How did the course, weekly readings and discussions contribute to your digital teacher identity?

Distance learning is an undeniable part of our lives from now on. Ever since covid 19 forced us to go online, people realized the convenience of it and started to think about the actual possible ways to use it. Before the forced transition, people thought it was not sufficient enough and it was distracting. But the significant part of the reason behind that appears to be the teachers who were not prepared and ready to go online. Course, weekly discussions and readings prepared us for that kind of future. Thanks to this class, I have educated myself about the fundamentals of online education, important things to keep an eye on during the online lecturing, the place of technology on our future career, flipped classroom concept, hybrid classroom concept, how to design an online lesson, and some important tools to use during online class.But the most important thing that class made me realize was the importance of keeping yourself up to date as a teacher. If everyone wold follow the innovations on education and technology ever since, the transition between conventional education and online education would not be that hard. Also thanks to our discussions, I have learnt how important it is to discuss with a colleague and a friend whom you value the opinions of. In those discussions while getting ready at the discussion, it was amazing the different points that we find about the same subject and nearly the exact same sources. Also the readings opened my eye about what is still there for me to find out about. I consider myself as a person who likes to research and investigate the most efficient way to do what I do. I believe in efficiency when it comes to achieve something. However, almost every weeks content blew me on another way and turned the wheels in my head. While making the researchs for the discussions, I was jumping from a subject to another. Also there is a saying in Turkish “mind is superior to mind”. As I said because I always think that minimum effort and maximum income brings the efficiency I was always thinking about implementing technology to my classes. I was thinking many ways to do it but since the infrastructure is not that good in Turkey I always thought it was impossible to achieve my goals. But this class opened my eye about educational technologies. As I said, mind is superior to mind. While I was researching for the weekly discussions, I found some really easy and efficient implementations of technology to the conventional education method that I would have never thought of on my own. This class opened my eyes on very different ways to grab the attention of the students in the class and I found many answers on how to make a conventional class more efficient.

 

How did you (if you did) connect these to your practicum experience? and/or How do you plan to connect these to your future teaching experiences?

 

Due to coronavirus, as my friends, my practicum was spent on online education. However I found the small chance of giving classes on a school. They assigned me a class with low interest on English to test myself. Because they had little interest, it was hard for me to begin with. At first, I thought of breaking their walls and force them to like English but that was obviously a bad plan. Due to their low interest in class, I thought why bother trying to force them to like English when I can make them hate learning English. I made some decisions which were not well received by the school but since our group leader assigned me and said give your best shot, administration didn’t mess with me. I tried to implement gamification on every possible way and told them if we could finish that days’ lessons early, we can do whatever we can. I changed my lesson plan and designed a hybrid class. I put every material of the semester to internet and in class we only played games like Kahoot. They hated learning English but at the end, they liked English. Because class happened to be only by males, and because they were all about sports and games, it was easy for me to turn everything into competition but as I said it was a small chance and after 2 weeks, it was the end. The great thing is that most of the students came to me in breaks to challenge me to ask harder questions on class because “they have studied to beat their friends”. Which was enough for me. It made me realize how unique situations I might be in and how every method had a place in teaching. Because I was a student with high ADHD and I was addicted to sports until university, I knew those students had low attention span and trying too hard to grab their attention would backfire. So whatever I do would not made them follow the book and they wouldn’t pay attention to class and that moment I realized how important it can be to use technology. With the hybrid education, I would go quicker through the subjects in class, they would come prepared, I didn’t need to spend too much time to teach them the subject and students with ADHD or no experience of studying after class can benefit from it. At my last lesson with those students, rather than spending nearly 120 minutes to grab their attention and fighthing to teach them 1 subject, I would go past 2 subjects in 80 minutes and they would have 40 minutes for themselves. Without this class and doctrines of it, I wouldn’t be able to use technology in that basic way. I just uploaded some files and bring some competition to the class and they happened to be more ambitious towards to class than they are to any class.  On my future classes, I will definitely use the actual function of internet to help students understand the content. I learnt that I don’t need to fight and spend my whole effort in class to make them learn something. Without thinking too much, uploading every weeks content and giving them a small assignment afterwards will keep them more ambitious in the class and in theory, they will be able to come to class more prepared. I learnt how to make online formative assessment and plan online lessons. If they have a problem, it is easier and more efficient to prepare a video of myself touching to the key points that I understood in class they didn’t understand or have problems with and upload it to internet so my students can go over the class again and again.

Open and Distance Learning

 

Weekly Discussions Of Weeks Three to Six

For 4 weeks, we have discussed some topics about open and distance learning. The topics were named as, “Distance Language Teaching with Technology”, “Importance of Presence in Online Education”, “Online Learner Engagement” and “Flipped Classrooms”, respectively. These discussions had a different importance on us because of the global pandemic, the world was basically forced to switch on online education. With that, discussing these topics felt up to date and improving.

The topics turned out to be interestingly catchy because with the current Covid-19 pandemic which has been going on for more than a year, it turns out that the world was not ready for it. For example when we were examining first weeks topic, “Distance Language Teaching with Technology”, we found many disadvantages about it such as, there are many problems in communication between teacher and the students. Or because they are not seeing each other in a physical room, there are too many feedback absences. Those problems combined have many negative effects on teacher student bonding and student motivation. It wasn’t only students who have lost motivation, teachers also got effected from lack of feedback and their motivation is decreased too. For example, some of our teacher from university mentioned it couple of times that not seeing us and not getting immediate feedbacks have decreased their motivation.

On the other hand, when we were discussing about all those negativities, we found many positive sides of online education too. For example, on the conventional way of language teaching and learning, the best way to improve your language was to go abroad and talk to natives which is something pricy to do. But with online education programs, you can speak with a native without actually travelling and not spending money. Also online education did reduce the stage fright in general.  We also realized the importance of the presence too. In our discussions, we found out that socializing and actually feeling the presence of a class is really important to a person that have been educated with conventional teaching methods. It is especially hard for people who are middle aged and even though they were born into the rise of technology, they tend to be not as competent as young adults in technology. That was because they felt the real presence in their education life but online education applications are not able to fulfill our need of presence. Because when you look at a screen and judge the person as the screen, you realize that you are too isolated to bond with anyone.

As a teacher candidate and students who have been spending their life chatting and being influenced on social media, we had problems with learner engagement. On the fifth weeks discussion, we examined this ironic situation and how to overcome the problems about online learner engagement. It is hard to keep the engagement on online education because basically most of the students are attending the class from their own pc which they were always using to play games or watch something or idle about. We thought that it might be due to the fact that those machines that we were attending the class were shortening our attention span because attending the class and sitting in front of them while taking notes and sitting still was not what they were bought for. As a student who is suffering from severe ADHD and as a person who have been playing games on computer since 2002, I do suffer from that too. Most of the time the class doesn’t catch my attention and even sometimes I found myself zoned out. So we did our research and found out that the best way to catch students’ attention and never let it go was to have as many interactive activities as possible. It turns out that especially young students are needy for responsibility. Because they have little to no responsibility at their home and only responsibility of them is to pass the exams and do homework, they are feeling the lack of responsibility in their life. So having interactive classroom environment increases their attention span and interestingly, if those interactions are happening via games, their attention span increases even more and it even can pass the attention span of conventional classrooms. But still, at the end, we decided that even though computers and smartphones are getting the job done, to increase the feel of being in a classroom, there should be some improvements about technological devices that are dedicated to online education.

We also discussed flipped classroom concept. While we were researching, we understood that flipped classroom concept is basically taking the responsibility of learning from the teacher and giving it to the student. The aim with that is to instill the idea of responsibility and cooperating the students and getting rid of the time waste while teaching in class. Also, as a side effect it becomes adjustable for different kind of students. Most of the people are complaining from the conventional evaluation and teaching methods because every person is different. One can learn in 5 minutes while one can learn in 30 seconds. It is a big problem for teachers too. If the teacher adjusts himself / herself for the student who is learning in 5 minutes, the one that learns in 30 seconds will get bored and eventually lose the attention. However, if the teacher adjusts himself / herself towards the student who is learning in 30 seconds, this time the student who is learning in 5 minutes will lose his / her self confidence and will never learn anything from the lesson. So, giving students the chance to manage the time separation between subjects as individual is quite a game changer. However, while I was mesmerized by the idea of adjusting the speed of the instructor and how much it would help me when I was in middle school and high school, my pair, Ceren tried to wake me up from the dream. Unlike me, she wasn’t suffering from ADHD and for her it was easy to study at home and listen the teacher in class. She mentioned the negative parts about that system such as, “What happens if a student doesn’t get prepared?” or “how will you solve economical problems of every student?”. At that week, we had the first disagreement and agreed on disagreement.

To conclude, me and Ceren both improved ourselves on the online education context with those content specific researches that we made. With the progress on ourselves, we think that these discussions had major effects on us. With these discussions, I realized for myself that even though how much I track the agenda, I was still behind of many things. Ironically, I realized that I was even behind of online education which I am a part of as both a student and a teacher. These discussions taught me that I should never be so sure about what I know and never stop my professional development. And those researches taught me that even after the pandemic, online education will never get out of our life. I’ve shared this experience in my blog too.

 

 

References

Chapelle, C. A., & Sauro, S. (2019). The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning. John Wiley & Sons.

Hiver, P., Al-Hoorie, A. H., & Mercer, S. (2020). Student engagement in the language classroom. Multilingual Matters.

Lehman, R. M., & Conceição, S. C. (2010). Creating a sense of presence in online teaching: How to “Be there” for distance learners. John Wiley & Sons.

A systematic review of research on flipped language classrooms: Theoretical foundations, learning activities, tools, research topics and findings. (2020, November 13). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2020.1839502

(n.d.). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hLOUlbAgs0