Google Docs for Focusing on Form: dogme 2.0

Along with encouraging co-construction and emergent language, the practice of dogme calls for, via scaffolding, there be a focus a form and one of my favourite tools to help me meet this objective in the techno age is Google Docs.  

And although I've been meaning to do this post for ages, I reckon this might be one of those occasions where an explanation won't be anywhere near as effective simply showing you why:

Video 1: 

Backstory my student Y, would like to comment on G's summary blog post about mobile phone market share (based on an article and infographic from Mashable).  

He's nervous that his comment won't be written correctly so has drafted his response before clicking on add-a-comment.  We then imported this into our shared google doc in order to work on his text together.   As you can see in this video, we are working on separate computers - me showing him where he needs to make the changes and discussing the errors or mistakes while he corrects the problems himself.

His weaknesses remain his private domain at the end of the day as only the two of us have access to his page, however, at any time he can go through previous entries evaluating his written work and find patterns in his errors.   But while his English develops, he can still add his thoughts  and opinions to G's post and although they are at different levels of English they can effectively hold a conversation about a shared interest.

Video 2:

Backstory My student B, lives in another city and our classes are held over the telephone.  In this video I am showing how, over a series of lessons B can get a feel for the type of errors she makes most often via the colours.  As Google Docs don't work on pages, but instead a long running stream, she can go back and forth through her document reviewing whether or not she still remembers new vocabulary and phrases.   You can can also see how I link to other sites for reference and how I use the blog I write for them to review and scaffold language which emerges in our lessons.

Hope these were clear!   Don't hesitate to ask questions if not.

Please note that like everything I write on this blog, my work is creative-commons licensed so I am very excited when my readers try things out in class and then take ownership of a practice or material,  adapting it for their own purposes and so if you do adopt this practice too, I'm deeply honored... however, I would like to stress to you that working in this particular fashion, in terms of creating an e-space in order to focus on form, is my original concept and therefore if you write an article, a research paper, blog post or print article or give a presentation on google-docs and error correction that you do not forget to atttribute my work by referencing this post.  Imitation is flattery, plagiarism and copyright violation isn't.  Thanks so much!

Best,
Karenne
education


Useful links:
Learn more about Google Docs: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html
More of my posts using Google Tools and Apps

S is for Scaffolding
Reformulation by Scott Thornbury
Giving language learners a voice in correction by Peter Watkins
Sometimes a prop is really the best thing by Mike Harrison
interesting...  John Truscott, disagreeing with L2 grammar correction in writing

Noodle Casserole

Carola's Vegetarian Casserole

I'm sure most of you already do this, especially if you're an ESOL teacher with lots of students from all over the world, but just in case you haven't yet - sharing students' recipes, even with Business English students can be great fun and an interesting way to check if they know the different words for types of food they like in English; phrases for food preparation  and giving instructions.   

I used to do this activity a lot in Ecuador when I lived there, it was part of our "Concentrating on Conversation" Friday course and once a month we'd have sessions in the kitchen together.  

(We also played Casino on other days, but that's another story)

Yum!Yum!

Now that I work online a great deal, I've also tried applying this activity to our community platform too and recently, Carola (who I've never met - she's a tele-student) wrote this incredibly easy and very delicious recipe for me:

For the recipe, you need the following ingredients:

250 g pasta (e.g. Penne)
2 bell peppers (I like the red and yellow ones best)
1 zucchini
1 onion
some olive oil
1 clove of garlic
250 g cream (perhaps you can use soy cream, here - I am sorry, but I have not found any noodle casserole recipe without cream...)
a tablespoonful of tomato puree
salt
pepper
chili
herbs (basil, thyme)
250 g cheese (slices or grated) (e.g. Gouda)

Cook the pasta (see instructions on the package for the exact cooking time).

Cut the onion, wash and cut the bell peppers and the zucchini. Heat some olive oil in a pan and fry the onion together with the zucchini and the bell peppers - just for a short time, the vegetables have to be "al dente".

For the sauce:
Mix the cream with a tablespoonful of tomato puree, add some salt, pepper, chili, and herbs (e.g. basil and thyme), and a clove of garlic cut in small pieces (or you can use a garlic press). You can also add an egg to the sauce, if you like.

Now put the pasta in the casserole, mix with the fried vegetables and the sauce and cover it all with some slices of cheese or grated cheese.

Put the casserole in the preheated oven (at a temperature of about 180 °C) for about 20 minutes.

Then enjoy your meal! :-)
I would say that the recipe is for about two to four persons (depending on the appetite..).   As I have already told you, what I like best about this recipe is that, when you have guests, you can prepare the casserole, put it in the oven, clean up the kitchen, and then all you have to do is wait till it's ready, i.e. you don't have to do much more cooking when your guests have arrived.

The other thing is that you can vary the recipe as you like, e.g. use some other vegetables (for example, leek or spinach). 

I hope you like the casserole! Looking forward to hearing from you! :-)

Cooking with students, whether it's in person or on a community/ blogging platform is a lot of fun , a good learning activity and a great sharing experience.

Silke's Cherry&ChocChip Cake

Some things I've noticed since turning this into a digital exercise is that my students get the chance to practice writing out instructions and reviewing their language mistakes and errors more than once (not quite the same as them bringing in the food to cook and telling us how to do it in person - although the benefit there is that a lot of emergent language occurs at the same time); looking up the English words for ingredients online, sharing preferences with each other and of course, adding photos afterward to show how their recipes turned out is a good bit of fun social-media silliness which can help them to remember the experience of the language!

Have you done any cooking with your (online) students?  How did it go?



Useful links related to this posting:
More lesson ideas

Best,
Karenne
education

Dogme meets Coca Cola

For anyone whose clicked on over here without really knowing or understanding what dogme is, you might enjoy reading the older posts first (linked above).  For the ELTers, who've heard me rabbit on and on before, let me tell you all about how I came to realize that dogme and Coke have something in common...

It kicked off in the dogme yahoo!group.   A long time member said  "anything 'online' has absolutely nothing to do with the materials-free ethos which is Dogme."

Now, I've heard this argument so often before that this time I couldn't even be bothered with the illogical bias against technology as every single other generation has been frightened of changes too... didn't stop them from coming though...  (yawn)

at the end of the day...

some people in the world have access to computers and some people don't  (yeah, and... are we expected to feel so sad for them that we should not move with the times but wait patiently for them to catch up or do we just get on with it  - I mean go work for or donate money to a charity  if the social conscience itches I say, that would be heaps more effective),  because let's face it,  in a few years, just like Coca Cola, most people will have a computer* just down the road or maybe even on their mobile phone...

some teachers use computers in their classroom
and
some teachers don't
(yawn!)...

I mean why bother pretending that life as we know it hasn't changed., draaaassssttttiiiicccalllllly in the last ten years, five years, three years...

personally, it's become so completely normalized in my own teaching practices that I could hardly give a hoot whether or not another teacher finds this a good thing or not.   I don't make value judgments of those who're still use whiteboards instead of laptops or IWBs - in fact blackboards are very much still around  in some German community colleges (along with the beamer on the wall) and chalk, well chalk is still a staple in any local stationers. 

I like computers.
(Your turn to yawn!)

I find them useful and supportive and they happen to suit my approach to teaching and those of lots of others but so what?

After all, my favorite chocolate is made of 80% cocoa beans, comes from Ecuador and has a cherry chili flavored nougat center. Does it matter than many other people would rather eat a flavored milk product  which only smiled at a cocoa bean for a micro-second before it was drowned in a vat of sugar?

Not a jot, it doesn't.

Anyway, I didn't start this article to talk about chocolate or have a dig at some guy who thinks that the computer is the end of civilization, but instead to compare Coca-Cola to Dogme.

Dear Scott and Luke, forgive me...

Regular Coke = 139 calories in a 33cl bottle.

Coke Light = 1.3 calories

Coke Zero = 0 calories.


The calories, while negligible, count.

Materials Lite 

is not 

Materials Zero.

The reason why we churn out students after 8 years of language lessons in English, still not speaking English, is because in class they're loaded up with a whole bunch of stuff they don't need and not given enough chance to express themselves about what they do need.

It's not the students.

Nope.

It's not the students.

It might, oooooh, dangerous territory, not be, indeed, just the book's fault, in part it might be the teacher's too.  Thing is, Meddings and Thornbury even included a section in Teaching Unplugged on working with coursebooks and I've heard many a teacher say they see parallels in dogme to many a methodology and of course,  Thornbury did acquiesce, somewhat, at SEETA last year on the issues of Dogme2.0.

If a teacher is personalizing a text to extract the students own thoughts on it, creating an environment of communication, enabling the emergence of new language and then scaffolding this process, then heck, the use of the book doesn't matter, what matters is it's been used lightly to go deeply...

see, the crux of the issue, the matter, the philosophy, the dogma, once the gold foil wrapper has been unwrapped and all that is that

Dogme

is 
not 
a

methodology,

it's 
an 

approach. 

It's the how you teach, not the what or the with what you teach.
It's keeping the classroom all about the participants within.


Useful links related to this posting:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top25.htm

Best,
Karenne
image credit, by Lvklock on wikimedia commons

education

Powerpointing My Office

It goes without saying that any good beginner level (and many elementary) coursebook has a picture appropriately labeled to tell the students what everything is.   If it's aimed at general learners, it'll be the kitchen or the bathroom or perhaps all the rooms in a house.  If it's aimed at Business English students or ESP learners, it'll be common instruments they probably come into contact frequently.

But here's the thing... why use someone else's picture when your students actually live in houses, work in offices or manufacture on site?

My tech-tip to bypass the coursebook or rather personalize it, if you wish, is this:

1. Ask students to take photographs of the room they need to describe or refer to in common speech. In the example above, we've used an office.  By the way, these were taken with Torsten's mobile phone.

2. Get your students to load the pictures up into a Powerpoint document.

3. Ask them to now work in groups to share each others best guesses at what things are before checking their dictionaries (online/on the phone/in hard copy).  

If you're working individually, as I am in this case (not many beginner level students in Germany!), talk through the items together, ensuring that the student does most of the work, using words he's already come in contact with before and look up others together, rather than you giving him all the answers.  

4. Ensure that your student(s) do all the labeling themselves.  

5. If you're working on an online platform with students, you can also jpeg the slides and upload them into a common album.

Why is this such an amazing resource?

Aside from the fact it's a very personal photograph and therefore has a real and immediate relationship to the learner and his needs, you can use these pictures/Powerpoint slides, repetitively, to

• practice articles
• practice this and that, these and those
• practice prepositions
• discuss functions of items
• review vocabulary

What other things could you get your own language learners taking pictures of and labeling?  What other language functions can these pictures help practice?

Have you ever tried anything like this?   How did it go?   Do you think that the pfaffing involved is setting something like this up is prohibitory (it took us about 10 minutes to go around the building snapping pictures... about 5 minutes to load the pictures from his phone into Powerpoint but then I needed to teach him how to make boxes and label, that was about another 10 minutes - I'd refused to give the instructions in German) - we did this about a month ago and his feedback was that he knows the words because he 'sees' them whenever he looks at things in the office now.

Useful links related to this posting: 

• Powerpointing me
• Powerpointing grammar
• Powerpoint and metaphors
• Creating Cross Cultural Guides

Best,
Karenne
education

Dogme ELT 2.0

Making the simple complex
or
Making the complex simple?

This post is part of a teacher-training workshop on using the web2.0 platform, Ning, with adult language learners, I'm Ningin' it, and also is a comment on the comments on Nick Jaworski's Crazy or Enlightened.

• KS on Dogme 
• Wikipedia on Dogme ELT
• Communicative Language Teaching
• Task Based Learning
• Bloom's Taxonomy
• Web2.0
• Dogme3D / Virtual Worlds Language Learning

Best,
Karenne