Session 11—MOST Environments

This approach seems like remedial education (Am I right about the name? Not sure about how you call it :P) since its target is at-risk students; however, as a language teacher, I strongly agree that using images to introduce a new vocabulary and concept to learners is an effective way of teaching! It’s a shame that I used to be a “basic-first” teacher in my early teaching years. I didn’t know how to teach Pinyin (the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin) or Chinese vocabulary in other ways except directly telling them the meaning in English. And I deeply believed that only when students and I got through the boring basic learning process could they enjoy the following interesting parts of learning (contextual learning). However, late is better than never! (What else can I say…☹) I’m glad that I know that I could use technology to help me make learning interesting/meaningful from the very beginning of the language learning process.

In addition, I like the “retelling” idea of this approach. In language teaching, ask students to retell a story or explain a words meaning is very important because the retelling shows clearly that if a students understand the text. Capturing the silent scenes to record students’ own narrations to the stories not only makes retelling process fun, but also introduces tools (technology) to help students’ learn. For retelling, I think VoiceThread and Viddler are very good and easy Web tool for students to record their voice of retelling the story directly on the website.

Besides introducing a whole new course content, I also think MOST can be used for reviewing or assessing students’ understanding of the target language. Teachers can use analogous clips that similar to the subject discussed earlier in the unit and ask them to retell the story to see how much they understand about the subject. While learning the content knowledge, students also have many opportunities to practice their speaking skills in the target language, which I think is extremely beneficial to language learners.

For me, I think the barrier is the difficulty to create multiple analogous videos. Creating stories is always not easy to me, let alone make it a video. But I think like Dr. Oliver mentioned in the lecture of this week, we could use still images or some other broadly defined clips to make this process a little bit easier.

Session 10—Star Legacy

I like this approach very much! It is very similar to Anchored Instruction that we have discussed last week, but more organized and easier to understand for both teachers and students. Besides, I also think it is similar to Guided design that students follow the steps created by teachers to complete challenges. For me, I think this approach is the most feasible one so far in Context-based Instruction & Multimedia section because of its layout’s clarity and its flexibility. I like its flexibility a lot because it is coincide with my belief that instruction must be adjusted to meet students’ needs and learning styles. If the learning software or system is unchangeable once after being created, it can’t be an effective teaching material. Using this approach, teachers can change/add any element they wish to meet the needs of a group of students. In addition, I LOVE the idea that ask students’ initial thoughts first and reflect back later to see how much they learned. Students really have seldom chance to see how much they learned, so they seldom appreciate school education. This step allows students actually see their growth in a subject by reading their own notes, I believe they’ll have very strong impression on the knowledge they just learned and retain it for long.

Although Star Legacy keeps mentioning the importance of flexibility, the step-by-step cycle is easily misunderstood as a rigid format to follow. That is also the reason why I think it is similar to Guided Design. Therefore, I think it is very important for teachers to remind their students that you can always revise/switch the steps when you find it’s better for your own research process. Besides, like other approaches in this section, the biggest barrier is the huge workload that added to a teacher. Teachers must have a clear vision of the cycle(s) and prepare the transcripts for the necessary videos/audios as well as resources. Nonetheless, probably because I always need clear and explicit information about the theories, I don’t feel as overwhelmed or panic toward this approach as previous two approaches. I believe that when having enough time to prepare all the essential information, I can definitely apply it to my future class.

I think there are lots of website can be used for presenting this module, like Moodle, Wiki, and creating web pages. I even think that using online environment is better than the original software format since students’ comments or thoughts can be saved immediately online so that both teacher and students can easily track students’ progress.

Session 9—Anchored Instruction

While reading the articles of this week, I got headache because this approach is very similar to many previous approaches but different in some ways. I usually think through how to apply an approach while reading, however, I had a hard time this week because I couldn’t help come up with ideas that seemed not belong to this one approach. (I know in the real life I don’t have to try to fit in just one approach, but I’m trying to come up with ideas for our next project.)

I like the way that Anchored Instruction creates an authentic environment for instruction, in which question and information for solving the question are all embedded in a story. This makes learning not only more fun and engaging to students, but also very similar to the real world. Students can benefit largely by learning the subject and high-level thinking skills at the same time. Besides, this approach makes learning much more meaningful to me. In my past learning experiences, there were many subjects that I had asked thousand times that “Why do we need to learn this?” But I didn’t get the answers. So I assumed I learned it to get good grades on the standardized exams. I had no passion and desire to know more about the subjects, and undoubtedly, I threw away all I learned of those subjects soon after the exams. Though I admit that I found the meaning of learning some subjects afterwards (sometimes long after graduation), I still don’t think that’s a good thing since the learning process was painful. I think it is teacher’s responsibility to design a curriculum that is related to students’ lives and make the knowledge non-inert.

Just like GBS, Anchored Instruction has so many things to prepare for a teacher. And it is more challenging for students as well since the materials are not presented in order; learners need to find the question and answers mainly by themselves. Therefore, how to assist them but still need to allow them to struggle seems difficult to me. But I think it is worth trying, so I hope I can come up with more ideas to create a lesson based on this approach in my future class.

I think that like GBS, the elements of Anchored Instruction can be presented by multimedia that embedded in many existing websites, such as embed a video for story or a page of text for story. It’s hard to design software by a teacher, but I think we don’t have to; we can try to use what we have to reach the same goals of this approach.

Session 8—Goal-Based Scenarios

When I first read this approach, I was overwhelmed. The examples on papers look like well-designed software that was sold for teachers, I really doubt that I can do the same product as they did. Besides, those systems in the papers seem to have many experts work in one scenario, how can I have others to work for my classroom? However, after thinking over and over again to search for the possibility in my classroom, I came up with an idea that is co-teaching with other teachers probably in my own school, that way, we can all provide our expertise in the same subject but different subtopics in the task. Also, it will make the designing process of this approach easier when having other teachers involved.

I really like the idea of learning by doing, I agree with that students will retain more skills and be more motivated by this approach than traditional lecture way. I like its flexibility to be used for individual learners as well as group learners. And it combines lots of approaches that we’ve learned so far, for instance, when the mission is completed by one student, its self-paced learning characteristic reminds me of PSI; when it’s completed by a group, it is similar to situated learning and PBL, which makes the mission more plausible to me. But exactly because it’s more complicated just like the real life situation, there are so many things need to be planed and lots of information need to be provided by teacher. It can be intimidating for a teacher to do all these for one course plus other schoolwork. So as I mentioned earlier, I think working within a group of teacher can solve this problem, and teachers can learn from each other as well! Also, after seeing the “Moving Day” example of Dr. Oliver’s former student, I think all these can be designed in a simpler way on a teacher-made website. Although the website still needs lots of planning, but I think it at least looks not so intimidating as the software in the readings.

I haven’t come up a concrete plan for this approach but I would keep thinking to make it feasible to my future classroom. I think that many existing websites can be used for this approach for multimedia access such as videos and hyperlinks, etc. I believe that this will be a great learning experience for students as well as teachers.