Rubrics, PBL and WebQuest

Reflections on Week 5

Only 2 days and we reach the mid-point of this 10 week Webskills program. Whoever said: "Time flies" , really knew what he was talking about. This week is special in that it is productive and time consuming. We have been introduced to WebQuest which is novel to me. Thus, I took most of the time going through different articles, websites and videos to have a clear idea of its merits and demerits. I am planning to write my reflections of this week in three parts:

Part One

I would like to share the following comments about alternative assessments and rubrics with you. I have read the article entitled: “Assessing Learning: Alternative Assessment” that was assigned to us. It is a useful article that focuses on the methods of assessment in learner-centered classrooms where the learners reflect on their own learning process. Checklists and rubrics are the tools of alternative assessment. These two tools are not new to me. 

I have been using checklists since 1988. I have been using them for only two purposes. The first one is to evaluate my students’ performance in their teaching practice at schools. I have adapted a checklist that contains 5 main dimensions, namely: Personality, Language proficiency, Lesson preparation, Instruction, and Class management. Each dimension contains between 2 and 10 items. When observing my students teaching, I have just to make a tick in the appropriate column that represents the student’s  score in an item. The total marks of the five dimensions are calculated and that is the student’s score in practicing teaching at schools. I also use such checklists for evaluating Micro- teaching. I use checklists to evaluate the undergraduate students’ research papers. It consists of 23 dimensions. For example, six marks out of 100 are assigned to the category References. Then, we make a tick or  “X” for the following items: Accurate presentation, consistent style, adequate, match literature review, relevant, and recent. Then, we count the scores of all the dimensions and that is the student’s marks in Educational Research.

In 2007, I was introduced to Rubrics for the first time at the University of Sohar in the Sultanate of Oman. I was a visiting lecturer (2007-2012) and I was teaching Advanced Writing to the students of English Education. I had to use a rubric for evaluating my students’ performance in the Advanced Writing course. A one day workshop training was provided to us at that time providing us with examples and benchmarks (standards) against which a student’s performance is judged. In 2011, I attended a 3 day conference organized by the British Council in India and presented a paper. The theme of the conference was “Assessment” and most of the presenters advocated the use of rubrics in assessing language skills.

Therefore, I created a rubric for evaluating my M.Ed. students’ Oral Presentation as part of the requirements of the Theories of Language Learning course. The URL of the rubric is: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-BuYg9zyxUESWJmbHZwTHRXdkU/edit?usp=drive_web

I posted that rubric in the Webskills Wiki and in the Blog that I have just created for my course of Theories of Language Learning so that my students can see the items against which their own oral presentations will be assessed. I created this rubric based on the several  rubrics that I have in my personal library and by viewing many rubrics for evaluating many topics. I am planning to use this rubric to evaluate the oral presentation of my M. Ed. students in the Theories of Language Learning course. As part of the requirements of this course the students are assigned topics related to the Theories of Language Learning. The following are the topics assigned to the students this semester:

1   The Role of L1 Interference.

2      The Acquisition Learning Hypothesis

3      The Monitor Hypothesis

4      The Monitor Hypothesis

5      The Natural Order Hypothesis

6      The Input Hypothesis

7      The Critical Period Hypothesis

8      Personality Factors

9      Motivation, Aptitude, and Attitude

1     Language Learning Strategies and Learning Styles

Each student is assigned one topic. S/He has to prepare a 3000 word assignment and to make a 30 minute oral presentation of the same topic. At the end 3-4 minutes are given for the other students to ask the presenter questions on the topic of the presentation and the presenter has to address such questions. The maximum marks of the presentation is 5 marks. I added the last column of the rubric to allow me to put the student’s marks in each category out of 4.  The total marks of the rubric is 5 * 4 = 20. Then I will divide the mark over 4 in order to get the student’s mark out of 5.

The article that I read categorizes rubrics into 4 types, namely: Holistic rubrics, Analytic rubrics, Primary Trait rubrics and Multi-Trait rubrics. It might be worth mentioning that the rubric that I created is of the Analytic type. It consists of 5 dimensions for evaluating my students’ oral presentations. These dimensions are Presentation and Preparedness, Content, Originality, Vocabulary and Answer Questions. Each dimension is scored separately out of 4 marks.  Then, the  overall marks are calculated by adding the marks of the 5 dimensions.

One advantage of this type of rubrics is that the instructor can modify the marks of each dimension if s/he feels that one dimension is more important than another. For example in my rubric, “Content” may be assigned 5 marks while “Vocabulary” may be assigned 3 marks instead of assigning 4 to the 2 categories. However, Analytic rubrics are criticized for not giving the teacher or the student a good picture of the whole performance. They give separate scores for different dimensions of a student’s oral presentation skills. In short, rubrics are good tools for judging a student’s performance based on established criteria .

To Be Continued

Reflections on Week 4

Part Two

This week, I did four assignments as part of the requirements of the Webskills course. The first one was to review one article and evaluate and select 3 activities for teaching EFL college students reading and vocabulary.  I also reviewed another article for teaching writing and selected 3 activities and I wrote down the ABCD objectives for using such activities in the EFL classroom. For more details refer to the previous post, Part One.

The second assignment I did was to create a technology enhanced lesson plan. I did this task after reading 2 useful articles. The first one is written by Robert Elliott  of the University of Oregon, Webskills team https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/lesson-plan . The second one was E-How website whose URL is http://www.ehow.com/how_2324320_write-integrated-lesson-plan.html. I found them very useful and convincing.  I downloaded a template which was prepared by Deborah Healey of the American English Institute, Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon. This template helped me a lot to accomplish my task. Then I searched the Internet for some activities and games that I can incorporate into my lesson plan. I found some interesting games and activities for teaching English homonyms. I downloaded them into my laptop in PDF forms  and they are ready to be used in my class which has no internet connection. I really liked the idea of having Plan B alternatives to be always ready for whatever circumstances that may occur in the class. The URL of my Lesson Plan with Technology on my Google Drive is https://docs.google.com/document/d/18neg0xR4DGIMJynP1zczNAuu4r0nx6da6Vn4jDnRvs/edit . I also shared this link with the participants of Webskills on Nicenet.

The third assignment that I did was completing Task 3 of the project. I briefly described the learners of my course who are 10 M.A students. Then, I had a brainstorming activity to write down some of the issues and problems that face my students and I. The most dominant issue in our context  is the absence of fundamental resources like an e- library, internet, multimedia, computer lab, data show projectors, smart boards, etc. My students and I need such facilities to perform our tasks and enhance the learning and teaching  process. The only available teaching aid in the classroom is a non- interactive whiteboard without markers. Our Faculty of Education has a small library and the University has a Central library, but the most recent book or journal that they have is dated 1990 and before. Thus, our students face difficulties in finding out relevant research references to accomplish their tasks and later in writing their dissertations. What aggravates the situation is that our graduates become English teachers and I think they should be introduced to such technological devices at least during their training. There are also other issues related to instructors. As teachers, we are unable to follow the progress of our students in our courses or in the other courses that they take with the other teachers due to the absence of the technological software and hardware.

The final assignment is what I have been doing right now. That is to describe in a  Blog post on what we have been doing this week and to comment on one of the Blogs of our colleagues in the course of Webskills.

Having come to the terminal stage of my assignments for Week 4, I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to my Instructor Mr Sean McClelland for being always ready to help  

Reading/Writing Skill-Building Websites

Reflections on Week 4

Part One

Here are my reflections on what I did and what I learned in the fourth week of Webskills which mainly focuses on the development of reading and writing skills and vocabulary.

I read two of the three articles assigned. I found them really interesting and useful. The first article entitled:  “Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books” is written by Mei-Ya Liang (2004). The URL of this article is : http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html.  The writer guided the  students to read authentic e-texts outside of the classroom and to improve their overall reading skills. The lesson aims at EFL college students. The students were given the chance to select 3 e-books out of 10 based on their interest. The writer concludes the article by mentioning that with appropriate guidance, students will increase not only extensive reading, writing and thinking skills, but also their confidence in and motivation for reading L2 texts.

After that, I reviewed many reading and writing web sites in order to evaluate and select three useful activities for my context in reading and writing skills development and publish two posts on Nicenet.  In the first post, I focused on the useful activities that could be used in my own classes for teaching reading. I was really impressed by the variety of passages and activities that are really useful for teaching my students reading. The most useful passage that is useful for first level university students is entitled: Searching the Internet. The URL of the passage is http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/stories/searchingtheinternet.html . Culturally the passage is useful for all EFL students. The topic is a general one and not very long. It contains about 600 words. The new words are written in bold. What is interesting is that you click the mouse on the new words and a dialogue box appears giving you the definition of that word. For example, the word URL is defined as “The URL of a website is its address, often something like www.google.com.  Technology has made language learning and teaching fun and easy. This technology tool reminded me when I was a student at college. I used to spend much time searching for the meaning of new words in dictionaries. Today with the advancement of technology just pass the curser and press it over the new words and its definition is ready at your disposal. Isn’t that amazing and saves a lot of time. After reading the passage, you go to a quiz that consists of 15 statements about the passage and you select whether the statement is true or false. After that you check your answers.

The second passage that suits my students is entitled: “Working at the Bank”. Its URL is http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/stories/ihtm1bank2.html . This passage is suitable

for my students. After reading the passage, you can test your vocabulary and comprehension by selecting one of 3 alternatives and immediately you get the feedback. When you finish this exercise, you can get your score and you can try again. This exercise is followed by a nice activity that gets the students to think about the story and use their own imagination to decide what will happen next and to write what will happen next.

The third passage that I found suitable for the students of Level One Reading course is called: “Recycling and the Environment”. The URL is http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/call/recycling.html

Again the new words are in bold and you can get their definitions by clicking the mouse. The passage is followed by interesting exercises to check comprehension. In short, I found those three passages useful for teaching reading and vocabulary to level one university students of EFL. I recommend them to the teachers who teach Reading 1 in our department.

The ABCD Objectives for the previous three reading activities will be as follows:

Condition (C): Given a reading passage that is technologically enhanced and followed by interesting exercises, Audience (A): the First Year university students, Behavior (B): will be able to read the passage, accurately identify the main theme of the passage, and complete the comprehension and vocabulary tasks that follow, Degree of Mastery (D):  with 90% accuracy in their scores.

The second article is entitled: “Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction”. The URL of this article is : http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html. It is written by Jarek Krajka et. al. (2000). It is really an interesting article. The writers explore the use of the Internet as a teaching aid in which students are taught how to write different writing genres. After that I reviewed some websites for teaching writing in order to select 3 suitable ones and to post my second post on Nicenet. I focused on the useful ones that can be adapted and used for teaching writing.

The most useful Website is that of the American University in Cairo which is useful for first level university students. It is entitled: “Ten Steps to Writing an Essay”  http://www1.aucegypt.edu/academic/writers/. It is useful to be used as the first lesson in a writing course of the First level at the university level. The 10 steps start with researching the topic and finish with editing the first draft linguistically for grammatical and stylistic errors. The 10 steps are illustrated.

The second useful Website for teaching and learning writing is Enchanted Learning. It is mainly for subscribers, but it has many activities and ideas for teaching writing for free. The URL of the page is http://www.enchantedlearning.com/essay/writing.shtml. There are some good ideas for writing students’ own books journals on topics such as A Book About Me, Vacation Memory Book, School Memory Book,..etc.  Students can print some templates to help them write such topics.

The third useful site is Creative Writing Worksheets. The URL of this site is : http://www.tlsbooks.com/languageartscreativewriting.htm . It has many useful activities that can be used for first university students in my teaching context.  For example, the students can write about “When I went to……”. (a city they have visited).  The worksheet helps them write an essay by answering 10 questions.

Again, The ABCD Objectives for the previous three reading activities will be as follows:

Condition (C): Given a writing worksheet, e.g., “When I Went to ….” which is printed from the website, Audience (A): the First Year university students, Behavior (B): will be able to write an essay about their trip to a city that they have visited , Degree of Mastery (D):  in about 300 words using transition words and without grammatical  errors.

To be Continued

Aural/Oral Skill Development Websites

Reflections on Week 3

This is my personal space to reflect on our Webskills course assignments.  Below is my reflection on what I did and what I learned in the third week of Webskills which mainly focuses on the development of aural/oral skills.

First of all, I created my Delicious page in order to save, sort and  share the useful links with others. The URL of my page is https://delicious.com/malmekhlafi. I found it a very useful page to keep and classify my links. So far I have shared two useful links with my students on Facebook. I will continue the habit of sharing links on my Facebook account.

Then, I looked at the links of the various activities, exercises, lesson plans and software programs that are used for the teaching and learning of aural/oral language skills. I was really impressed by the variety of programs and links that are really useful for my class of Phonetics and Phonology. So far, I have shared 8 useful links that are useful for my course of Phonetics and Phonology  on my Delicious account.

The most useful website that I used was “Speech Analyzer”. I downloaded the program from http://www-01.sil.org/computing/sa/index.htm . It is very useful for student teachers or advanced students who study phonetics and phonology. I am training myself to use  it to perform frequency and spectographic analysis of English and Arabic sounds. It is very useful for Acoustic Phonetics. The following is a spectrograph of my own Arabic pronunciation of  “Bismillah Al-Rahman Al-Raheem” and my name in Arabic created by the program.

In short, I recommend this program for the teachers who teach pronunciation and/or phonetics and phonology. It allows students to record, visualize and analyze their own speech on their computer screens. They can obtain an accurate visualization of their production at both the segmental and supra-segmental levels. It is the role of the teacher to show them how to read and interpret speech signals and prosodic patterns of loudness, pitch and intonation, etc. Another splendid site is An Introduction to the Sounds of Language: Peter Ladefoged’s vowels and consonants at http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/contents.html. It is very useful for students learning English Pronunciation or Phonetics. It familiarizes the students with the IPA chart. It also compares and contrasts the vowel sounds of American English and that of BBC English and many other activities. I am planning to use these activities with my students.

The third useful site is David Brett’s Phonetics Page whose URL is: http://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/ . It is also useful for teaching and learning pronunciation and phonetics. I also found a number of useful sites for teaching aural/oral skill development and phonetics and phonology. I added them to my Delicious page for future reference. I also found some useful sites for phonetic transcription, but unfortunately they do not open.

After that, I read the three articles assigned. I found them really interesting and useful. The first article entitled: New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation is written by Maria Grazia Busa. It reviews recent technology for teaching pronunciation as well as the trends emerging in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

The second article is written by Julia Gong. It is entitled: The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the use of technology in teaching and learning second language speaking skills. This article convinced me that using computers  in the teaching and learning of Aural/Oral skills is highly motivating and less threatening psychologically. 

The third article  is  titled: Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials. This article is written by Lindsay Miller. It divides the activities of listening into  3 main stages: Pre-Listening Tasks, While Listening Tasks and Post Listening Tasks. The teacher gets the students to prepare their discussion tasks from the following three links: http://www.bbc.co.uk;  http://www.avoa.gov or http://npr.org.

In the rest of the week I will be working on Project Task 2.

At the end  I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to our instructor, Sean McClelland, for the useful resources and websites that he sent us.

Learning Objectives (ABCD Style)

ABCD Objectives

 I have been learning how to write down the learning objectives of a lesson that I teach using Pennsylvania State University's ABCD Style. It is more effective than the style that I use. I have published this into Nicenet , but I am republishing it here in my Blog  to remind me with the four components of ABCD Style. Furthermore, here I can use colors that make it look better.

Condition: Given a passage that contains some phrasal verbs and interesting exercises, Audience: the First Year Trainee Teachers at the Department of English, College of Education, University of Sana’a, Yemen, Behavior : will be able to practice the phrasal verbs through meaningful contexts and solve the mastery of the phrasal verbs, Degree of Mastery :  with 90% accuracy in selecting the answer that is the closest in meaning to such phrasal verbs. For example, brush up means  a) comb   b) review     c) start

Searching the Web

My Reflections

This is my second week in the course entitled: Web skills. I have read some articles about how to search for relevant information using different search portals. I learned how to personalize the search portal. Right now I can search for information using a well known portal such as Google or my personal portal: Mohammad Abdu Al-Mekhlafi. It is very attractive with multi- colors. I also learned how to narrow a topic down and to start writing the most important words in my search. Another way of looking for direct and relevant information is using quotation marks. For example, when I write my name and start searching, more than a thousand entries are found including all people who carry my first name and those who carry my last name. However, when I type my name using quotation marks,e.g., "Mohammad Abdu Al-Mekhlafi". The result is amazing. It displays only the entries that are related to my topic only leaving out all the unnecessary information that I do not need.

I came across new searching engines. What I like most is Free Book Search Net at www.FreeBookSearch.net. I used this portal to find out a book that I use in my class. The name of the book is How Languages are Learned. It is written by Pasty Lightbown.  Another site that interests me is called Great PDF. As its name indicates it is indeed a great search engine to look for PDF documents and e-books.  I recommend my students to try those portals. They are splendid. 

I have also learned that when we look for academic articles and theses, scholar.google.com comes first.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude and appreciation to our instructor, Sean, for his  directions and being always ready to help.

Welcome

I would like to welcome you to my first blog. I am trying to learn how to build educational blogs through which I can interact with my students.