In-house Pro-D

At our ESL school, our Curriculum Coordinator also arranges all the Pro-D for teachers. Once a month or so, on a Friday afternoon, teachers (individually or in pairs) provide an hour of Pro-D for other teachers. These are sometimes teaching techniques and sometimes personal strengths. Teachers are paid a certain number of Pro-D hours in the year and can elect to go to one or more of these presentations as part of their hours. It’s a great system here and your school may already has something like this; if not, it might be something to pass by your Pro-D committee.

Study Zone renovations

My life is renovations. We’ve been renovating our kitchen for months now. And though we had a basic plan, the plan evolved as the project progressed. Much the same can be said for re-designing and updating the ELC Study Zone. As with the kitchen, design improvments are often rooted in the feedback we’ve received. So if you have a minute or two, please try out the new Study Zone and let me know if it is straightforward to navigate and use. I’m working on Level 200 now, but will move on to 330 soon. Once I finish the many, many changes that are needed, we’ll be ready to add new lessons and exercises that apply to our classes and hopefully yours. Then we’ll be cookin’!

Websites of the day

If you’re looking for great ideas related to technology and English language learning, look no further than Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day. Larry’s an ESL teacher in the States who finds and uses websites and web technologies (like blogs) with his students. I subscribe to his blog and enjoy his prolific lists of interesting websites and his suggestions for the use of technology with English language learners.

Speaking of lists, Larry has over 8000 categorized links for English language learners on his English Website! It’s a bit overwhelming to sift through 8000 links, so my advice is subscribe to his blog and try out the links he finds as he categorizes them.

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/larry-ferlazzos-english-website/

Online dictionaries

Finding the definition of a word online is pretty simple. Many people have a favourite dictionary site bookmarked. Some people use a dictionary built into the search box on their browser. If you use Firefox, you can add dictionaries to the Search Bar. I’ve added Dictionary.com to mine. One of the quickest ways to find the definition of a word is to use Google! Just type “define: ” (without the quotes) and then type your word after the colon. For example, try “define: dictionary“. Google will give you lots of definitions from dictionaries on the Web. Google’s dictionary search is a handy tool, but don’t forget to buy a good learner’s dictionary such as the Collins Cobuild or Oxford ESL Dictionary.

Facebook Pages vs. Groups

In our ESL programs at UVic, we use Facebook Groups to foster the sense of community among our students. We recently set up a Facebook Page too.

A Facebook Page has some advantages over Facebook Groups. For one, you can add applications to a Page. We added Simply RSS so that we could pull the event calendar from our main campus site. It works pretty well too! Groups have members, but Pages have fans. It’s easier to communicate with fans because Pages use updates that aren’t lost in the regular newsfeed. On the downside, too many updates and you might lose some fans! Pages also have metrics to measure site visits. This helps you measure the success of your Facebook Page. And last, Pages don’t have the Related Groups sections, so you can control your associations. With some of the groups I belong to, I’ve seen some unrelated and inappropriate Related Groups. It can look like the group is supporting or associated with those other groups!

Fun with comics

There are lots of great websites out there for ESL students and teachers alike. Some are well known and used in ESL labs and classrooms all the time. For example, Dave’s ESL Cafe and Gerry Luton’s Vocabulary Exercises for the AWL have great resources for students and teachers of English.For something a bit different, try making your own English language comic strip online with MakeBeliefsComix.com! The instructions are clear and simple to follow. For teachers, there are some classroom suggestions linked from the bottom of the main page (“How to play…”). Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo’s excellent site for this idea.

New projects

The launch of the Beginner Listening course brings to a close the development of our online ESL courses for now. I’m on to much neglected online ESL projects such as revitalizing the ELC’s Study Zone, providing support for ESL teachers interested in web sites, blogs, and wikis, and of course using our online courses to help our students improve their English.

I’ll miss many of the challenges involved with course development: maintaining the continuity of design and content; coding activities so that they address the desired outcomes of the content specialists; and creating the visual bits and pieces of the interface that enhance each student’s experience. That said, I’m looking forward to more interaction with more people and a little less time moving content around and diagnosing javascript errors!

Beginner Listening finished

We’ve completed our suite of online ESL listening courses for the English Language Centre (ELC) at the University of Victoria. The Beginner Listening course was created by the same team as the other listening courses, so it has the same look and feel, as well as the same wonderful creativity that Sherry brings to her work. I think the consensus is that it is more challenging to write and develop courses for lower-level students. Creativity can be stifled by language limitations and there is certainly a lot of language grading to do (and probably more in the revisions). Have a look at our sample unit.

Online Listening Courses

At the English Language Centre in the University of Victoria, we have just finished developing our sixth online ESL course. Advanced Listening is designed for ESL students with approximately a 550-level TOEFL ability. Students read through listening and grammar lessons, listen to a variety of audio clips, watch videos, and complete interactive exercises in each unit of the course. Assignments are completed online and marked by a tutor who provides personalized feedback. We’re very happy with our Intermediate Listening course too. Many folks collaborated on the project. Some key contributions are: course content (the writer!) from Sherry Contreras; leadership and content design from Elaine Hays; media production from Judy Somers; and instructional design consultation from Katy Chan. I took care of designing the interface and putting all the pieces together including way too much javascript coding!

So far, we’ve developed three writing courses, a technology English course, and two listening courses. We’re working on a listening course for beginner-level ESL students (250-level TOEFL ability) and plan to launch that course in Autumn 2007. You can try a sample unit from each course too.

Vocabulary acquisition and review

Gerry Luton, a friend and colleague at the University of Victoria, has created more than 150 vocabulary exercises for ESL students. The exercises are grouped according to word families from the Academic Word List. Students and teachers have unlimited access to Gerry’s exercises on his website: Vocabulary Exercises for the Academic Word List. Gerry created all of the vocabulary exercises on his site using a software tool that he and Martin Holmes (of Hot Potatoes) created; the tool is called Gerry’s Vocabulary Teacher.