Journal #7: Professional Learning Networking

This assignment provided me with a great opportunity to experience how teaching/practice and professional development/theory can be easily combined and enhanced through joining affiliation groups and following news feeds.

From the “Flipped Learning Community, and especially the group “First Time Flippers,” I learned a lot about the “Dos” and “Don’ts” for making engaging flipping videos and about  free flipped platforms – such as Knowmia - that allow you to make mini-units and embed quizzes and questions with any content, even from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. I joined their conversation asking more details about flipped platforms and I was amazed at how fast I received answers. Unfortunately, I can’t still contribute to their exchange of ideas.

What I also found exciting is that there is a wide variety of web-based tools and mobile apps that make comics creation a simple and easy drag and drop process. Although I have no such experience, I’m sure that using comics in the classroom can be a great way to engage students in learning activities and boost their motivation. Students can use them to unleash their imaginative potential and experiment with a number of various multimodal creative activities. I also liked the Tellagami iPad freemium app that allows you to make a cartoon characterization of yourself and have it speak, something that can bring students closer to you.

Through the Digg Reader, especially EmergingEdTech, I found out how you can share YouTube videos in the safest way so as to avoid distractions and inappropriate content. There are interesting tools and techniques that offer both privacy and safe delivery. Such tools are LMS, SafeShare, TubeChop, etc. Since I have never used YouTube so far, I found such information, together with everything I learned about Twitter two weeks ago, interesting and applicable.

Overall, I think I have started seeing teaching in a new light. I have always thought – and still think – that the teacher has an irreplaceable role in the classroom.  But technology, in all its forms and applications, has an unquestionable value as a motivator and facilitator for both students and teachers. Since technology is highly adaptable, judicious and effective use of it can be the key to making all content teachable and learnable.

Journal #6: Self-reflection

I started this course, this quarter, and this MA program with the wrong assumption that my educational background would help me deal with difficulties, if any, and I would easily get over my ignorance of using technology for purposes other than searching for resources, writing long research papers, and preparing Power Point presentations.  I have to admit that the first weeks of class were a torture for me since I strongly felt that I could not follow instructions, I could be left behind any minute, and I was probably the weakest link in the class chain. It took me four to five weeks to feel better and more confident. Rather recently I've started enjoying the class and looking forward to the next session and the new things I can learn and apply.

Now it has become like a hobby for  me to look at the HTML of everything that I find interesting. What I really like about HTML is that there is a structure, an organization, which – although it is rather strict – is at the same time immensely flexible and offers numerous possibilities to the designer. I find the way that each element is, or can be, embedded inside a bigger one – each with its own clear borders – and the logic behind such an organization fascinating.  This gives my mind a desirable structure, avoids confusion or chaos, and makes controlling each element more feasible. And when content and organization are there, CSS comes in to polish the ideas by giving them color and finesse and make the webpage both attractive and easy to read. Borrowing terms from my Rhetoric and Composition background, I could say that HTML provides logos (content, logical arguments) while CSS creates pathos (feelings to the reader); their successful combination establishes the web designer’s ethos (credibility and acceptance by readers).

Although it took me hours of practice at home, I was very proud of myself when I felt I was really able to use the FTP and transfer files to the server and then see them when opening a browser. What was also rewarding for me was when I created a very simple but still my very  first webpage, which of course needs a lot of CSS work.  The book assignment of Chapter 13  took me forever to finish and put my sanity at risk because I couldn’t find any mistakes (I had misspelt the word background – I had written backgound). But that taught me a good lesson – to pay attention to the detail. And I was to blame for my time wasted, not the assignment.

After a very hesitant – and even more stressful – start in this course, I now think I’ve started enjoying the course since I feel that I can understand and apply what we do in class.  It also makes me feel more optimistic about my future in this program. 

Journal #5: To tweet or not to tweet (in the classroom)?

I do remember my first impression after reading some tweets a few years ago: that’s nonsense; that’s a tool for celebrities to keep the spotlights on them; it’s a promotional trick; no serious, well-educated person with some dignity will ever tweet… And although most of my friends had Facebook accounts much earlier than me and tried to persuade me to join Facebook, they never actually asked me to join Twitter. Needless to say, I hadn’t had a Twitter account before I was asked to for this class.

Of course, in the meantime, I have to confess that I heard or read stories about people tweeting and warning and/or informing the public about accidents, catastrophes, attacks. And I thought that maybe something good and useful could come out of this useless fad. But nowTwitter in the classroom? What can students learn when restricted to writing within only 140 characters?

What I can now say is that Twitter and education are not mutually exclusive. First, Twitter is a great platform for teachers’ professional development, since they can meet and exchange ideas with like-minded individuals. I followed a couple of educational hashtags, such as TESOL Intl Assn, American TESOL, ELTchat, and ESLlibrary and read very interesting tweets by professionals in the field. I was also impressed by the information and the resources available.

As for using Twitter in the classroom, I have no such experience. But I read a lot of tweets and tips on using it as a learning tool, and I agree that it can have some interesting applications. First of all, it is motivating for students who may already have used it outside the class and are thrilled when using technology to do homework. It can also be used to make students feel part of a community, not only a national but even an international one by communicating with schools and students around the globe. And at a smaller scale, that of a classroom, Twitter can help students learn and practice necessary skills, such as writing concise topic sentences, summarizing, getting to the point when commenting, asking and answering questions, collaborating on writing stories, taking and sharing notes, and many more.

What I realized in such a short time is that Twitter has far more possibilities than I could ever imagine. It is up to the teacher’s imagination to use Twitter in productive ways, all of which can outweigh its limitations.

Journal #4: My Project Plan

Site Title: Better Grammar Starts Here!

Developer: Dina Papachristou

Focus: My website will be an informational site, not a promotional one. The main purpose of the site will be to help nonnative speakers of English with grammar problems. No matter how long nonnative speakers have been living in the U.S., they usually have trouble with their grammar use. The site will provide information in an accessible way so that visitors will not feel overwhelmed as if reading a grammar book. Such information will include short, simply stated rules and lots of examples. Moreover, there will be links to grammar books and video tutorials.

Main features outline: For the time being, I think my site will have the following pages:

·         Homepage

·         About me

·         Grammar Rules

·         Practice

·         Contact

Content: The homepage will welcome visitors and explain the objectives of the site and its target audience, and it will also give instructions on how to use the site. Links to the other web pages will also be there.

            An About Me page will give information about me and my long teaching experience  with nonnative speakers of English.

A Grammar page with options for the visitor/learner to choose from: Such options may be: Verb Tenses, Sentence Structures, Articles, Verb forms, Punctuation. The options will open Power Point presentations on the most basic grammar rules.

A Practice page with exercises and links to further tutorials.

A contact page.

Target audience: The target audience of the site is ESL (English as a Second Language) or EFL (English as a Foreign Language) adult learners, especially those who decide to go after a BA or an MA and their command of the English grammar is not good enough for academic writing. Of course, learners of all ages will also find it useful.

Design considerations: I hope that I will be able to create a user friendly and consistent navigation system. That being said, I will try to offer visitors fast track ways of accessing the information they are looking for and also enable them to get back to previous pages easily.

Limiting Factors: Probably the main limitation will be my own limited knowledge of designing a website. Another limitation is that time is not enough for me to create a lot of Power Point presentations for a sufficient number of grammar rules. So, I have to choose no more than five grammatical structures to present. A good website designed to "teach" grammar would be required to have many more. 

My site map

My wireframe (a tentative one)

Journal 3: Social Media in Schools

Kessler, S. (2010, September 29). The Case for Social Media in Schools. Retrieved October 16, 2015.

In her article, "The case for social media in schools," Sarah Kessler shares the story of a teacher, Elizabeth Delmatoff, who pioneered a social media program in her school with admirable results.
Undoubtedly, using social media sites is one among the most common activities of today's children, adolescents, and adults. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, video sites like YouTube and blog sites can all provide a portal for entertainment and communication. Of course, social media is here to stay! For these reasons, education can and should embrace social media on the condition they are healthy environments for all participants.
Engaging in social media for educational purposes can definitely benefit young students since it can offer enhanced learning opportunities. Using blogs as teaching tools has the benefit of engaging students and reinforcing their skills in English, writing, and individual and collective creativity. Social media is one more way for teachers to reach their students. Through regular contact with the teacher and their classmates, students can collaborate more, exchange ideas by reading and commenting on each other's blogs. Even shy students have the opportunity to feel more confident and participate as everybody else does. Using such sites can be useful for homework help and sharing resources. Needless to say, there are also cons in using social media in the classroom, such as distraction, improper use, cyberbullying. But schools, teachers, and parents have the means to control online environments and provide young, impressionable students with access to safe platforms.
In general, social media has a role to play in education. Social media should supplement traditional teaching and learning in a way that is intellectually challenging to students. As with all things, using social media wisely and in moderation will be the key to success.

Question 1: Are there any long-term benefits of using social media in schools?

Answer: One more benefit of using social media in schools is that teachers can raise students' awareness of the appropriate use of these tools since they will be an indispensable part of their personal and professional lives. And as Sarah Kessler says, "to keep kids safe is to teach them."

Question 2: Does students' contact with social media have an impact on their time devoted to reading for pleasure?

Answer: Yes, it does. Unfortunately, time spent on social media is increasing while time spent on reading for pleasure is dwindling at an alarming rate. But today's digital natives cannot do without technology, without social networking. It is up to parents and teachers to try to instill a love of reading a book in young students.

Affinity Groups and Digg Reader

My Affinity Groups

I decided to join the affinity group EFL Classroom 2.0. Thousands of teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are members in this 10-year-old community, which provide them with a plethora of resources. I am most interested in teaching EFL since that is what I did in Greece for many years and what I would also like to do in the future. I am confident that I have a lot to contribute to their discussions and they will also help me stay up-to-date with the latest developments. 
Another affinity group I found interesting is the Flipped Learning Community, a professional community for educators using Flipped Learning, something I'd like to master. Members share lessons and submit videos, thus adding to the growing library showcasing Flipped Learning. I'm especially interested in their Flipped Learning Research and Mastery Learning groups.  

Digg Reader

Being inexperienced with news readers, I can only tell you about my experience so far. I found it user friendly; first, it is easy both to subscribe and unsubscribe. I was able to choose its categories or make more specific searches according to my interests. I made folders to classify my feeds and I already saved some of the articles I read and found interesting. I also “digged” and what I found can reappear when clicking on the “diggs” button. That confused me a little as I thought it was the same as the “save” button. By clicking on “popular,” I also saw what is popular from among my feeds, which is a useful feature.

Question #1: Now that news readers/RSS feeds are gaining ground, are we still going to wait for email newsletters? Can news readers replace email newsletters?

Answer: Yes, I think news readers can and will replace email newsletters. Personally, I had various problems with email newsletters since I received a lot of junk mail trying to keep up-to-date by receiving newsletters from my favorite websites. Now I can very easily subscribe to a reader, like Digg, choose and sort information and, most of all, I can read it comfortably (No more spam). And I don’t have to use my email for subscription (More privacy).

Question #2: Can teaching resources shared on different sites be used by other teachers in the form they are? 

Answer: I think that teachers have to modify any resource they find according to their teaching style and mainly their students’ needs. Just choosing the correct grade or the specific grammar point they are targeting may not be enough. More modifications may be necessary so that the teacher can use a resource in the most meaningful way for his/her class. Discussions among group participants can also provide ideas on how resources can be further adapted or enriched.

Journal #1

Robbins, J. (2012). Learning web design: A beginner’s guide to HTML, CSS, Javascript, and web graphics (4^th ed., pp. 3-46). Sebastopol, CA:O’Reilly.

Aptly named, the first three chapters equip beginners to web design with basic knowledge they should acquire before being able to delve into any deeper understanding of the craft. The questions, maybe naive for advanced students, echo what beginners would like to ask but never have the courage to.

The first chapter informs readers of what a web designer, a job title open to a variety of roles, usually has to deal with: design, development, content strategy and creation, and multimedia. Technologies and professional tools – software and hardware – are also explained in simple terms.

Following the same strategy of not taking any previous knowledge as granted, chapter 2 starts with a brief history of the web (by the way, Internet is not another name for the Web) and goes on to explain pages and resources on the Web and their features. I found it really interesting that although relatively early (page 26) the writer introduces readers to the anatomy of a web page by explaining HTML documents and providing an example of it, it all makes sense and the reader feels that he/she can easily grasp how such a document can be created. (What a relief for me!) Added to this, the figure showing how browsers display web pages gives another clear idea of how a web page appears on a screen.

Finally, the third chapter explains what Robbins considers “Big Concepts.” Using a plethora of devices, sticking with web standards, dealing with unknown browser capabilities through progressive enhancement, using responsive web design to handle screen size, ensuring accessibility and site performance are all concepts to help us avoid any unpredictable and undesirable outcomes in our medium.

Question 1: What does the imaginary web address (URL) http://www.essaywriting.com/GWT/argumentation/sampleessays.html mean?

Answer: This URL first defines the protocol the server uses, which is the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (http). Then it gives the host name www of the site while its domain name is  essaywriting.com. After the slashes we have the directory names, starting from a broader and ending with a specific one: so the specific document is sampleessays.html located in the argumentation directory, which in turn is in the GWT directory.

Question 2:Do text and image travel together through the browser?

Answer: No, the browser parses the HTML document. There is a second request from the browser to the server for any images or other external resources.