CRAAP: An acronym to guide web research

The CRAAP Test for assessing appropriacy of web resources popped up on my radar in a Pinterest suggestion of a graphic:

The CRAAP Test

gleaned from the Daytona State College Library:

• https://library.daytonastate.edu/reliable/CRAAP,

which in turn apparently adapted content from a library guidance page at California State University, Chico:

• http://libguides.csuchico.edu/LiteratureReviews?p=2822716.

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The Beaufait Collaboratoire: A Google Site

A Google Site that I'm using to reconstitute bits and pieces of new and previous online endeavours, the Beaufait Collaboratoire, grew new pages and subpages today.

Home page snapshot, 2019.07.12

Most notable was a new Educators' Corner, now a ProDev subpage. Other additions included a couple of Google Forms for surveys of EnglishCentral (EC) users that I have embedded in EC subpages. I'd linked to the forms previously from the Tech. Tools page to replace old wiki resources.

Please feel free to browse the Collaboratoire, and let me know in comments on this post if you have any questions or discover any incipient web rot (faulty links).

As I continue to build and update that site, I'm seeking a communication interface to include there. Something like the threaded comment functionality of Blogger blogs might be ideal. In the meantime, I welcome your suggestions in comments here.

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A Visual Summary: 32 Learning Theories Every Teacher Should Know

In his post, A Visual Summary: 32 Learning Theories Every Teacher Should Know, Terry Heck displayed a detailed graphic by Richard Millwood.

In that post, Heck asserted that "there are dozens of theories that underpin what and how you teach already, and that the better you understand them, the better chance you’ll have to master your current approach and begin to bring new possibilities into your classroom..." (¶4).


Heck then posted brief additional explanations of the concepts in Millwood's graphic. 

The graphic itself is available ... [as a PDF]: 

• http://blog.richardmillwood.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Learning-Theory.pdf (PDF)

and in a hypertextual concept map with loads of links to additional resources here:

• https://cmapspublic3.ihmc.us/rid=1LNV3H2J9-HWSVMQ-13LH/ (Cmap).

A follow-up comment by Millwood (2019.06.18) on his one of his own posts that introduced the map (2013.05.10) suggested that he was preparing a new version.

References

• Heck, T. (2019, January 12). A Visual Summary: 32 Learning Theories Every Teacher Should Know [weblog post]. Retrieved from https://www.teachthought.com/learning/a-visual-summary-the-most-important-learning-theories/
• Millwood, R. (2019, June 18). Learning Theory [comment on 2013, May 10 weblog post]. Retrieved from https://blog.richardmillwood.net/2013/05/10/learning-theory/#comment-54999 

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Revisiting communicative competencies (YouTube recording)

This hour-long recording by Dr. Kate Reynolds of Central Washington University's College of Education and Professional Studies[, Chairperson of the Department of Education, Development, Teaching and Learning,] came out about a year ago. It was from a TESOL Teacher Education Interest Section (TEIS) webinar on evolving theories and potential applications of a communicative competence framework for language teaching.

Frames and Reframing:

Recent Discussions on Communicative Competencies 

In that webinar, Dr. Reynolds surveyed "recent developments on the model of communicative competencies and [began to] facilitate an interactive conversation on how teacher educators can use this information" (Abstract, 2018.06.26). Though the webinar chat is invisible in the recording, live discussion opened about 33 minutes in. Dr. Reynolds read and summarized chat entries aloud. She then reflected on contributions and issues that arose, and asked clarification and follow-up questions.

At the end of the webinar, Dr. Reynolds highlighted one of over a dozen selected references for further reading. She also offered to share her PowerPoint slides, and expressed desire to continue discussion in audience-initiated TEIS discussion list posts. That's a TESOL members-only venue, so I (Paul) would be happy to see comments from PIGATE reviewers here [on this post].

Reference

• Reynolds, K. M. (2018, June 26). Frames and reframing: Recent discussions on communicative competencies [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1aRTjnwAY

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Linguistic paranoia – why is Australia so afraid of languages?

For most other countries speaking more than one language is the norm.

Misty Adoniou, University of Canberra

Image from www.shutterstock.com.au

About 20% of the Australian population speaks a language other than English. In fact, around 250 languages are spoken in homes around the country. This would seem to be cause for celebration. After all, successive governments have spent millions trying to increase the numbers of students studying languages in schools. However there is little connection between the languages taught in schools, and the languages spoken in homes.

Foreign language learning in schools

In 2001 the Howard Liberal government set a target of 25% of Year 12 students studying a foreign language. The same target was set by the incoming Rudd Labor government in 2007. In 2014, the new Abbott Liberal government upped the ante to 40% of Year 12 students studying a foreign or classical language within the decade. This was ambitious given that the previous targets of 25% had never been reached.

Barely 10% of Year 12 students study a language. Yet 20% of the population speaks a language other than English in the home. How does that add up? The answer is governments pay little heed to the languages spoken in Australian homes; they prefer “foreign and classical” languages to “local and community” ones.

Not all languages are equal

There is a clear hierarchy of languages in Australia. English is at the top. Next are the “classical” languages like French and German, particularly when learned at school. These are followed by languages deemed useful for Australia’s economic prosperity - e.g. Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese - but only if they are being learned as “foreign” languages. Because that is quite clever, learning a foreign language.

But if they are languages already spoken in the home, they slip down the hierarchy of languages, into the community languages pile along with about 245 other languages. Somewhere towards the bottom of that community languages pile are the Indigenous languages of Australia, about which most Australians know nothing.

The chances of those 245 community languages surviving in Australia are remote. Australia is remarkably adept at wiping out languages. Of the 250 Indigenous languages in existence at the time of British colonisation, only around 20 remain viable today. The languages immigrants bring with them are usually dead within two generations.

It seems remarkably odd policy to pour millions of dollars into setting consistently unachievable targets for learning foreign languages at school, while simultaneously watching community languages slide into oblivion.

Is it just linguistic snobbery?

We always seem more impressed by a native English speaker who has managed to learn another language at school than we are by those who learn their languages at home.

Everyone was quite impressed by ex Prime Minister Rudd’s proficiency in Mandarin, but I expect Senator Dio Wang’s Mandarin runs rings around Mr Rudd’s. I’m guessing Belgian born Finance Minister Mathias Cormann speaks German, Flemish, and perhaps also French. I suppose Senator Nick Xenophon speaks Greek, but perhaps he doesn’t. Maybe his Greek language heritage has been lost, which would be ironic as his surname means “foreign voice”. Does Deputy Opposition leader Tanya Plibersek speak Slovenian? Does the Malaysian born Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong speak Malay and Mandarin or Cantonese or Hakka?

I don’t know. I’ve never heard any of them speak another language, or be reported admirably in the press for their linguistic prowess. They don’t note their bilingualism in their biographies on their websites. Perhaps they’ve lost their heritage languages - or perhaps it’s just not “Australian” to say you speak another language in your home or to your mum and dad. Either scenario is a sad indictment.

It seems, in Australia, if you learned your second language at school or at university - that’s clever and admirable. If your bilingualism comes from your heritage, we’d prefer to ignore it.

Multicultural but monolingual

Australia is generally happy to be multicultural, as long as that just involves some tasty food, and a bit of dance and music at an annual festival. We are definitely not comfortable with being multilingual. We are a country where you are free to speak another language, but preferably in the privacy of your own home or on an overseas holiday. It seems we like our foreign languages to stay that way - foreign.

Australia is currently in a social and political space where “unity” has overtaken “diversity” as the preferred political discourse. A country that speaks multiple languages in its everyday life seems somehow harder to manage. After all, who knows what they’re saying? A community that speaks foreign languages to foreign people in foreign lands is much more secure.

It is odd we should be so determined to keep our multilingualism in the closet. For most other countries speaking more than one language is the norm. With so many economic, cognitive, social and political advantages to multilingualism it seems simultaneously extraordinarily wasteful and absurdly paranoid to not celebrate and nurture the languages spoken in homes all around the country.

Misty Adoniou, Senior Lecturer in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Yippee: A free continuing ed. cert. from edWeb.net!

You, too, can get a certificate like this from edWeb by watching and listening to the webinar recording: Error Correction: Tips and Techniques for Language Teachers.

Screenshot of PDF at ceu.edwebpd.net
(https://goo.gl/K19W66)

EdWeb is a free professional learning network. Its Browse and Search edWebinars pages listed 1564 webinars today (2019.03.06 [JST]) in, just a guess, hundreds of communities. 

Screenshot of Select Community menu

Please check it out, and leave comments on this post to let us know what you think.

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The Common Sense Media website: Goodies for parents and educators

Last Saturday, at a monthly gathering (2019.01.12), I mentioned a blog post I'd read recently:

• 5 Ways to Block Porn on Your Kid's Devices
• Topics: Cellphone Parenting, Healthy Media Habits, Internet Basics, Screen Time, Sex in the Media

In that post, one of the main points that Caroline Knorr (2019), Common Sense Media's parenting editor, made was that technological interventions work best in conjunction with ongoing conversations with young learners.

That post is just one of the Must Read items displayed in the For Parents section of the Common Sense Media website, which you can personalize to suit your family or the ages of students you teach.

There also is a For Educators section of the website that is worth exploring for additional age-appropriate recommendations and resources as well.

References

• Common Sense Media. (2019, January 14). Common Sense MediaⓇ. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/
• Knorr, Caroline. (2019, January 7). 5 Ways to Block Porn on Your Kid's Devices [weblog post]. Retrieved from: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/5-ways-to-block-porn-on-your-kids-devices

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A brilliant talk about TED talks

In this eight-minute talk, Anderson ... clearly [and concisely] spilled the beans about public speaking.

Reference

• Anderson, Chris. (2016, March). TED's secret to great public speaking [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_teds_secret_to_great_public_speaking 

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Humanizing screen time

Photo by Jabiz Raisdana, 2013.07.18, 
Some rights reserved (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In a recent post on The Principal of Change blog, George Couros highlighted recommendations for children's screen time (AAP, 2018.05.01), and posed three questions to frame thinking about ways to use technology both at home and at school:

When we look at how we are using technology, we have to ask:

1. Is the way we are using technology building connections or severing them?
2. Is this fostering deep learning as well as critical thought and creation, or promoting surface level thinking?
3. Are we modeling our learning, balance, and human connection through our use of technology so we can effectively guide our students?

(Using Technology to Humanize, 2018.11.20)

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Coming soon: Self-determination theory—for young learners and the young at heart!

Creating and implementing interactive tasks based on self-determination theory—for young learners and the young at heart!

By David Ockert, Toyo University

David Ockert’s teaching interests are in critical thinking, reading comprehension, and academic writing. He does research on the influence of technology on affective variables (motivation, confidence, anxiety, and willingness to communicate). 

David also enjoys creative lesson planning for communicative purposes, using a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach via the three pillars of self-determination theory [SDT]: competence (mastery), relatedness, and autonomy. 

For this presentation, David will focus on self-determination theory-based EFL motives interconnected with competence, relatedness, and autonomy. He will show how all three can be incorporated easily into any level of pedagogy, with a focus on the junior high school level in Japan.

[UPDATE, 2018.09.10: This presentation will be a participatory event with very little lecture. David will lead participants through hands-on tasks, with evaluation of each afterwards, to provide a real-world experience of how and why SDT-based lessons work.]

Date & time

Saturday, September 15, 2018; 13:30–16:30

Venue

Seminar room 10, Faculty of Administrative Studies office wing, Prefectural University of Kumamoto (PUK): Please see PIGATE Meeting Locations (https://goo.gl/h5DgbP) for details.

Attendance plans

Hoping or planning to attend? Please let us know by filling out an attendance form: 

• https://goo.gl/i4GvyN (select: 2018, September). 

If you'd also like to attend an informal networking event afterwards (tentatively 18:30–20:30), please ... add, "Post-function: Yes!" (without quotation marks) along with your email address as Additional info. at the end of the form [2018.09.13: ... ask Paul in person on Saturday whether a seat is still available].

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Does seat-time matter?

Kaichi School, Matsumoto, JP, photographed May 31, 2013,
by Paul Beaufait. All rights reserved.

How much time do students spend in school?

"There is no consistent pattern ... among top-performing education systems. / This suggests that when it comes to student performance, more important than the amount of time students spend in class is how that time is spent" (Craw, 2018 [emphasis in original]).

• Craw, J. (2018 February 22). Statistic of the month: How much time do students spend in school? http://ncee.org/2018/02/statistic-of-the-month-how-much-time-do-students-spend-in-school/

ASCD Express 9.02 - The Why, What, and When of Assessment

ASCD Express 9.02 - The Why, What, and When of Assessment (Tomlinson & Moon, 2013b)

That newsletter article caught my eye this morning in a list of website bookmarks after discussion at an English Café gathering yesterday, in which participants ... considered ... [among other topics]: 

• Assessment practices in elementary school English-as-an-additional language learning activities slated to become mandatory coursework in the next few years (GU, n.d), and 
• Roles of assistant or partner classroom teachers in occasional or routine team-teaching. 

The article is an adaptation of Tomlinson and Moon (2013a, pp. 19-21), in which the authors described assessment of, for, and as elements of differentiated instruction. Tomlinson and Moon argued for assessments to identify differences in: 

• Individual learners' readiness to learn, 
• Their individual interests or passions, and 
• The learning modalities that individuals prefer (2013b, What to Assess, ¶1).

Tomlinson and Moon also outlined various types of assessment to use before, during, and after instructional units, namely: 

• Pre-instructional assessments,
• Formative or ongoing assessments, and
• Summative assessments (2013b, When to Assess, ¶1).

The article concluded with examples of, and purposes for, combinations of formal and informal assessments. Regarding informal assessments in particular, Tomlinson and Moon asserted:

Informal assessments are useful in giving a teacher a sense of what makes a student tick, providing a big-picture look at how the class as a whole seems to be faring at a given moment, and amassing a growing sense of how specific students work in particular contexts (2013b, When to Assess, ¶2).

The first few examples of informal assessments that Tomlinson and Moon mentioned in their article resonated with remarks that the English Café convener made yesterday with regard to what a team teacher could do when not directly involved in instructional activities.

References

General Union [GU]. (n.d.). MEXT's 2018/2020 "New Course Of Study In Foreign Language Education" Plan. [Retrieved 27 March 2018 from] https://goo.gl/sBjXpo

Tomlinson, C. A., & Moon, T. R. (2013a). Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Tomlinson, C. A., & Moon, T. R. (2013b). The why, what, and when of assessment. Assessment and Differentiation, 9(2). http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol9/902-tomlinson.aspx

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Clicky Wishes You a Happy Safer Internet Day 2018

A couple days late, but still worth sharing!

Source: https://youtu.be/4hTapDlrP5g (ConnectSafely.org, 2018.02.02)

New presentation resources on the LTD Project Wiki

Here are two of three of today's additions to LTD Project Wiki, SpeakingPresenting page:

Prezi. (2017.07.05). Harvard researchers: Prezi is more engaging, persuasive, and effective than PowerPoint [weblog post]. Retrieved January 17, 2018, from https://blog.prezi.com/university-study/

• This weblog post summarised Harvard researchers ... findings (Moulton, Türkay, & Kosslyn, 2017; above).

Prezi. (2018 [n.d.]). The science of effective presentations [webpage]. Retrieved January 17, 2018, from https://prezi.com/the-science/

• This infographic-style web page represented Prezi-related findings summarised in Harvard researchers ... (Prezi, 2017.07.05; above).

The third addition was the research paper by Moulton, Türkay, & Kosslyn (2017).

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TESOL Electronic Village Online workshop for teachers of young learners

This post is to point out a free, five-week long, online workshop for teachers of young learners—one of many such offerings in TESOL International's Electronic Village Online (EVO) program for 2018.

Teaching EFL to Young Learners
Participants of Teaching EFL to Young Learners TEFL2YL EVO18 will learn about and create activities for English to Young Learners and Teens from around the world using storytelling, board games, action songs, and limited resource classroom activities. ...

Registration starts on [Jan 8, and the _program_ starts] Jan 14, 2018. 

Source: http://evo2018proposals.pbworks.com/w/page/119830158/TEFL2YL, 2017.12.21

If you have a yen for online networking and distance learning, and will have a bit of time to spare between mid-January and February next year, I highly recommend looking into this and other upcoming EVO workshops. 

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#higopigate Twitter hashtag extensions

This quickpost displays a Google spreadsheet of Twitter hashtags.

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Teachers' resource book in the KGU library

One of the last times we met in the KGU library, the title on the spine of a book (Shin & Crandall, 2014) caught my eye. So I pulled it out to take a peek. It's in the syllabus corner on the first floor: 

KGU OPAC catalog listing (English)
KGU OPAC catalog listing (Japanese)

Here's a preview of the table of contents:

• Preface
• About the Authors
• Chapter 1: Teaching English to Young learners around the World: An Introduction
• Chapter 2: Basic Principles of Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL)
• Chapter 3: Contextualizing Instruction: Creating Thematic Units and Lesson Plans
• Chapter 4: Teaching Listening and Speaking
• Chapter 5: Teaching Reading and Writing
• Chapter 6: Storytelling
• Chapter 7: Assessment
• Chapter 8: Classroom Management
• Chapter 9: Twenty-First-Century Skills in Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL)
• Chapter 10: Professional Development
• Worksheets
• Index

(Source: National Geographic Learning, English Language Teaching, 

Product Information, More, Table of Contents, 

retrieved 2017.11.01)

Would you like to have a go at reviewing it for a future newsletter? If so, please send us a heads-up either in a comment on this post or in a message to our Google Group.

Reference

Shin, J. K, & Crandall, J. (2014). Teaching Young Learners English: From Theory to Practice. Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning.

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Webinar recordings and related resources

Here's a window into a Google spreadsheet in which there's an in-progress list of teacher development websites with webinar recordings and related resources:

If you have recommendations for additions, please mention them the next time we meet, or point them out in comments on this post.

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Teachers rock–everyday!

Image source: https://pixabay.com/p-1449488/ (CC0)

"Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher." — Japanese proverb

Quotation source: [U.S.] National Educational Association, 

Quotes about Teaching (2017.05.09)

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The PIGATE Diigo Group: A social bookmarking venue

The screenshot below shows three websites I've earmarked recently for PIGATE by tagging them and sharing them in Diigo, a social bookmarking service. The list on the ... [right] side shows the top ten tags in use since May 2015.

For example, a few days before Mr. Kobori's presentation on September 9th, 2017, I discovered a homepage offering a free, open source typeface designed to help "make reading easier for [people with] some symptoms of dyslexia" (https://opendyslexic.org/faq/, ¶1).

The PIGATE Diigo Group, 2017.09.18
Source: https://goo.gl/XfudJW

Though the PIGATE Diigo Group currently is private, anyone can find and use bookmarked website links in an RSS feed on the PIGATE Blog sidebar (Diigo Bookmarks: Group PIGATE's best content).

PIGATE members are more than welcome to join. I'd love to see what websites other little piggies recommend for each other.

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