Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Come, you know, come back to us. I don't want to lose you to this online world.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Boundary setting is a massively important part of learning. And when we bring the online dimension into that, then being clear about what our boundaries are and what the students boundaries are is really important.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: The conversation will just expand, which is wonderful. You've got participation multiplying itself there. But as a teacher, you've got your objectives, you want ideas, right? Five minutes of this, then we're moving on and getting students right. Everyone stop talking. Close your devices. It's like, you know, any parent who's trying to get a kid to stop using the Internet before bedtime will sympathise completely. It is really hard to close down these online chats.
[00:00:47] Speaker C: I find that even with online meetings that someone says something, I feel I should know that, but I don't know it. And you know, I can check while the conversation is going on.
So I can imagine the same in a language learning situation.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Talk to yourself. Students and find out what they want and what they need and what they feel comfortable with. Might well be that they want to detox from all of that. They want a space which is devoid of it, or it might be that they want to harness it and can we facilitate them.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: I think it really is a question of not giving in always to this mode and using it when it's appropriate, but also explaining to students that we're here in a classroom. This is an opportunity to do something different.
[00:01:39] Speaker C: I think we had a really great couple of conversations. What I wanted to do now is to look much more at this question of how to bring the different worlds together. So we've talked about some of the great things of online digital learning, some of the great things of the classroom, the real face to face classroom.
How can we approach bringing those together?
In some ways, are they in competition? Is the online world competing with us as teachers in the classroom? How can we take a more positive view of these two worlds of learning?
Those are all my questions in one go at the beginning.
Anybody want to pitch into to this question?
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Maybe we all have different answers. Perhaps no two contexts are the same.
The idea of two worlds, I wonder, is it two worlds or it's not?
[00:02:40] Speaker C: No.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:02:42] Speaker D: It's the 2020s classroom rather than two worlds, isn't it? It's like, I don't know, 10, 20 years ago when there was the kind of the battle raging about, you know, should we use tech in the classroom? Should we not? The tech classroom, the non tech classroom. And it all just seemed like, well, why are we even debating this? It's like saying, never bring a Biro to class. You know, it's just incorporate it rather than see it as the other side, digital. I mean, not necessarily going entirely digital, but.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that said, there's still. I mean, that's totally my philosophy as well, you know, get the kids bringing the mobile phones to class. But in mainstream state schools, there's. There's a real move to ban the digital devices in the school. Don't even let them bring it, let alone have it on in class.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: And with positive results, actually.
[00:03:41] Speaker D: It's a tricky one, isn't it?
[00:03:42] Speaker A: It is. And also, you know, the. Especially the younger students, you know, in the UK system, year seven, Year eight, that sort of thing, getting them to not use their devices when you don't want them to as well. So the. It feels like very much there is a dichotomy. It's like, no, you're in the present, come, you know, come back to us. Well, I don't want to lose you to this online world.
So it does feel sometimes like you're, you know, fighting against it.
And I think discipline is a main issue.
[00:04:13] Speaker D: It's really tricky.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: And I think really, we go back to something we said in the previous episode, which is like, talk to your students and find out what they want and what they need and what they feel comfortable with. Might well be that they want to detox from all of that and they want a space which is devoid of it, or it might be that they want to harness it or need to harness it. And can we facilitate them in that?
[00:04:35] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I've heard similar comments about gamification, which Duolingo, for example, is very strong on, and it seems to be a great motivator. And yet for a lot of teenagers, feel that that is so much part of their world all the time, that coming into class they don't want.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: And also, can we offer things to the same standard and quality, the online experience that they would have outside?
I mean, you know, they can. Obviously, I don't know anything about online games, but World of Warcraft is that one.
[00:05:06] Speaker D: Can we.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: I think so.
Can we offer an ELT game that is any. Nowhere near as engaging with graphics and the gaming experience?
[00:05:14] Speaker D: I'm picking up on what you've just said last week.
So most of my students at the moment, anyway, Japanese, Chinese from Hong Kong, you know, Asia, they come to class, they have. They all have tablets, they just don't own a notebook and they don't have A pen, basically, if I need to fill in forms, have to hand out pens. But literally what is this? Which way exactly? Which way up does it go? No, they're not that bad.
But I noticed last week they had to create a quiz or an activity for their classmates. So we're in a small group, they're in threes and they had 25 of them and they had to create an activity and essentially to teach each other something.
And one group. And I will give the chap a name check here. His name is. His English name is Alan. Because this is entirely his idea. Rather than go the Kahoot way, he uploaded. I had no idea what he was doing until we did it. We actually did it in the class. He uploaded a thing and had a QR code and then he put his slides, his quiz questions were slides and he asked us to ping the QR code and, and all it was was a PDF, four pages, a red page, a blue page, a yellow page and a green page. A, B, C, D. And we had to take our phones out and we had to scroll and choose our arms and hold it up.
So it was like the perfect combination of using digital but not using digital. He didn't want to do kahoot, he wanted to lead it and kind of make it semi manual whereby we showed.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:57] Speaker D: The answers and then everybody could see. You could see if you've got the same color as everyone else in the room.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Very good.
[00:07:03] Speaker D: And I just.
For me that was like, yeah, this is, this is like the perfect tech. But it was a.
What would he be? Gen Z, as you've been saying, age groups. 19, 18. 19 somewhere around there.
[00:07:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:19] Speaker D: And instead of going the full tech, he was choosing to make it sort of semi.
[00:07:25] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Maintaining that social interaction.
[00:07:27] Speaker D: Exactly. And make it kind of analog, but not exactly because literally they don't have paper.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Do you think, Fiona, that the, the tech aspect there motivates because you could just do hands on head, hands on shoulders. Right. For abcd. But it sounds like having the QR code.
[00:07:44] Speaker D: Having the QR code actually. And I noticed it was a colored QR code as well. So instead of black on white.
Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like halfway there. But they still got a very hands on thing. Rather than the. Everybody's eyes were not down at the screens, they were down briefly as they chose their letter and their colour. But everybody's eyes were then up looking around the room to see everybody else's little screen. And that was a big difference.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: That's a really nice Approach.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: I think it's also interesting when we're using devices or whatever in company, we're never using them by ourselves. In silos, there's always interaction, looking at each other's screen or who posted that or why did you do that? And the. Often the devices are a starting off point, aren't they? Or they inspire interaction. So to see it as two worlds, I suppose, is a false distinction in that sense.
[00:08:41] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's partly that we're focusing here on technology in the classroom, but I think also some of our conversations in the previous episodes were talking about kind of the overall learning experience, what's happening in the classroom, and also what's happening outside the classroom and how we might see those as two parts of that overall learning experience.
And some of the aspects where technology has an advantage outside the classroom.
I think we talked about anonymity being one of those things.
Posting on a board somewhere or using your avatar or just whatever anonymity you have gives you that safe space.
Are there ways that you can see that complementarity between the digital outside the classroom in a face to face in the classroom?
[00:09:43] Speaker A: I think, yeah. I mean, inside a classroom, you, I think, can create variety with the digital world by bringing it in.
I think you can also.
Yeah. So it's partly about breaking up the rhythms, interaction, doing something a bit different and I think just inspiring students. We're taking out phones now. Wow.
So in many ways it's just that sort of change of dynamic and speed and. And relevance. I mean, the phone is the lives of many students, isn't it? So suddenly they feel ownership if they've got the phone or, you know.
[00:10:19] Speaker C: Right.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: We're doing this online quiz, get your phones out. And they suddenly feel like this is our way, we interact. This is for us.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: So I think that's something, you know, it gives power to them. Even if you're desperately trying to control what they're doing on it, it's still a concession perhaps to their world.
[00:10:37] Speaker C: I agree with you completely. I often feel like that about kind of multimodal communications, you know, with a video clip or an audio clip instead of just writing things down, as we talked about in the first episode, that it's. That it is. That is the world they live in.
That is how they communicate, as we all do now. Increasingly, it's a multimodal communication. So bringing that into the classroom is just authenticating the type of communication.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: And I often, often find as well, when you get them to perhaps post something, maybe on a screen, thinking of the Apps like Padlet, you know, where you might just get them to create post comments.
A lot of them will change their names.
They enjoy even though, you know, you know, it's someone in the classroom. They can't hide really. But it's almost just for, almost for fun. But to create that ambiguity, like who put that there, it creates real interest, you know, and I think they don't abuse that. And no one's going to post anything inappropriate because you know, the IT department, if no one else can always find out who it was posting things. But it is just that sense of play, you know, about being able to inhabit another character, call yourself a name, a silly name, a cartoon character, whatever.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: Also your L2 self, you know, this, you mentioned, you mentioned Zoltan Dornier and this, this way that we almost create a Persona for ourselves as we speak in another language.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Nick Thorner. If you want to discover more about the relationship between motivation and social interaction within English language learning, go ahead and download our position paper that Fiona and I helped to co author alongside other fantastic contributors. It's called the Human Connection. Motivation and Social Learning.
In an increasingly digital world, the English language classroom is more important than ever in providing a social learning environment that boosts communication and motivation. In this paper we investigate the threats to student motivation within the classroom, ranging from foreign language anxiety to a lack of connection and much more.
Download the paper via the link in the description Description and enjoy the read. Thank you.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: I was at a conference last year and it was a hybrid conference, so I was in the room, but there were also people joining remotely.
And I was aware of a kind of normal setup where the people in the room have the. Have the best experience and those who are watching online have a reduced experience in terms of feeling like they're involved.
And we got to the Q and A part and online participants were invited to post their questions in the chat box. And it completely shifted the dynamic because everyone could see their questions first and they actually got, as it were, you know, they got the first bite of the cherry when it came to asking questions. And I love that aspect of potentially equalizing the extent to which people have their voices heard in hybrid situations.
Some people feel way more confident and comfortable putting their hand up in a room. Others feel much more safe and confident typing their question or their comments. And being able to have the potential to do both of those things in the same class is really exciting.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: I think one of the things we mentioned in the paper as well about the job role of the teacher now Often it's about creating a democratic community of participation where everyone can participate equally and stopping students from dominating. I mean, we all, I think, have assumed in this conversation often that it's. It's peers, they love being with peers and they enjoy listening or talking with each other all the time. But I think very often that isn't necessarily the case. They feel awkward. They don't perhaps enjoy talking in the group or I prefer not to talk with this person or whatever. And suddenly creating this sort of online space where they can all sort of participate, I think is a leveler and no one person can dominate that space.
As you're saying, you know, everyone can participate equally.
[00:14:41] Speaker D: I think that's particularly true of, again, going back to the cultural thing.
If you've got, if you're teaching in mainstream education in any context, your students are going to be roughly the same age. But if you're in a private language school or courses of the type that I work on, you may have students from different year groups.
And in that kind of situation, you'll often get some of the students unwilling to speak, ask questions, etc. In front of others. You've got the kind of the age hierarchy and essentially asking a question in the kind of full forum format in a classroom is like public speaking.
It's putting your hand up and asking question in front of 24 other people or nine other people or whatever it is, which may include people who are more competent in the language than you, etc. So, yeah, definitely having some kind of alternative way of asking those questions, whether it's a WhatsApp group that they can use after class or tutorial mode, whatever it is. But this combining digital with face to face can.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: That's really interesting.
[00:16:07] Speaker D: Definitely overcome that. Yeah.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: I think the idea of having people post questions in a chat, we. I think your point was about that could be great if you've got hybrid situation where people are joining online, but there's no reason why you couldn't have that in a classroom as well. Yeah, we use post it and there's.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: No, there's no speak up from the back of the room, please. I can't hear you. If you're, if you're typing your comments, the teacher can see all comments equally clearly.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: That's right. And no accusations that you're looking at the right inside the class, more the left, that sort of thing. You know, the favoritism.
[00:16:39] Speaker C: So, yeah, and I think there's also that being able to kind of check and prepare things almost invisibly. I mean, I Find that even with online meetings that someone says something, I feel I should know that, but I don't know it and you know, I can check while the conversation is going on.
So I can imagine the same in a, in a language learning situation, you want to say something, you're not quite sure if you're saying the right thing. You can double check in real time online in a way which would be quite difficult in a face to face classroom without a digital.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Absolutely. And having that trace as well, which is perhaps similar, you can go back and look at what was said much more easily. And so I want to go back and look at this comment now and yes, so you don't have to, you can engage with them all the time.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Whilst that trace, that record is being built up on the screen and that's I think a great aid, saves the teacher spending time writing notes when they can instead just join in and participate.
[00:17:39] Speaker D: I suppose as well. If you've got a chat box function, you can ask for clarification from the other people listening. If you didn't catch a name or you didn't catch something, you can quickly pop in the chat box, what was that name?
[00:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: So can I look almost at the flip side of that is, are there things that people need to be wary of, to be careful about when they're trying to bring together digital kind of perhaps more private individual learning and the more social learning in the classroom? Are there pitfalls, other things have gone wrong for you that you, you would like to share the learning from that?
[00:18:21] Speaker B: I think boundary setting is a massively important part of learning and when we bring the online dimension into that, then being clear about what our boundaries are and what the students boundaries are, is, is it really important?
I don't want to go too much into like issues of privacy, but I think at a very simple level, one of the things about a classroom in the, in the past was it was a cocoon from the real world and we entered the language world of the language classroom as soon as we bring tech in that potentially begets gets blown away.
So being clear about, about how we're going to approach it and getting students agreement on that is important. Some students want to bring in things from their private lives and from the outside world into the lesson. Others want to do exactly the opposite and love the fact that it's a bubble which is separate from whatever's going on outside. So again, talking about it, asking, negotiating and being careful I think are important parts of that decision and I think.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Stopping it as well, you know, once you've put students in a position where they're. They're free to. Whether it's, you know, express themselves in a certain way, add comments and things to think, engage, they will. This will have its own life and, you know, one comment. The student posts will certainly attract a huge melee of comments from other students and the conversation will just expand, which is wonderful. You've got participation multiplying itself there. But as a teacher, you've got your objectives. You want. Ideally, what we're going to have five minutes of this, then we're moving on and getting students right. Everyone stop talking. Close your devices. It's like, you know, any parent who's tried to get a kid to stop using the Internet before bedtime will sympathize completely. It is really hard to close down these online chats.
[00:20:02] Speaker C: You've motivated them too much.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: That's right.
You want to still got to have that aim of the control and the pacing of the lesson.
And I think also that can be the case from lesson two lessons. So they'll say, oh, let's do a kahoot again, let's do. And sometimes you'll say, no, no, we can't do that all the time. You know, sometimes that's important. Other times we've got to try other modes of learning and, you know, yeah, hard. I think, too, it's a genie out of the bottle sometimes, isn't it? It is getting it back in. I think it's a challenge.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Do you both find that you lose time? Like you have to factor in that I can cover less in this class because we can move at the pace that the slowest person is able to figure out how the QR code works and that there's some attrition there. In any activity where there's. There's tech involved.
[00:20:48] Speaker D: There's more than that. There's that you need a plan B. You've got the whole. I have this quite often. The whole, I can't get this to work. My haven't got data. I haven't got coverage. I haven't got.
And there's going to be a lot of teachers just don't have Internet access or. Or the bandwidth, you know, on their Internet connection to do half the stuff or the kids won't. Or. Yeah, there's also depending on the age group, if it's children or younger teens, where.
Or mixed background where producing your phone. You know, if I put my phone on the table right now, my students laugh at it because of how old it is. You know, there's an element of that. I think you've got to be very careful about that.
You've also got. Do we want them to be engaged with the screen all the time or looking at each other?
Non verbal cues. They're not going to get that from a screen. There's all kinds of things I think that can go wrong with dopamine that you were just saying, Nick, about.
Oh, can we have another cahoot? Can we have another cahoot? Do I always want my students to be right up there, Hyper. Hyper. No, I want them to be calm and focused and present.
I want my students to be present for learning.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: I have a colleague who hates Kahoot with a passion.
[00:22:09] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Because he has a slow reading speed.
[00:22:12] Speaker D: Right.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Says Cahoot favors people who read quickly because you know.
[00:22:17] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: How fast can you read? The question is going to give you more points.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: I've had students that can hack Kahoot and completely destroy the whole activity.
And I don't know, sometimes the students, they know how to sort of get into these systems.
But that, that just sabotaged the lesson completely. And I've had to abandon all, you know, my quizzes before.
It's really hard. And also just waiting for them all to register on Kahoot. It just takes about five minutes sometimes.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: A lot of people think that gamification is about technology and it's not. It's just about using the elements of gameplay that motivate students. And we can do that in a completely analog way.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah.
[00:23:01] Speaker C: And the point I think you were making which was that gamification for an individual is different when you're in a classroom and there's a competitive element, you know, so as an individual, you kind of like duolingo. You're kind of competing with yourself most of the time.
Put gamification into a class where it's visible how different people are performing.
You're sometimes sending a negative message to everybody except those at the top of the league.
Whatever the board is, unless you make.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: It a whole class mission.
If it's process gamification, where this term we are all trying to get into the castle or whatever it is by doing whatever we have to do collectively as a group, then it works. But that requires a whole different approach to course design, which is I think not typical of most teaching situations.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:52] Speaker C: Well, I think that's something to save up for the next episode, which is much more about culture and class community.
So I think we've explored his. Was there anything else you were about to say, Nick, to the.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: I'd say about the style of Communication online as well. It's very short phrases, a bit of code switching sometimes, or which is fine, but it's. If you wanted students to practice longer turn taking or academic styles of English or whatever, these are not part of the online world. And if you want students to practice even full sentences, you'd be hard pressed to get them to do that in a comment online. So I think it really is a question of not giving in always to this mode and using it when it's appropriate, but also explaining to students that, you know, we're here in a classroom, this is an opportunity, something different.
We're not going to practice those things you're doing day in, day out at home.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: We're going to give you a chance to write full sentences.
[00:24:44] Speaker D: And I think they appreciate that as well, don't they? Sometimes playing the more traditional board games or with dice or whatever. They enjoy that more because it is different.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: It's a break is. Yeah, they need a break from these online worlds.
[00:24:58] Speaker D: And I also think it's like, yeah, like using computers 20 years ago that we shouldn't just be using digital for the sake of using digital. There should be a real genuine reason behind it. If it's just for the sake of hey guys, let's use this cool app.
They're not going to think you're cool, you're the teacher, It's a losing battle.
So to really think through why and can we use an alternative because you will have accessibility issues and you will have slower readers and you may have colorblind students and they, whatever thing you're using has chosen to use different, you know. Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: So should never be the default option, should it? It should always be a real choice.
[00:25:47] Speaker D: Yeah. And I think particularly as some establishments are moving towards not having phones in the classroom and some teachers just can't use phones in the classroom anyway for certain reasons, or computers, then, you know, going the analog way is easier in the classroom and maybe digital stuff outside the classroom, perhaps, maybe depending on your context.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: So thank you very much. I think that was a really interesting discussion about that blending of the digital in classroom experience. Thank you.
