Voice Thread follow-ups

Working in groups you recently posted an activity to VoiceThread. Now, choose an activity posted by a different group that addresses a communication mode that you would like to give more attention to with your students. In your blog, identify which group’s activity you chose. Briefly describe the activity with any changes you would make to fit your goals and classroom environment. Include any assessment challenges this activity presents in a distance classroom, and how you would adapt for that so that you know how well all students are doing regardless of their location.

I went to look at the voice thread activities from the other groups and I found that only one group that was not in the interpretive area had posted-  this was group #6 that did the comparative TV program idea for interpersonal activities. On the other hand, group #6 had a task that was partially interpretive--listening to a message from the teacher telling them that class would be outside and then checking the weather for a certain location--but then the group followed up with a (presentational) response to the teacher that had to demonstrate the students' understanding of both the teacher's message and the weather report AND demonstrate a negotiation of several levels of vocabulary and message-giving to accept or reject --with reasons--the teacher's invitation.  

This seemed like a lot for one activity--I think I might have to break it down into smaller steps to make sure that students understood what was expected, but I really liked the idea as a summative assessment at the end of a unit!

Describe your experiences in working remotely in groups for this course. What worked, what didn’t, what challenges did you face, what solutions did you come up with? When you consider developing group activities in Distance Learning (DL) environments, what issues/concerns do you anticipate with respect to assessment of group work?

Our group was able to work easily together for the first assignment, making a Voice thread project describing an interpretive activity.  Our challenges were technological (getting the skype set up on my feeble and memory-challenged computer) and managing to synchronize our calendars. We were not dealing with time-zone issues, but we have three very different work schedules and whenever two people were available, someone else was busy!  We pulled it off, though.

I anticipate that synchronous group activities would need to be scheduled well in advance, perhaps before the class begins, to make sure that students were available for synchronous activities.

Three Modes

* Is there one mode that you tend to focus on more than the others? Interpersonal/Presentational/Interpretive?

To answer this question, I decided to examine my morning class today, since I had already decided on class activities before I read the blog topic. Background:  beginning French-community college-tiny class (6) with two who do all the work, two who do some and two who do the minimum to barely get by. However, despite disparities in homework completion and study habits. all are good participants within class and work well with each other.

 CLASS 4/9
1-Nuts and bolts-who remembers the forms of 6 different verbs?--kind of review work. I wanted to make sure that they had the tools they needed to go on to the next activity:

2-Seasonal activities:   In pairs they discussed the activities they could do, would like to do and knew how to do in the season of their choice. They had to ask each other follow-up questions (with whom, where, when, why) as well. Interpersonal

3-survey:  choosing from a list of possible activities, each student had to perform a survey about individual preferences for a choice of activities, then present their overall finding to the class Interpersonal followed by Presentational.

4-I presented a story about a small boy's daily routine (reflexive verbs) and then showed the forms of the reflexive pronouns with different verbs. They had to follow the visuals of the story but it was not cultural interpretation but rather figuring out grammar.  

5-Last, they took posters from oral presentations earlier in the week and wrote for 20 minutes about the other person-presentational.

* What can you do/change to more intentionally include all three modes in student learning?


I had no interpretive in today's class, which surprised me because I would think that classes would be more interpretation heavy.  In fact, the class before this class was heavily interpretive, using a watch advertisement as a spring board to discuss what activities say about one's personality.   I think that it is a bit like having good nutrition. You don't have to have everything everyday--just in the long run (say a week) making sure you get everything covered.  I'm sure i could find a chart of sporting preferences for Canadians from Chatelaine, or something along those lines for interpretive.

* How do you think a distance learning environment will impact your practice?  

 I can see a lot of this being easily adapted to the distance learning, in synchronous modes (seasonal activities discussion and survey) and then in asynchronous mode (presentation of survey results, small write-up based on a project somone has posted and done a voice-thread commentary over).

PLNs

In my department, we are our own mini-PLN and we share everything with each other. (It is funny  when a strange picture appears in a power point and I have to confess that I have no idea where the photo came from because a colleague shared the PPT with me.)

My group worked on Facebook and I had previously considered Facebook only as a social site, not as a place for me to connect with other "language heads."  I was interested to see all the language learning associations with pages on Facebook and to see the different topics that were important in different parts of the country. I don't know if I will join any of the individual pages, but I will certainly check out the pages occasionally now. Time (the lack thereof, that is) is a major factor in my reluctance to add "Likes' to my life! 

Charlotte, Mahmoud and I just finished out Hangout.  It was challenging trying to get things to work, because it turned out that Charlotte and I each needed install programs in our office computers, but the computers were not cooperating. Luckily, I work in the same building with Charlotte so we met in her office and talked with Mahmoud, who could not see us, although we could see him.  (Computer with the camera on the opposite side from the screen.)  Mahmoud had a lovely view of the wall behind Charlotte's desk.

Mahmoud had experience in teaching upper level Arabic literature classes on line. I have taken classes on line (mathematics) but I haven't taught on-line.  It was very interesting to me that above and beyond the simple technological challenges of having both the bandwidth and a computer to do the work, there was also an issue that I had never considered as a teacher of Spanish and French only.  All the students Mahmoud works with have to write from right to left, when all the computer programs on my computer, like this blog, go from left to right.

Already learned something in the class just from watching the short clip from the University of Wisconsin-Madison: I had taken what was labeled an on-line class--and virtually everything was on the computer--but in order to take the tests and the final exam for the class I had to come in to school to the testing center. Thus it was a blended class. However, someone far away could take the class, if they were able to set up an outside monitoring system for exams. I wonder how that fits in the definitions.