By Matt 　http://blog.matbury.com/2011/12/11/a-thorny-issue-protecting-teachers-and-learners-right-to-privacy/

Table of Contents [hide]

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 What do we mean by require?
  • 1.2 Why is it important?
• 2 Website Safety Guidelines
  • 2.1 Raise awareness on the issues with teachers and learners
    • 2.1.1 Important questions to ask:
  • 2.2 Minimize teachers’ and learners’ digital footprints
    • 2.2.1 Important questions to ask:
  • 2.3 Don’t sell out teachers and learners
    • 2.3.1 Important questions to ask:
  • 2.4 Don’t subject teachers and learners to trolls, spammers, child groomers or offensive behavior
    • 2.4.1 Important questions to ask:
  • 2.5 Monitor and arbitrate teachers’ and learners’ online behavior
    • 2.5.1 Important questions to ask:
  • 2.6 Conclusion
  • 2.7 Useful anti-surveillance tools
  • 2.8 Press articles on internet surveillance issues
  • 2.9 About the authors

Introduction

Elearning is booming and many schools are investigating the advantages and opportunities afforded by using the WWW to enhance participation in learning activities and add value to the courses they offer. The following guide is intended to help schools and teachers avoid some of the risks involved in encouraging or requiring learners of all ages to participate in activities on the WWW.

“Learners’ personal privacy and data security are our responsibility if we require them to use web services.”

What do we mean by require?

Even if we don’t explicitly or intentionally state that teachers and learners must use a particular website, we can, in effect, do this implicitly and unintentionally. If teachers and learners cannot participate fully in a course without using a specific website or service, or may be at a disadvantage if they choose not to use it, then we are, in effect, requiring them to use it. For example, conducting discussions or posting course materials on 3rd party websites or services, or teachers and learners themselves may create their own groups on 3rd party sites if we don’t provide them with more private alternatives.

Why is it important?

Teachers’ and learners’ personal privacy is our responsibility if we require them to use websites and web services. It’s a legal requirement in most countries under “duty of care” (tort law) and in some cases civil law, e.g. the European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, to learn about privacy on the web and take those responsibilities seriously because failing to do so can result in issues such as:

• Complaints from teachers, learners and/or guardians which can damage teacher and school reputations
• Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leaks
• Profiling of teachers and learners without their consent or knowledge
• Loss of control of teachers’ and learners’ personal information and subsequent “permanence” making it difficult or impossible to remove
• Cyber-crime and identity theft
• Cyber-bullying, i.e. suppressing learners’ rights and freedom of expression
• Grooming, i.e. predatory abuse of children
• Invasions by spammers and marketing of products and services that learners may be uncomfortable with or even find offensive
• Unmanageable offensive behavior by uninvited 3rd parties
• In rare cases, legal action

Fortunately, there are measures that we can take to minimize these risks easily and effectively. The coauthors of this article have developed this guide to help raise awareness of the issues and provide practical advice.

Website Safety Guidelines

Raise awareness on the issues with teachers and learners

The first step is to acknowledge that the issues exist and ensure that teachers and learners are adequately informed and understand them. If we fail in this task, we expose ourselves to liabilities both legally and ethically. Fortunately, there are easy ways to raise awareness from short introductory seminars or presentations that highlight the issues, to web safety guidelines, to installing software and putting safety checks in place. So called Digital Citizenship programmes are becoming increasingly popular and participants are often grateful to have been made aware of these important issues and how to deal with them in everyday life on the WWW.

Instead of relying on school network filters, we can also look for other solutions for better protection and education. At the end of this article we list some useful plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer that not only block the majority of internet surveillance but also help to raise awareness of how pervasive it has become.

Important questions to ask:

• What are you doing to adequately inform teachers and learners of the risks?
• What support and tools are you offering in order to help them make well-informed decisions?
• What tools and resources are you informing teachers and learners about so that they can use the WWW and avoid internet surveillance?
• Do you require teachers and learners to agree to a clear, concise statement of limit of liabilities for 3rd party sites before participating in online activities?

Minimize teachers’ and learners’ digital footprints

A learners’ or teachers’ digital footprint is the information they leave about themselves on the WWW. It can be innocuous information such as what they had for lunch or it can be an email, phone number, address or date of birth, otherwise known as personally identifiable information (PII). If PII falls into the wrong hands, it can be used for fraud, identity theft or to target teachers and learners with unsolicited marketing campaigns or divulge private personal information without their permission. The maximum information that we require from teachers and learners should be their names and avatars/photos: Just enough so teachers and learners can recognize and identify each other quickly and easily. In some cases, email addresses* may also be required so learners and teachers can be notified of updates to collaborative activities, assessment and/or announcements from teachers or the school. Any more information is more than likely unnecessary for online learning activities. Geographical location, Social Security numbers, addresses, age or date of birth, even gender shouldn’t be stored online unless we have a very good reason to do so and substantial security to prevent access to the data by 3rd parties is in place.

Websites’ privacy policies are probably your best guide to understanding what information they collect and what they do with it. For example, compare the privacy policies of two sites; Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and note the differences. Which one do you think is more open and transparent? Which one is more forthcoming with specific details?

Important questions to ask:

• What Personally Identifiable Information are teachers and learners required to give?
• Why is it required?
• How frequently are the privacy policies and end user licence agreement (EULA) on the website updated?
• What measures are in place for detecting and dealing with abuse such as acquiring other users’ PII and other forms of internet surveillance?
• Does the website take steps to educate about and/or prevent users from entering too much PII?

*Some schools do not store learners’ email addresses. In this instance, we should look for websites which provide us with tools to create and manage teacher and learner accounts.

Don’t sell out teachers and learners

Almost all websites have surveillance software in place, otherwise known as analytics, that gathers user data, i.e. users’ IP addresses, operating system and browser details, cookies from previously visited sites, navigation and mouse movements, etc., which can be aggregated to compile comprehensive profiles on individual users. What websites do with this data is of paramount importance to teachers’ and learners’ personal privacy. We should insist on using websites whose revenue strategies are transparent and aligned with our policies and mission statement.

Additionally, we should also ensure that sites do not contain any 3rd party “share” or “rate this” buttons or embedded apps that may contain user surveillance software. The surveillance of internet users has become a widespread phenomenon and we have a responsibility to reduce teachers’ and learners’ exposure in educational settings whenever possible (for much more on this see “Press articles on internet surveillance issues” at the bottom of this post).

Important questions to ask:

• How is the website funded? Who or where do its revenues come from?
• Can marketers and salespeople easily enter the site and promote products and services?
• Does it support targeted advertising and sponsorship?
• How easy is it for teachers and learners to shut down and delete their accounts?
• How easy is their end user licence agreement and privacy statement to read and understand? Do they change often? Does it appear as if they are trying to obscure something?
• Who does user generated content belong to and what do they do with it? Who has access to it?
• Do they have software in place to analyze teachers’ and learners’ browsing habits?
• Do they have business relationships with any non-educational entities? What are they?
• What messages do they send to users? Why?

Don’t subject teachers and learners to trolls, spammers, child groomers or offensive behavior

Websites want to make it as easy as possible for you to join. “Join now!” “Signing up is free and easy!” In all but exceptional cases, we should consider websites with instant membership for anyone and everyone as unsuitable for educational purposes.

However, some sites also allow members to form virtual groups and create a protected environment or ‘walled garden’ within the site, i.e. uninvited 3rd parties and marketers cannot intrude on the groups. This may be acceptable if the tools are robust and we can manage them effectively. Often the most appropriate choice is for specialist education websites that are entirely ‘walled gardens’ with a rigorous vetting system in place where only specific people can join through a verification process.

Important questions to ask:

• Who can become a member?
• How easy is it to create accounts using false information?
• If they ask us for our date of birth, address, school, etc., how do they verify that we are telling the truth and what sanctions do they impose on us for providing false information?
• Once inside, are there effective tools or procedures to protect your environment from inappropriate behavior?
• Are there privacy settings, and if so, are they clear, consistent, understandable and won’t change without warning?

Monitor and arbitrate teachers’ and learners’ online behavior

We are responsible for cultivating a productive learning environment that is safe for teachers and learners to use. Sites may include teacher and learner generated content in the form of online chats, discussions, projects and other collaborative tasks and we should ensure that we can meet our responsibilities effectively.

Most social networks enable and encourage users to contact each other privately. In a classroom setting there are risks of inappropriate teacher-to-learner and learner-to-learner behaviors. In the same way that we usually have policies in place that prohibit teachers being alone with a learner at any time in school, the same should be true online.

Also as teachers are required to be present during classes, it’s a good idea to require teachers to have some kind of presence in online learning groups. This is not only appropriate for detecting inappropriate behavior, it’s also a means to provide effective support and motivation to learners. Additionally, the option to automatically filter user-generated content, for example, blank out any email addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, offensive language, etc. that they might try to post, may be useful for some situations.

Important questions to ask:

• Are all teacher and learner generated content and messages permanently recorded?
• Can we access communications between all our teachers and learners?
• Can we perform group-wide and/or site-wide searches for inappropriate behavior?
• Can we suspend the accounts of teachers and learners who behave inappropriately until an issue is resolved?
• Does the site provide automatic filtering options to detect inappropriate words or links?
• Are the provided monitoring tools easy to use and effective?

Conclusion

Schools have always had the responsibility of keeping learners safe. While the current surge of interest in elearning has presented new challenges to these responsibilities, being vigilant and following these safety guidelines can help ensure that all participants are safer and more aware of the various risks.

Useful anti-surveillance tools

Here are some useful plugins for web browsers that monitor and block internet surveillance.

• Ghostery (Firefox) sees the “invisible” web, detecting companies interested in your activity.
• Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out (TACO) (Firefox) automatically blocks 100′s of tracking technologies that advertisers and others use to track you.
• NoScript (Firefox) is a more advanced approach with a variety of benefits.
• Tracking protection list plugins (Internet Explorer 9).
• EFF Surveillance Self-Defense guide to reducing the risks of all online activities.

Press articles on internet surveillance issues

We’ve compiled a list of relevant news items. Please note that this is by no means exhaustive and that internet searches for news items on the topics mentioned in this article will return many hundreds of results. They are in no particular order.

1. Cory Doctorow describes Facebook as a Skinner box that trains you to under-value your privacy: how do we make kids care about online privacy? (Youtube.com)
2. Teachers, students shouldn’t be Facebook friends
3. Will Missouri ‘Facebook Law’ spook teachers away from social media?
4. Kids Face Intensive Tracking on Web
5. Are You Being Tracked? 8 Ways Your Privacy Is Being Eroded Online and Off
6. Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest Websites
7. Untangling the web: privacy
8. Social Networking: Keeping It Clean
9. How To Force a Friendship on Facebook in Three Easy Steps
10. The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
11. Senate Probes Privacy Practices of Google and Apple
12. How Facebook Betrayed Users and Undermined Online Privacy
13. Facebook’s Arrogance
14. Why Privacy on Facebook Is ‘Virtually Impossible’
15. Facebook ‘close to settlement’ with FTC over privacy failings
16. Web 3.0 and Privacy Issues – Concern Grows
17. Facebook could face €100,000 fine for holding data that users have deleted
18. Facebook investigates pornography deluge after users’ complaints
19. School apologises for Facebook message calling pupils ‘inbred’
20. Alarm over secret Facebook accounts that allow children to slip safety net
21. Facebook refuses to take down rape joke pages
22. Facebook to be investigated over privacy concerns
23. Google+ forces us to question who owns our digital identity
24. Google investigated over household data privacy breaches
25. Privacy group demands apology from Google
26. How Do Social Networks Make Money? [In Case You Were Wondering]
27. Google Agonizes Over Privacy
28. Facebook in Privacy Breach
29. Your Apps Are Watching You
30. There are no free lunches on the internet
31. Cloud-based educational technology and privacy: a Canadian perspective
32. Google vs. Facebook on Privacy and Security
33. Privacy Policies Best Understood By College Grads, Senate Investigates
34. Privacy, Privacy, Where for Art Thou Privacy?
35. Why Web 2.0 will end your privacy
36. Creepy or Convenient? Apps for Tracking, Keeping Tabs
37. Facebook Squashes New ‘Stalker’ App
38. Social Networking Privacy
39. Commerce Department Releases Important Report Urging Comprehensive Privacy Protections
40. Spokeo is the leading people search engine
41. On Facebook, You Are Who You Know
42. 1.5 Million Stolen Facebook IDs up for Sale

About the authors

Jeffrey Dionne is the co-founder and CEO of PikiFriends, a safe social network for jr/sr high schools in use worldwide, as well as a full-time ESL teacher in Tokyo.

Matt Bury is a freelance elearning consultant, EFL/ESL teacher, blogger, and Flash and Moodle developer. He created, developed and maintains two plugin modules for Moodle, and a suite of software applications and resources for second language learning. His clients include agencies of the European Commission, universities, schools and colleges in the public and private sectors.

Rating: 10.0/10 (11 votes cast)

A thorny issue: Protecting teachers' and learners' right to privacy, 10.0 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

This entry was written by Matt, posted on December 11, 2011 at 2:16 am, filed under Learning and tagged CALL, Computer Assisted Language Learning, e-learning, Learning Management System, LMS, SLA, SLT, social learning, social networking, Virtual Learning Environment, VLE. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

2 Comments

1. Richard Stallman
   Posted December 11, 2011 at 6:54 pm | Permalink

   We are developing a Firefox plug-in that will block the use of
   nonfree, nontrivial Javascript programs. We will also make it block
   the Javascript for Google Analytics and some other similar sites.

   If you see a Facebook “Like” button, Facebook has collected your IP
   address and knows what page you visited. I hope we will develop
   a browser modification to block this surveillance.

   Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)
2. Matt
   Posted January 17, 2012 at 5:52 am | Permalink

   Donal O’ Mahony wrote about this article here: http://donalomahony.edublogs.org/2012/01/09/mission-statement-online-activity/

   Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

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Signal poor on m-learning's impact ht.ly/9Fypd #mlearning #edtech #besig #tesol

— Carl Dowse (@carldowse) March 15, 2012

Fascinating Study On What Learning From Mistakes Does To The Brain zite.to/AACPH5 via @zite

— NeridaHart (@neridahart) February 19, 2012

A field guide to the art and science of the solid argument.

Australian outfit Bridge 8, who have the admirable mission of devising “creative strategies for science and society,” and animator James Hutson have created six fantastic two-minute animations on various aspects of critical thinking, aimed at kids ages 8 to 10 but also designed to resonate with grown-ups. Inspired by the animation style of the 1950s, most recognizably Saul Bass, the films are designed to promote a set of educational resources on critical thinking by TechNYou, an emerging technologies public information project funded by the Australian government.

The animations — which are part Minute Physics, part The Dot and the Line, part 60-Second Adventures in Thought — are released under a Creative Commons license and cover the basics of logic and the scientific method, as well as specific psychological pitfalls like confirmation bias and Gambler’s Fallacy.

New bookmark: App Inventor -: Learn how to create your own Apps for the Android platform. Tutorials included! bit.ly/xem2vl

— Seth Dickens (@sethdickens) February 9, 2012

Nice one @englishraven V.Smart! #Moodle Tutorial: Page design to avoid the 'scroll of death'... bit.ly/z1h8Oe

— Seth Dickens (@sethdickens) February 13, 2012

RT @JenniferTeaches: Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains: bit.ly/xW9Fdl#eltchat #educhat

— MarisaConstantinides (@Marisa_C) February 13, 2012

"No Longer An Awkward Teenager? Gamification Grows Up" techcrunch.com/2012/02/12/no-… via @techcrunch < Momentum is building in #mlearning 4 sure!

— Robert Gadd (@robgadd4) February 13, 2012

1. Don’t assess how mobile fits in your blended learning strategy. Today, 50% of the US workforce is now considered mobile. However, while exploding, the mobile share of total web consumption is still extremely low, topping out at about slightly over 3% according to Quantcast. Furthermore, a recent report from iPass indicates that mobile workers are not committed to any one mobile device, leveraging notebooks as much as they do smartphones and more than tablets.

What this tells us is that it’s still early days for mobile learning. Without a proper assessment of how learners want to leverage mobile for their learning needs and on what devices, it’s highly likely to result in a poor allocation of resources across delivery modalities.

Block and report trolls ( ie: eurominuteman in whatever of his many twitter ids he uses) when they start to provoke others, and avoid engaging them: that takes their game away. If anyone is annoying, block them. Life is short, and mean people suck.

Enough blocks and they get banned, although our friend can probably get round that easy enough. But... this is a good learning opportunity, and now a lot of teachers will be able to recognize trolls, and share that with students... wrecking a perfectly good hobby for trolls. That is why it is a bad idea to troll a teacher area full of people that care about teaching and who share knowledge in a far too inclusive way.

As a note to Mr. James O'Reilly: If you want to stay as our pet troll, then you should know that nobody is going to get angry at someone's imaginary friend.

This is fascinating reading.

great video site especially if you're working with ESP students, hat tip @gscruton

Here are some ways I think you could use this site with students.

• Get them to find a country they would prefer to live in and ask them to find 5 reasons to justify.
• Get students to find a country they would NOT prefer to live in and ask them to justify.
• Select two countries and ask students to choose one to live in and justify their choice.
• Ask students to look at the colour rating of the facts and see if the agree with the positive / negative rating of the facts.

The origins of  “grammar” are as shady as you would expect.  Samuel Johnson, along with other agents of the Crown, needed to devise a way of communicating with one another in unbreakable code. The solution that was seized upon was a complex and contradictory series of “rules” for writing involving periods, commas, colons and end-blights that would ensure that written communication was so arcane that only the most highly educated men could ever possibly do it “correctly.” This had the added benefit of shaming any member of the middle or lower classes with aspirations of upward mobility who couldn’t possibly grasp all the nuances of these made up and arbitrary rules.

Let’s talk about prejudice in education. I am not talking about race, religion, or sexual preference prejudice. I am going to discuss a prejudice that I believe is prevalent throughout our educational system. Of course it will be denied by most educators, but that is a tell-tale symptom of prejudice. Most people will not admit to it. They may recognize it in others, but they will never admit their own engagement in this biased philosophy. I have no idea where this prejudice starts, or how it is driven, but its existence is undeniable. No, not every educator is prejudiced in this regard, but many, too many, are.

The prejudice to which I refer is that of grade level. Many educators look to other levels of education attributing expectations or disappointments based on nothing more than unfounded misconceptions and believing it to be truth. Let’s at least state the myths, and misconceptions to get them out in the open. Elementary teachers tell students that what they are doing now is nothing compared to what middle school teachers will demand. Middle school teachers say the same thing to their students, implying that high school will be more demanding. Of course high school teachers defer to the difficult paces that college professors will put students through when they get a hold on them in college. These are all points that teachers often tend to focus on with their students especially toward the end of the year.

Now let us examine the blame game based on this prejudice. The big myth is little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.

Nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.

A lot of time has been spent studying the impact of user generated content. You know, all the stuff that gets posted up onto the web, and whether it is at all useful to us as teachers and educators. Some of the best content is often provided by amateurs - people who are not necessarily specialists or qualified in their field of interest, but who are never the less passionate about their subject. This is also the ethos of sites such as Wikipedia, which rely heavily on 'the people' and 'wisdom of crowds' to create and maintain the content held in its pages. Blogging has emerged in recent years as a strong contender for the number one spot as user generated content, driven as it is by people who are both passionate and knowledgeable.

But it's not plain sailing. Influential commentators such as Andrew Keen have sniped consistently against such amateur content, suggesting that it is not only dumbing down society, but also eroding the authority of professionals and scholars, and denigrating knowledge.

And yet where is the first place students will go when they want to glean some facts or information about a subject? A lot of academics and scolars scoff at Wikipedia and forbid their students to reference it in their assessed work. Even more anathema are the many thousands of specialist blogs that are written by avid fans of topics. I must agree that quality across such sites is variable, but I also point out to the critics that just like Wikipedia, there are real experts out there writing these blogs. What if these blogs did not exist? How much poorer would we be in terms of knowledge of the world? There is a criticism that blogs are not peer reviewed, contain mainly opinion and have no credibility when compared with peer reviewed journal articles. Let's examine each criticism in turn.

Super article on the credibility of blogging

testing the share button

When the Tohoku Earthquake hit Japan, I was in California, but I was using Twitter at the time, on my @readable account with a lot of Japanese users. Many of them quickly tweeted 地震だ–”it’s an earthquake.” I realized something was wrong when, even fifteen minutes later, they were tweeting things like まだゆれる–”it’s still shaking.

10 Misleading Claims By TEFL Course Providers

Ten very common statements by people who sell TEFL courses that aren’t quite lies but are still meant to mislead

Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net

As in shopping and business generally, the things that you should be especially careful of when shopping for a TEFL course are the times when the course provider is not actually lying but is nonetheless playing the truth in a way that is only designed to deceive. This article should help you spot the most common such traps.

It was some years ago. I had the prep classes then which means I had 12 hours with the class to teach grammar. The students I had that year were the laziest or the most demotivated ones in my teaching career.

They didn’t have the habit of studying, no responsibility for school work. They were like 10 year-old kids although they were 14 and 15.

Most of the times I was angry and I was feeling we were going nowhere.

I remember spending nights to find a way but the first term ended in a total failure.

Then suddenly I realised there were things I could do.

Learners could devise their own surveys (either paper-based, or using an online tool such as surveymonkey) poll other students, and then present their findings as a chart, slideshow, or whatever.

On a deeper level, it could also be used as a springboard for discussing global issues in a critical thinking lesson, as it throws up some uncomfortable facts about the hard realities of life for people living in poorer parts of the world.

Why does the typical woman in Afghanistan live 41 years less than the typical woman in Japan? Put your learners into teams and get them googling to find out.

Just watched Dave Letterman giving 10 very vacuous and, quite frankly, deeply unconvincing, reasons why one SHOULD buy an iPad 2.

Here are my reasoms why you SHOULDN’T buy an iPad2:

1. It’s not a phone.

2. You already have a camera.

3. The keyboard is crap.

4. The screeen gets yucky mucky.

I have been living in Turkey for over 10 years now and I’ve been teaching English here for almost as long. Before I came to Turkey, I taught English Literature Studies. In Norway I was hired because I have an MA in British Literature and a degree in Applied Education as well as a valid Teaching Certificate. In Turkey I was hired for my blonde hair, Nordic looks and status as a foreigner.

relatively new blogger - really interesting articles.

I have been living in Turkey for over 10 years now and I’ve been teaching English here for almost as long. Before I came to Turkey, I taught English Literature Studies. In Norway I was hired because I have an MA in British Literature and a degree in Applied Education as well as a valid Teaching Certificate. In Turkey I was hired for my blonde hair, Nordic looks and status as a foreigner.

relatively new blogger - really interesting articles.

In searching for some creative ways to teach and learn vocabulary, I decided to use Glogster EDU for a springboard and platform, add a few other web 2.0 tools and vocabulary sites, and see where it took my adult ESOL class in three weeks.  In the process, we used Pic Lits, Jing, Youblisher, Wall Wisher, and Tagxedo.  Here’s where beginning to advanced level language learners landed in a few class periods when they brought their laptops to class. 

explore this post further for ideas and tips with own ss, nice real examples.

How do you invent an alien language? It isn't as easy as you might think. It's not enough just to take some words from a well-known modern language and twist them a bit. If these beings look really alien, and behave in an alien way, then they should sound alien too - and their writing system, if they have one, should also look alien. So their speech shouldn't remind you of a human language - and especially not a world language like English.

1. Self-concept: As a person matures his self concept moves from one of being a dependent personality toward one of being a self-directed human being

2. Experience: As a person matures he accumulates a growing reservoir of experience that becomes an increasing resource for learning.

3. Readiness to learn. As a person matures his readiness to learn becomes oriented increasingly to the developmental tasks of his social roles.

4. Orientation to learning. As a person matures his time perspective changes from one of postponed application of knowledge to immediacy of application, and accordingly his orientation toward learning shifts from one of subject-centeredness to one of problem centredness.

5. Motivation to learn: As a person matures the motivation to learn is internal (Knowles 1984:12).

I did this lesson with my students a few weeks back, based on an article from The Guardian. They got really into it, and we ended up making a video. Feel free to download it and adapt it as you see fit. (click on ‘View on Slideshare’ and the download button should appear above the presentation)

Now call me whatever you like, but I had NO problem in working out – in a very short time too, probably about  a nano second – that the man wanted two cheeseburgers. I ran this past Thomas, “What is the man ordering, Thomas?”

“Two cheeseburgers,” says Thomas also in a nano second.

So where’s the problem? It’s not with the student, gallantly trying to order two cheeseburgers in a language not his own, it’s not with ELF or EFL or anything else. It is with the completely intransigent and, dare I say, recalcitrant, bloody-minded and probably deeply stupid Macdonald’s waitron/service engineer/customer relations liaison moron – sorry “officer”.

Been kind of squelching and splashing about on the BELF practice pitch for a bit, (allusions both to the British weather and the cricket…..) and have chosen those particular verbs especially. Why? Because it doesn’t matter how much I splash and puddle about, the only effect it has is making my feet muddy. Not a trace of my ever having been there remains – all the reading, the researching, the thinking, the listening I do on the subject, leaves it as unmarked as a puddle once I have left it.

for BESIG

Very interesting report out this week from Morgan Stanley. Those motivated by the potential of mobile learning shouldn’t be put off by the title – Ten Questions Internet Execs should ask and answer.

I’ve picked up a few of the slides below but the full report is at the link above. (Full downloadable  index here, last year’s still useful mobile internet trend report here).

The iPad is incredibly useful in that it allows me to browse the Internet, search for images and download them. This saves using a desktop or laptop and printing the images out for use in class. I can save all browsed images and group them into categories (food, transport, sports, etc). I no longer have to visit the school cabinet and look through folders of pictures to find the right one. Furthermore, the iPad is large enough for students to see in class but light enough to keep in my teacher’s bag. One more thing is that you can setup a slideshow on the iPad: a teacher can arrange a slideshow with 20 pictures, show this to students and then have them try to remember each picture shown. It is especially useful for recycling vocabulary, particularly nouns. Finally, a student can be shown a picture on the iPad and attempt to explain what it is to his or her classmates, who then have to draw pictures. This becomes a useful dictation activity.

Much of the language learning students do is linear in nature - going from unit to unit, from new language items to new language item. Much of this learning is abstract and focuses on 'one-point' learning. While this can help raise linguistic awareness, research shows that in fact much of this knowledge stays abstract and is available only in limited ways. Research also shows that combining 'one-point' learning with consolidation activities, especially Extensive Reading, doubles a learner's receptive and productive vocabulary.

Thirteen years ago I celebrated my 18th birthday. I didn't celebrate it in May as I was preparing for my A-levels.  I had saved some money so in the summer I went to Crete with some friends from school. Each night we went out to the bars and clubs. Each day we recovered by the swimming pool. It was a typical summer break for someone who had just left high school in 1998.

Maybe that's why I am particularly affected by what's happening at my workplace.

A number of my students will be turning 18 this year.

I think it will be an enjoyable milestone for the Pole and the Latvian and their families.

The three Afghan boys are in a very different place.

Scott Thornbury answers the question: Should I do a "dogme" lesson as part of my DELTA course experimental practice?

thought I’d test the water with a chat about social networking, after all, everyone has something to say about that. What could possibly go wrong? So, I walked into the classroom and wrote, “Facebook ruins my privacy” on the board. No response… nothing, silence. Not quite what I had expected. I then asked students to discuss this, which they did, with very little enthusiasm. It crashed. I saw it dive bomb before my eyes. So, I reverted to plan B: played some vocabulary games.

After the lesson I could not stop asking myself what had not interested them. Was it that they were feeling a bit tired from the week? It must have been. Lucky I had not laboured the topic too much and just accepted its failure.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I really think it could solve some problems I’m having with recycling, students who miss lessons and need to catch up, and balancing seeing a large amount of language that they might come across in their work with knowing a few things really well.

An e-book is not an engaging experience, merely replicating a textbook,” say William D. Rieders, executive vice president for new media at the publishing company Cengage Learning. At the 2011 Higher Ed Tech Summit, he said this major publisher sees little future in e-books, despite the proliferation of Kindles and other e-book readers, and tablets like the iPad. The biggest areas for Cengage, he says, are software programs like homework solutions and assessment tools.

This is really helpful, because now it means that you can select the song you want to use, copy the embed code and then embed it into your own web page or blog and write your activity around it.

Why in this case are some English Language teachers prepared and sometimes quite happy to announce that they “don’t know their grammar”? (Funny that they usually claim the grammar as theirs!

Webster was quite the man; an American lexicographer before such a thing existed, a textbook pioneer who thought that Americans should learn from American books, (resulting in his compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language), an English spelling reformer, a political writer, an editor, a slavery abolitionist and a prolific writer to boot. Basically, it’s not for nothing that Webster is referred to as the father of American scholarship and education. In essence, it’s very much down to him that his country folk might nowadays say, ‘He de man!’

Welcome to the new era, the one that scares traditional publishers to death and will make the world better for writers and readers alike. Congratulations to Amazon for making it possible. And congratulations to Ms. Hocking on her success.

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

via Larry Ferlazzo/ David

Grammar rules are like maps–and landscapes are like languages–in several important ways.

First of all, maps are not the landscape itself; they are a representation of that landscape. Likewise, grammar itself is not the language, but rather a way to describe language–to lay a grid over it so that we can examine and discuss its component parts. When we study a map of Japan, we are aware that we are studying Japan; however, we are equally aware that we are studying just a few aspects of Japan–its shape or geographic features. We know that there’s a lot about Japan that isn’t as easy to explain in map form, and we certainly don’t expect to be able to get around Japan without trouble just because we have a map in hand.

actually dated Dec 2010 but only came across it this week via eannegrenoble

Answer: It’s easy! Youtube has a great tool called Spotlight that lets you make any video interactive. It’s really handy for lessons and quizzes. Essentially, you can ask students a question — or a series of questions — and when they answer show them a personalized video response according to how they did.

Quizzes aren’t always the most exciting things in the world, so this adds a bit of adventure to the experience. This kind of personalization works great for our GMAT prep course, but any teacher can use the process to create a fun, interactive Youtube lesson.

Here’s how to do it.

*Speaking informally with teachers attending BETT, I found very few who were thinking about exploring the use of phones as part of their teaching.  Now, I certainly don't pretend that the views of 20-odd teachers I spoke with informally at BETT are in any way representative of, well, anything.  That said, I did recall these conversations when when reading a recent report (Deepening Commitment: teachers Increasingly Rely on Media and Technology [pdf]) on what teachers in the United States consider to be the 'portable technologies with the greatest education potential', which placed cell phones at the bottom of the list of devices surveyed, even below things like 'game devices (e.g. Nintendo DS)'.

I’ve been occupied with writing a paper to promote the adoption of mobile learning amongst corporates and enterprises. While trawling through multiple web-links, a pattern of myths about mobile learning emerges. Quite a bit of back and forth about these myths – I’m taking the liberty of listing and describing the five that struck me as odd, and am attempting to debunk them to an extent. I’ll be the first to admit there is always an element of truth behind myths; but with the rate of technological change, quite a few of those ‘truths’ would seem like falsehoods today.

An amazing interactive YouTube video for the students who want to win real... imaginary money! To play the game, simply click on the answer of your choice or ask a friend (you will never guess who!) to help you by clicking on the 'phone-a-buddy' sign at the top of your screen. In case you want to look up an answer before you make a decision, you are free to google it.

As a strong believer in and practitioner of using technology in language teaching, I thought it would be useful to bring together a list of resources providing research on its effectiveness.

I hope readers will make additional suggestions.

Here are my choices for The Best Places To Find Research On Technology & Language Teaching/Learning:

omic above easily created with Super Hero Squad Marvel.com

Looking through the archives of Nik Peachey's excellent blog "Quick Shout" today, I came across this fab posting from July 2009 where Nik explains the merits of The Ultimate Word Search Maker. This is a great tool which allows you to create fast and easy to use word searches. Please read Nik's posting here to find out more.

great for sending students on to

Questions to ask your students after presenting the infographic:

1. What is the most surprising fact that you discovered from this infographic?
2. Do you agree with the statement that today’s students “are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”? Why or why not?
3. Would you consider yourself to be a “digital native”? How do you compare to other digital natives with respect to the way(s) you use mobile devices?
4. Classroom technologies have come a long way since the end of the 19th century. In your opinion, what is the most important educational technology ever invented? Why?
5. Many students and teachers around the world have found mobile learning to be very successful. How has mobile learning impacted your own education? Give examples.

Fluency requires practice. Our students also know that speaking English can be both satisfying and stressful. Therefore, we require speaking activities in class – and strongly suggest ways to speak more out of class. Our students want to be fluent, but they often hesitate to practice their speaking skills. Many students do not want to risk making mistakes, being misunderstood, and feeling awkward. Some prefer to silently take notes, and speak as little as possible in their English classes. We have all probably faced this situation.

The idea of keeping a writing folder as an assessment component inspired me and I used the blogs as their e-portfolios both for their written work and for oral recordings. In some classes, we used different Web 2.0 tools such as glogster, wordle, voicethread, podomatic and more. I open a post and my students write their paragraphs by leaving a reply.

It's amazing how many tools cease to exist the moment you're planning to use them. :)

How can you find alternative tools? Use SIMILARSITESEARCH

Give them an authentic language example

Especially with adult learners, what they learn needs to be relevant and useful. Sometimes standard textbooks provide vocabulary that will be of little use to them in their everyday lives. (I mean really, do adults need to know how to say how many pieces of chalk there are in a classroom? Especially in today’s world? And yet, the textbooks we use still have vocabulary such as this in the introductory chapters. I think this is mostly because “that’s how it’s always been done”. From my experience, I can see my learners’ eyes glazing over with boredom when we have to learn vocabulary by rote that really has no relevance to them as working and professional adults who want to travel or do business abroad.

I haven't got time to spend on the Blackboard discussion environment. It's a waste of time. There are so many other things to do on this course and with all due respect to everybody else here, I just don't want to spend time in discussion with them, when they don't really know any more than I do. I prefer to spend time reading the views of experts in books or journals and listen to or talk with the tutors, who are experts in their field. I'll learn from them because they know more than me.

webinar includes directions for how to create a self-grading quiz using forms within Google Docs. The video of the webinar is embedded below. The transcript of the Q&A portion of the webinar is available here.

I've previously shared many tutorials for using Google Docs and other Google products in your classroom. Click here find twenty of those tutorials including the printable ebooks Google for Teachers and Google for Teachers II.

My students spend a lot of time on the Internet and even though they say they know absolutely everything about the perils of the virtual world, I strongly believe that every now and then this topic should be brought into discussion.

I have been tweeting mostly about ELT stuff and Web 2.o links.You can easily find your first tweet, but did you know that Twitter can only show your  most recent 3200 tweets (maybe less now)? I have nearly 7.000 tweets and that means that half  of my tweets are rubbish now!

But it’s never too late to back up your future tweets, here are the tools that can help you to save yours:

Russell Stannard is the creator of the award-winning ELT website www.teachertrainingvideos.com.

Cutbacks are taking place across Europe in the area of higher education, and many institutions are looking to save money and create new markets. Suddenly distance learning looks much more attractive, and the focus has turned to virtual classrooms. So what are these virtual classrooms, and what can they do? Here at Warwick University, we have been testing a number of them.

Applications for Education
Voki for Education now offers a lesson plan database that anyone can access. If you have lesson plans of your own that you would like to share, you can add them to the database.

Hispanics, Asians Most Likely US Smartphone Owners

As of December 2010, nearly a third (31%) of all mobile consumers in the US owned smartphones, according to data from The Nielsen Company. But smartphone penetration is even higher among mobile users who are part of ethnic and racial minorities in the US; namely Asian/Pacific Islanders (45%), Hispanics (45%) and African-Americans (33%), populations that also tend to skew younger. Meanwhile, only 27% of white mobile users reported owning a smartphone.

First of all, TEFL is a dynamic, developing field. Having attended a Diploma or an MA in TEFL course in the early eighties and not having followed the developments in the field since then does not just mean that you now know very little about the current state of TEFL, it means that you know very little about TEFL in general, as TEFL in the 2010s is a completely different activity from what it was in the 1980s and the body of knowledge on which TEFL professional activity is based has expanded so much that most of what you may have learnt in the eighties is now not just dated but simply irrelevant.

excerpt...

 

This is the "Bloodbath" Final Report for Smartphone Market Share Battle 2010

So, we finally have the last of the big 4 analyst houses reporting on the handset sales and smartphone sales and I can now calculate my numbers. As I have said many times before, I use the average of the big 4 analyst houses for the overall market size and then use the best info I can find (ideally the actual quarterly numbers from the handset maker quarterly reports) to calculate market shares. We can now report on the Smartphone Bloodbath of 2010 (I have been calling my analysis of the market share battle for smartphones last year, as the Bloodbath), and give the final count. I'll do Q4 quarterly results first briefly, then give the full year 'final report'.

Q4 NUMBERS

The top 10 smartphone manufacturers in Q4 were:

1  Nokia . . . . . . 28.3M . . . 28%
2  Apple . . . . . . 16.2M . . . 16%
3  RIM . . . . . . . .14.2M . . . 14%
4  Samsung . . . .10.5M . . . 11%
5  HTC . . . . . . . 10.2M . . . 10%
6  SonyEricsson . 5.2M . . .   5%
7  Motorola . . . . .4.9M . . .   5%
8  LG . . . . . . . . .4.7M . . .   5%
9  Fujitsu . . . . . . 2.0M . . .   2%
10 Sharp . . . . . . 1.7M . . .   2%
Others . . . . . . . . 1.5M . . .  2%
Total . . . . . . . . .99.4M

Whats new from Q4? Plenty of shuffling in the rankings. Samsung has jumped ahead of HTC. SonyEricsson has jumped Motorola for 6th place. LG came from nowhere and is challenging now ole' MotoMoto for that place. And Nokia's smartphone market share has dived under the 30% level for the first time ever, and also, for the first time ever, Nokia's nearest two rivals in smartphones now sell more smartphones when added together, than Nokia alone. The giant is no longer as invulnerable as it has been in the past..

The smartphone OS battle for Q4 has Symbian still on top. The widely reported story from analyst house Canalys, that Android would have passed Symbian has now been rebuked by both IDC and Gartner, so my immediate Tweet and blog about it, that Canalys numbers did not stand up, seems easily verified haha.. (who gives you the value in the stats to this industry, eh? Who told you first? Over 400 press articles had the faulty numbers but Communities Dominate broke the story that Canalys was wrong..) Lets see how the smartphone operating systems stand in Q4:

1  Symbian . . . . . . 31.4M . . . 32%
2  Android . . . . . .  30.1M . . . 30%
3  Apple iOS . . . .  16.2M . . . 16%
4  Blackberry OS . 14.2M . . . 14%
5  bada . . . . . . . . .  3.0M . . .  3%
6  Windows Mobile . 1.7M . . .  2%
7  Phone 7 . . . . . . . 1.5M . . .  2%
Others . . . . . . . . . . 1.3M . . .  1%
Total . . . . . . . . . . .99.4M

I also have done my analysis of the Android family for Q4, this is how I estimate the Android internal market shares among its biggest handset makers:

HTC . . . . . . . . 30%
Samsung . . . . .23%
SonyEricsson . 17%
Motorola . . . . . 16%
LG . . . . . . . . . 10%
Others . . . . . . .  4%

 

This is a brief post critiquing Sherlock Holes' error correction technique.

Not only is he an investigative mastermind, Sherlock Holmes is also a part-time TEFL teacher. Here he is displaying how he deals with error correction. What do you think of his technique?

 

Although he is quite harsh, he does effectively highlight the speaker's errors. He also quickly and effectively gets the speaker to start self-correcting.

 

Common TEFL Confusions

This page is about confusions that teachers often have, rather than confusions that students have. Each term is listed in alphabetical order, first within the list and then within the entry.

hat-tip @larryferlazzo

hat tip @larryferlazzo

Kieran McGovern considers why some verbs in English are so difficult for language learners to grasp and how they have changed (and continue to change) over time.

link with the BELF/ELF stuff from VickiHollett

10 Top iPhone Apps for Teaching & Learning

Posted by Sandra Pinto Pires | Filed under E Learning, Mobile learning

And just because my iPhone is my favourite mobile device, I couldn’t resist organising a list of great Educational apps for iPhone, mentioned at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference 2011.

I’ve had the opportunity to read a great book called A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster, who gets at the heart of some of the questions I’ve been having about creating good games.

What are games anyway?

 

 

 

 

Awesome Screenshot is a great Chrome and Safari browser extension for capturing, annotating, and sharing screenshots.

Feature 99

Why you should fight Apple’s Subscription Extortion

By Ryan Carson

15 February 2011 | Category: Web Industry

Apple just dropped a nuclear bomb on all of us with their new App Store subscriptions announcement. Here's the summary: "We're going to take 30% of your web app revenue. Just because we can."

90% of smartphone users send 1 txt, 40% connect to social media

how to feed blog into app 4 smartphones