about how not only teachers, but the kids are having to cope. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/28/asia/remote-school-education-intl-hnk/index.html
More such links are accumulating here on this page
In dealing with this problem in his own context, Jeff Lebow in Pusan, Korea, is in a better position than most. He long ago set up his his university courses on Blogger where each course has its own tag or label, while course materials reside in Google Drive. Jeff maintains dozens of courses in this manner, and ports from earlier ones to the more recent iterations, which he changes where necessary to keep them current. This blended learning classroom system was in place before corona virus came along and the only addition — now that students are staying home and face-to-face teaching is not possible — is that their synchronous work now occurs in Zoom.
Why DIYLMS? Click through the slides as you listen to the audio
This is a presentation I gave in Sharjah in 2012. Some of the sites mentioned no longer exist but can be replaced in your modern DIYLMS - But the principles are current.
You can follow along in the slides as you listen, here
One really nice thing about working in PBworks is you can embed objects in effective ways like this.
I'd like to know if and HOW I can do this in Schoology.
Anyone know?
How a DIYLMS works in practice
In the most recent webinar of this course on March 1, 2020 Jeff Lebow came online to explain to Vance how he has adapted his system to his situation in Korea, where his courses are up and running despite a delay of at least a week in the start of classes. English Language Specialist Vance Stevens, creator of this course on Blended Learning Classrooms, just entering its last week, relates his discussion with Jeff in the form of a digital story here
This video is queued at the point where Jeff explains how the parts of his system come together to create a socially networked learning environment for his students.
Jeff's means of managing his face-to-face teaching as a blended learning classroom has given him the ability to so seamlessly transfer from a blended classroom temporarily into a virtual one. His is an excellent example of what I (the English Language Specialist, Vance) have been calling DIYLMS, or do-it-yourself learning management systems.
A DIYLMS is a collection of free tools that teachers can use to mount blended learning classrooms in any context they happen to be in. But more importantly, they can carry their toolkit with them from one posting to the next, or wherever they are challenged to put forward any kind of syllabus quickly and deliver it online or in support of a face-to-face context.
The tools may change, but when one tool disappears (as they often do; see Stevens, 2020), the teacher can replace it with a similar tool, or if the teacher works for a time in an institution that has its own LMS, the teacher can use his or her DIYLMS to integrate with, and because it's personalized to your class, improve delivery on that LMS.
I have been working on this concept for some time, and incorporating it into all my teaching, both online and face-to-face, over the past decade. My own version of DIYLMS is what I am trying to model for participants in this course as we work through it together.
Jeff's students at Busan University of Foreign Studies are in-service teachers in Korea, and apart from the topics of the courses that appear on Jeff's Blogger site, much of what they are learning from him will be how to set up their own blended classrooms as they continue their own teaching careers.
Components of a DIYLMS
A portal
A place where
You can clarify your narrative for your course
Your students or participants can go to understand what the course is about and what they should be doing in it
PBworks
This course had two portals:
PBworks (the one you are exploring now); Here you can create different pages or worspaces for your topics or other courses.
Schoology Here you can set up assignments, a calendar, discussions, make announcements, and track user interaction
The great advantage of a DIYLMS as opposed to being constrained to a single LMS tool such as Moodle or Blackboard or Canvas is that if you might run up against things these tools don't as well as others. For example, I found that the different blocks in Schoology embedded objects in varying and hard-to-intuit ways, whereas with PBworks I felt that I could create much more versatile tutorials with more fluid command over embedding of images and videos. So I found I prefered to create my explanations in PBworks and then link to those from Schoology, so that PBworks became, as always, my definive portal, but always linked to from Schoology.
But PBworks can't host discussions, so for that and other basic features of an LMS it was convenient to use Schoology.
These are a class of tools that give you varying degrees of portal flexibility.
Moodle is a full-fledged learning management system, free to download and set up, a little more problematic to host (you may have to pay for that).
Schoology is similar in look and feel to Moodle, also free, but that includes hosting. It has a limited set of tools compared to Moodle and is far less robust, but might be servicable in many contexts.
Edmodo is a community of educators that hosts classrooms for free.
Here you can create different categories or tabs for your topics or other courses
Google Classroom
Many people use Google Classroom as their portal. If this is your choice, you can set one up and invite us to have a look, and we can give you feedback and advise you on it.
Google Docs
Another viable possibility for a portal is Google Docs. You can create a set of documents that all link to one another. A good way to do this might be to set up a front page that lists all of the other documents (could be docs, sheets, or slides, etc) with links to each one, and each document with a link back to the portal, so users could visit the documents, return to the portal, and then view another document, return to portal, etc.
The only two caveats that I can think of off the top of my head are that
you can't embed a video into a Google Doc (but you can embed videos in Google Slides ... why not in Docs? you wouldn't be the first to be wondering about this ... )
You can't have a sidebar available at all times as you can with PBworks and some other blog and wiki sites.
But you can use Google Docs to quickly make an attractive set of web pages that hyperlink in a way that you can design.
Apple
Nellie Deutsch suggests Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, which you can use in a PC environment as well as in the Apple ecosystem by logging in with your Apple ID
A notification space
Schoology has a robust notification system. Facilitators can create notices and have them appear on the front page of the course materials where visitors to the site will see them when they access the course. Schoology will also send notices, as well of alerts pertaining to assignments, discussions, and so on, to participants who configure themselves to receive them.
However if users don't do this then they won't have notifications and alerts pushed to them. But if they visit the site they will see the notices and alerts in a bell next to their profile icon.
Twitter can also be set up for notifications. If your class has a tag then you can use twitter to communicate with your class. Ours can be found through a Twitter search on #blended2020
A social space
A social space can serve as a notification space, but can also help nurture community in a group endeavor.
In this course we have not really set up a social space.
We are using Schoology for certain functions of a social space, and also Twitter
Alternatively
Facebook creates a good social environment if your participants are comfortable meeting in that space
Edmodo is social option for educators; Jeff prefers Band
Slack is getting a lot of traction these days.
Many countries have social spaces that seem to be used by many in that society; e.g. Kakao in Korea, or Line in Thailad, WeChat in China, Whatsapp in many parts of the world, Telegram where user privacy is paramount, etc.
A discussion space
In this course
I have set up discussions in Schoology
I also tried to get discussions going in Flipgrid (by asking participants to record a 4-min digital story at https://flipgrid.com/3ee9594a)
In other environments I have used many other tools.
Listervs:
It is still possible to use YahooGroups just for discussions
One that is working well for me elsewhere is Groups.io
Slack is a kind of community space (similar to Discord or Trello) that permits discussions in a social platform
An events calendar
We have three events spaces in this course:
The calendar in Schoology on the right side of the materials page
This course has been using Zoom. Zoom is a reliable and versatile tool that allows video, voice, and chat discussion, screen sharing, recording, and is free for meetings of up to 45 minutes.
GoBrunch
A new tool that might be worth looking into is https://gobrunch.com/. According to their website, "GoBrunch is a revolutionary place where you can learn and share best practices through live webinars and virtual meetings... everything for free."
Nellie Deutsch has been checking it out and has produced these useful videos:
Hmm, noo ... a little tricky; we need to get a manual.
On the other hand she's doing this on Safari, and it seems that GoBrunch favors Chrome.
You can also make a recording using a third party tool, such as Camtasia (not free) or Screencast-o-matic (the one that Nellie is using, but free for only 15 minutes). On the other hand you can use OBS, Open Broadcasting Software, which is free, but not easy. See:
So you could stream your GoBrunch meeting through YouTube Live using an encoder (such as OBS). See below:
YouTube Live and Hangout
One convenient alternative used to be Google Hangout, which was originally a part of Google+ and has recently been available through Go LIve at YouTube.
You can still use it at this writing but YouTube is changing things into a sleek new interface, and it's quite difficult to see whether Hangouts will still be available.
At this writing you can still revert to the Classic Studio. Enjoy it while you can, and if you miss it, Google have produced a video to introduce their conception of your future in streaming: https://youtu.be/Ok3qM3ecWJU
Then again, you could just use Zoom :-)
A backchannel
A backchannel allows participants to interact with the facilitator and with each other behind the scenes / off topic.
We have at least two backchannel spaces in this course.
Another backchannel tool is Etherpad. This seemed to be quite popular at my workshops because anyone can set one up, and once set up, anyone with the link can write on it. Interestingly, it's the ultimate wiki -- you can replay the second by second evolution of an Etherpad, revert it to any previous state, and each state (each second) has a link.
Schoology does not seem to want to host students' uploads for free. Its enterprise version is integrated with Dropbox.
In this course, mission assignments are made in such a way that participants can put their work online and communicate to us their links.
Online spaces for uploading and sharing files can include:
Dropbox
Google Docs (files can be uploaded and their links shared)
Participants' blogs and wikis (for example, PBworks allows uploads of all kinds of files in such a way that each one has a link that can be communicated to others)
A means of tracking student progress
Schoology is designed to assign grades to students and has a number of tools for tracking students individually
(grading was not invoked for this non-certificate course, but participation in discussions etc can be quantified)
Other means of tracking progress
Certificates; implies matriculation, but might not distinguish degree of participation or accomplishment
Award badges; this entails creating criteria for the badges and some means of establishing that the criteria were fulfilled, which can bring about an improvement to the specificity hence value of the badge over a certificate
Use software tools that track student progress; e.g.
Edpuzzle
Socrative
Google forms or polls
Quizziz
Memrise
Edpuzzle is one of my favorites in this genre of tool. Nery Alvarado, an ex-colleague of mine in my most recent teaching job, has prepared an excellent lightning talk explaining how we used to, and she still does, use Edpuzzle there.
The video was a part of the TELFestNW ‘19, which started in Dec 2019 but is apparently ongoing this year.
Examples of wikis used as blended classroom portals
I have been organizing students and teachers around blended and online learning environments since the turn of the century, starting in around 1997 when I started working full time as a software developer in California, and then moved to UAE as a consultant on a language school being developed there. When the contract for the consultancy ended in 2003 I worked for 8 years as a computing teacher in an engineering college in Abu Dhabi (in an EFL context; I used to characterize my work as LACL, language assisted computer learning).
When I went back to the EFL classroom in 2011, I started applying what I had learned over the previous decade to making my classrooms blended ones. I called what I was doing DIYLMS and got on a round of presentations and publications which went, by that name, well into 2012.
However, you shouldn't get the impression that the concept is out of date. Specific software may have changed in recent years, but the concepts are pretty much the same under DIYLMS. So though I conceived the concept under that acronym in 2011, and wrote and presented about it well into 2012, I've been developing the concept through constantly implementing and practicing it over the past decade in my teaching and teacher training.
My blended classroom techniques derived from course I was teaching entirely on line througout this period:
My volunteer work as a coordinator of Electronic Village Online (2002 to the present), http://evosessions.pbworks.com During this time I moderated many of my own online EVO sessions including
NCSCDS maintains this site to support the students, staff and faculty of North Shore Country Day with their use of technology for teaching and learning
Search on 'Educator Temporary School Closure' and three pop up:
Educator Temporary School Closure for Online Learning - https://www.facebook.com/groups/Temporaryschoolclosuresupport/ Description - We ask that Parents join homeschooling and online learning groups. This group is to support educators who are planning distance or online learning due to school closures for COV19. We need to keep this group educator focussed thanks for your understanding
Special Education and Temporary School Closure Support - https://www.facebook.com/groups/208114173735864/ Focus: Special Education student populations face unique challenges during the Coronavirus crisis. As schools modify, begin partial distance learning, close down, and eventually move to online education, special education teachers must think in new ways to offer our students the support they need.
The first one, pictured at left, was recommended via Facebook friends
Nives Torresi shared this video on Facebook which she says was "made especially for my students!
Since we are on Lockdown due to COVID-19 all our high school students (Italy) have been transferred to Online Learning (remote learning; distance learning). Our school has had GSuite for Education for approx 5 years and most of our staff are aware of how to use the basic concepts. The same goes for our students."
Open the video in YouTube and check out the descripton, e.g. the part where she explains how she
Replies explain in detail how to set up Zoom for organizing and monitoring breakout rooms, and Helaine Marshall offers:
"Given the concerns over on-campus instruction due to the current global health crisis, I thought it might be helpful to re-up SOFLA, my model of online flipped learning. Here are some resources:
The Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach https://lnkd.in/djFZW9A – article in TESOL Teacher Education Interest Section News, written with Carolina Rodriguez-Buitrago.
SOFLA: Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach: Innovative Online Learning at LIU https://lnkd.in/eC5YrHY – Presentation from Flipped Learning Network Conference, including data from my grammar course.
Secondly, Joe's presentation on Improving Your Virtual Presentation Skills, intended largely as advice for people giving online webinars for the first time, but many of the skills translate to online teaching. You ... might need to download the free Adobe Connect app to see the recording ... http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p18p78ycu9v/
Kim Cofino is assembling a set of resources to help teachers deal with Emergency School Closures
Also weighing in (an emailed advert; still, relevant, possibly helpful) ...
We’re in this together.
As the COVID-19 virus continues to spread and impact school communities, we want to do what we can to help. Teachers, parents, and students can use Edmodo to communicate and continue education—always for free—even when in-person learning isn’t possible.
If you or others you know are impacted by school closures, we’ve put together a short guide to quickly set up distance learning using Edmodo.
You can also find and share strategies with other teachers on Edmodo by using the hashtags #bettertogether#coronasafety.
Please stay safe, and reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions for us.
As educators, learners and families are impacted by COVID-19, know that our entire team is always here for you. Inspired by the simple and innovative ways you foster community beyond the classroom, we have curated a collection of resources to help you and your peers.
This one-page PDF will help you set up Flipgrid for a remote classroom. Please feel free to download and share with any interested educators.
In this Disco Library playlist, created by Jornea, Jess and Ann, our Flipgrid Educator Innovation Leads, you will find innovative Topic ideas for at-home learning.
During FlipgridPD webinars we explain the basics of Flipgrid and answer your questions.
Share this simple guide to help the families in your community use Flipgrid to keep their children active, connected and engaged while they are home from school.
We have also increased our support efforts to help as you, your colleagues and the families in your community embrace new approaches to teaching and learning.
On March 13 the makers of Socrative and Showbie sent an email to registered users announcing the launch of a program to give unlimited Showbie and Socrative free to Schools through the end of July 2020, in an effort to help everyone get through the most critical phase of the Coronavirus pandemic. Response was overwhelming, literally.
"Within minutes of the start of school, hundreds of thousands of students and teachers flooded into Showbie to begin their distance learning activities. Unfortunately, the surge of traffic completely overwhelmed our systems and took them down. Quite frankly, we have never seen this level of synchronous load before. While Showbie has suffered small outages from time to time in the past, this event was unprecedented."
So the following day they apologized that they would be unable to take on all comers and emailed a "More Prudent Offer" of a more limited number of free licenses - Please complete this form if you are a school or district administrator to apply for your extra licenses
According to this article, Zoom had "already removed the time limit from video chats using Zoom's free service for affected regions in China and elsewhere, Yuan took another measure to help mitigate the impact of the coronavirus: he decided to remove the limit for any K-12 schools affected in Japan, Italy and the United States. ... Students or teachers who fill out an online form using their school email addresses and are then verified by Zoom will have any accounts associated with that school’s domain also gain unlimited temporary meeting minutes, according to a site set up for the process overnight. The free Basic accounts are also available by request in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland, Poland, Romania and South Korea, a spokesperson for Zoom said."
This is a recording of a webinar held Mon 9 March by English Langauge Specialist Vance Stevens hosting a webinar on Using and Creating Blended Learning Classrooms on the topic of "What if your school closes?" . Special guests from Hong Kong were Suzan Stamper and Bonnie Calanchini. We were also joined by Don Carroll in Japan and Nergiz Kern in Turkey, with a cameo appearance from the course beautiful assistant Bobbi Stevens.
This webinar will be especially interesting if you are in the position of having to leap like a lemming into teaching online since it focuses on one particular ramification of the COVID-19 outbreak relevant to the course, where schools have been forced to close in many countries worldwide, and teachers have had to suddenly transition from developing blended learning classrooms all the way to going totally-online in one challenging leap.
From the article: "Reason Cybersecurity issued a threat analysis report about how the malware was embedded in a file, usually named Corona-virus-Map.com.exe, around 3.26MB in size." In other words, the site you visit for information prompts you to download a file, which, if you double click on it, delivers the payload. Incidentally in the original article, the word "report" above is linked, I presume, to the threat analysis report. If you want to track it down, visit the original article.
Stevens, V. (2020). The sky is falling: Are we nearing the end of Web 2.0?.TESL-EJ, 23(3), 1-14. Retrieved from http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej92/int.pdf. Also available:
These presentations were made at a time when I had hit on the DIYLMS as an umbrella term for how I was conducting my own blended classes at the time. Although the specific software I used at the time may no longer still be available, the function of that software is likely available as a replaceable component in a modern DIYLMS scheme.
On Feb 8, 2012, I gave a keynote speech entitled Learner-centered do-it-yourself Learning Management Systems at the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG http://ltsig.org.uk/ conference on Opportunities, challenges and practical solutions for the integration of ICT in education in Marrakech, Morocco from 8-11 February 2012. My write-up, slides, and recordings are linked from the URLs below:
On March 7, 2012, I presented at a TESOL Arabia Conference Pre-conference Development Course: ONLINE TEACHING AND LEARNING IN TESOL. This TESOL Arabia Development course looked at the ingredients English language teachers require to create and deliver successful online lessons and courses in the field of TESOL. I was one of three panelists:
Teaching Online: The Key Ingredients - Nicky Hockly (Director of Pedagogy, The Consultants-E, Spain)
Improving the Effectiveness of Online Discussions - Justin Shewell (former TESOL Arabia Webmaster; Instructor, Arizona State University, USA)
On March 13, 2012 I gave seminars in Erzincan, Turkey to around 50 Erzincan University Civil Aviation students which were prepared and delivered via a wiki forming a part of a DIYLMS (do-it-yourself learning management system)
On April 3, 2012 I presented a talk on DIYLMS: Student-centered do-it-yourself Learning Management Systems at the 6th eLearning in Action conference at the Sharjah Higher Colleges of Technology, "an event where teachers, eLearning developers and educational technology specialists from HCT and other educational institutions convene to share, connect, discuss and learn about the best ideas and technologies for eLearning;" see:
Conference program with the schedule of streamed events:
Abstract This presentation addresses situations where we are expected to develop viable courses quickly. Flexible creativity is achieved with DIYLMS (do it yourself LMS) using a wiki portal for course information and links, Google Docs for student writing and feedback, and blogging for students to showcase their work.
Summary I have been teaching research writing to NNS with NYIT on the ADMC campus as well as Academic Composition at HCT/CERT Naval College. Both contexts have required me to develop or adapt viable courses quickly, effectively gauge learner response and interest, and adjust materials on-the-fly to better meet learner needs. Flexibility, creativity, and organization beneficial to both instructor and student are achieved using DIYLMS (do it yourself LMS). Components include a wiki portal for course information, links pertinent to course content and management, and screencast and other tutorials. Google Docs are used for student collection of assignments. Teacher feedback can be given in-class directly on real-time, interactive instances of student writing for all to see via in-class projector, and for individual students to follow right there on their laptops, whereas effective feedback can be given between classes via a medium where it can be immediately seen, day or night, when students are revising their work. Another component, blogging, is used to showcase student work. I also use etherpad clones for certain classwork and Jing to create annotated screen-capture and screencast tutorials. All of these tools are free and work through institutional firewalls. In this presentation I will share anecdotal data gathered through writings from both sets of students.
Mon 9 March 1330 UTC - Special guests from Hong Kong - What if your school closes?
This will be Learning2gether episode 442 and the 4th Webinar of the course on Creating and Using a Blended Learning Classroom, or the 7th office hour, intended to explain or to help anyone with how to set up some kind of portal or activities in their own Blended Learning Classrooms.
Our theme for the week is focused on how so many countries are trying to contain a global pandemic in part by delaying the start of school terms, putting teachers worldwide in the position of having to set up online learning for their students on short notice, or at least give serious consideration to the possibility.
We will start a little earlier than the normal time with two special guests from Hong Kong, one of the locations most affected.
Bonnie Calanchini, a American teacher who works (from home now) at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong as an Inclusion Specialist, primary level. Her school has been closed since Chinese New Year in January, and she and her colleagues are going into their 6th week of home learning. Bonnie's take: "I can say that my school is doing a fantastic job implementing distance learning and the kids are responding well."
Suzan Stamper teaches at Yew Chung College of Early Childhood Education where she's a Senior Lecturer of English and the English Language Support Leader. Her school made the sudden announcement to go online in February, and it is expected that classes will be online until at least after Easter. Suzan's take: "Going online at the tertiary level has raised challenges for students and teachers." She notes that her school faces unique struggles with teaching adults at the tertiary level, and teachers have had to go online with little preparation.
We'll start there and see where the conversation takes us. It will be an honor to connect with both Bonnie and Suzan and find out how they and their colleagues are dealing with the situation.
How to connect in Zoom
To join the Zoom meeting, simply click on this link
Wed 11 March 1400 UTC Blended Learning Classroom Showcase Event with Vance Stevens on the MOOC community space extension to the course
This will be Learning2gether episode 443 and the last live event of the course on Creating and Using a Blended Learning Classroom at https://tinyurl.com/blended2020. The course started on Feb 20, 2020, and ends with this closing webinar on March 11.
I'm hoping we can make it an opportunity for participants to come together and show each other what they've learned through their creations.
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