Our class presentations took place yesterday and were really stimulating and exciting to listen to. The range of CALL artefacts demonstrated was vast and the visual aspect of some of them was extremely impressive.
It was interesting to see how students adapted other frameworks or chose not to use any as this was of central importance to my own design process. The merit of each artefact was very convincing and I would love to see them in their fully embedded state. The different ways in which my classmates evaluated their artefacts was noteworthy and reiterated the importance of focusing on this in my assignment. The overall professionalism and creativity was wonderful and was a very positive way to finish off a highly useful and well structured module.
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My steely resolve not to resort to gamifying a video with which I was already familiar dissipated and I resorted to making a video that I already used in my module interactive. However, it would transpire that this was the least of my worries as once I started the process of using H5P, I encountered an onslaught of obstacles.
It is however a plugin and needs to be hosted on the existing publishing platforms of either Drupal, Moodle or Wordpress. However, all three platforms require an external server, either Wordpress, Drupal or Moodle. The institution to which I am affiliated uses Moodle as its VLE but does not have H5P installed and was not in a position to install it on the main Moodle site in the middle of the academic year due to security and stability concerns. I was made aware that extensive testing and a long run in period are required before any such modifications are implemented. At this point, I explored other authoring software, a time consuming and ultimately fruitless venture as Hap Yak, albeit very suitable to my needs, comes at the costly price of 500 dollars a month. Videopath and Wirewax, both freeware, lacked the interactivity and ability to add text to the video that I required. I was eventually able to obtain a sub-domain on an existing server and install Wordpress. However, videos must not exceed 16 MBs on the server and the video I had chosen to gamify was 32 MB. This was not stated on the H5P site which would have been very useful as I thought that there was an error with the file itself and much time was wasted trying to find alternative versions of the file. The issue was however easily resolved using the freeware Miro to reduce the file size. Rendering the video interactive was relatively straightforward and was the quickest obstacle to overcome in the end. I am delighted with the response to my “Needs Analysis” survey as 36 current First Year students studying French took the time to answer. It has given me a real focus as it has given legitimacy to my digital artefact and has confirmed students’ interest in gamification and the value of videos as a pedagogical tool. My only regret is that I didn’t follow the correct order of things and carried it out earlier but it took me a few weeks to formulate my idea and also to think of a way I could contact students when I am not teaching this year. Hearing the student voice makes me sit up and listen!
Two people responded to my query for a video suggestion on the French teachers’ forum which is a little bit disappointing. One respondent suggested a really good website that shares short French video content, created for teaching purposes and categorised in accordance with content level of difficulty and phonological focus. Unfortunately, the interviewees are all French-Canadian and their accents are extremely difficult to understand so I will not be able to use it for the purpose of my project. The other respondent directed me to a French video bank that I am already familiar with so that did not produce any new leads unfortunately. I may refer back to my own personal favourites. I am still awaiting a video suggestion from the list to which I posted last week but am hopeful that something really interesting will be shared with me. In the interim, I will also contact some friends living in France who regularly use Facebook to share videos. The content of what they share is usually highly political, given the forthcoming divisive presidential elections in France, or too inane, but who knows.
My additional task to work on this week has been the creation of a simple form of needs analysis. I “discovered” or rather “rediscovered” this sound pedagogical practice in a first semester module on curriculum planning much to my shame as it is one of the basic tenets of how to practically assess your learners’ needs and subsequently design the curriculum around these needs as the basis of the module’s learning outcomes. I am determined not to slip back into my old ways of not being sufficiently learner centered so have devised a very basic survey that I will send to the current cohort of first year students that are taking the module that I previously coordinated. This short survey took more time than I had planned as my CALL lecturer made some very useful suggestions as to how best elicit information from students without overly pushing an agenda and I had to revise my initial survey considerably. I will post it next week as it is Reading Week in the university where I work and it is hard enough to get students to respond to surveys during term time, nevermind “off-season”. I hope that the fact that I have never taught these students will enable them to give honest answers to the questions posed. After having grappled with the challenges of coming up with an idea of a digital artefact and teasing out some of the technological scaffolding it would require, my foremost task this week was to find a video that I could use and modify for my artefact. As I have not been teaching since February 2016, I have not been keeping up to date with new video resources pertaining to current affairs or student interests. When I was teaching, colleagues and I would regularly share resources amongst each other or I was in the practice of looking at weekly updated Second Language French teaching resources. I am subscribed to a website Francofil where teachers of French post calls for information, practical help or share job offers. I will go out on a limb and post my query and see if anybody answers me. Given the complexity of the previous stages of the artefact creation process, I am surprised that this has been such a big stumbling block but it once again reiterates the importance of keeping pedagogical concerns to the forefront.
I was unable to attend this week's lecture but found the specific focus on the learner beneficial at this stage in the module and design process as I had become so fixated on the technological aspect of the artefact that I had nearly lost sight of the learner in the whole process.
As I know for whom exactly I am designing this artefact, this allows me to focus on what I believe to be the learners' needs but then I had the important "revelation" of carrying out student needs analysis rather than second guessing what I deem their needs to be. I am in the lucky position of being able to ask colleagues to help reach out to students who are currently taking the module for whom I am designing the artefact so I shall see how best to go about this. I discovered the area of game-based learning this week in class. As luck would have it, the Teaching Enhancement Unit in my place of work organised a webinar on Gamification two weeks ago which I watched after this week as I was unable to attend. It was most useful as this was a hitherto unknown area of language teaching design for me and the facilitator gave some practical examples of ways it could be implemented in the online learning environment of the institution where I work.
He made the important distinction between gaming, game-based learning and gamification, the latter being most relevant and most feasible to my own pedagogical needs and design capabilities. That said, it was really interesting to see what our lecturer has designed in relation to Irish language teaching and the different levels of design, ranging from high-spec to more doable. The resounding take-away piece of information I retained from this week's lecture and the webinar was the importance of finding the crucial "hook", a means of incentivising students to spend time on task. I must keep this in mind when designing my artefact. This week's lecture was directly related to my idea for my CALL artefact, looking at some way of improving students' pronunciation, but I found it so far removed from my own capabilities in terms of my own technical capabilities that it was quite daunting.
That said, it was a wake-up call to just how developed and technically advanced iCALL is and also the importance of the aesthetics and overall package that is a necessary part of designing a CALL artefact. The field of Natural Language Processing was fascinating as it comprises how computers can understand and generate language. Artificial Speech Recognition systems in particular grabbed my attention as it would be wonderful if I could add some rudimentary form of this to my artefact. One of the last tasks we did in class pertained to discovering H5P and it was really exciting as this was exactly the type of software I could use to improve learners' pronunciation in an interactive way without having to produce low-quality videos myself (something I already tried). Finally I had my much awaited epiphany in this week’s class regarding my artefact. At the end of week three, I realised that I wanted to work on pronunciation but didn’t know what slant to take nor how to make it relevant to learners’ and teachers’ needs. I joined a group of classmates at the beginning of week four’s seminar who were similarly interested in the general area of speech production and having listened to their ideas, decided that I would like to work on the gamification of speech content whilst incorporating a speech recognition system. When I state that this was an epiphany, this is a misnomer as the content of our third week’s lecture was on our lecturer’s own research into different aspects of speech recognition systems and the Irish language as detailed in last week’s reflections. It really appealed to me and led me to think about how I could incorporate that technology in my own project.
This week’s lecture made our prescribed task for this module concrete and clear as our lecturer showed us examples of CALL artefacts she developed and evaluated, clearly contextualising them in the TATL framework that we reviewed last week. All three multimodal interactive platforms were very impressive and their individual aesthetic appeal highlighted the importance of effective instructional design. The degree of technological complexity was daunting but our lecturer reassured us that Digichaint and Fáilte go TCD platforms were the fruit of a close collaboration between programmers and language pedagogues.
Based on the Open University’s “7Cs of Learning Design”, we were encouraged to work on the conceptualisation of our artefact by choosing twelve cards that would define the key features of our creation. I must admit that I did not find this particularly useful as the key features seemed more like buzz words and they were all appealing to me. This is not a criticism of the task itself but is rather an indication of my floundering in trying to find an idea for my artefact and imagine that it helped hone the focus of my classmates who were clear about what they intend to work on. When we discussed in groups what we intended to create, I knew at last that I would like to work on some aspect of pronunciation but stalled beyond this. |
Fledgling WeeblerSome weekly musings to help piece together my digital artefact. Archives
April 2017
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