Metacognition and 21st Century Skills

Metacognition and Technology for Language Learning

9:00 – 10:30 Introductions and Overview
What are the 21st Century Skills?

A group of businesses has come together to improve education. Their mission statement is "To bring 21st Century Skills to every child in America by serving as a catalyst for change in teaching, learning, and assessment and as an advocate among education policy makers through a unique partnership among education, business, and government leaders."

The rationale for this innovation is "There is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces. To successfully face rigorous higher education coursework, career challenges and a globally competitive workforce, U.S. schools must align classroom environments with real world environments by infusing 21st century skills."

The area we are concerned with in this institute is defined as "Learning and Thinking Skills:"

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills
Communication Skills
Creativity and Innovation Skills
Collaboration Skills
Information and Media Literacy Skills
Contextual Learning Skills

1. Activity: How Techie Are You, Teach’?
Sit with a fellow participant. One will be A and the other will be B. Do the activity, then switch roles.
A. Choose a situation from the list below. Name the ways you would use technology to solve the problem. Try to think of as many options as you can.
B. Listen to A’s list and tally up the uses s/he has for technology to solve the problem chosen.

Problem	Solution(s)
You find out the night before that you are going to be late to a staff meeting. It begins at 8 am and you’re suffering from a terrible toothache and need to see your dentist first thing in the morning.
A student wants to show some video from their trip abroad with a presentation. The video is on a mini-dv tape.
You’re presenting at a teachers’ conference and when you arrive you find that the airline has lost your luggage, which contained your handouts for your presentation.
A student needs to have help in translating a word from a foreign language that you don’t know.
You want your students to use a set of particular websites for an assignment. You don’t want them to spend too much time searching for the sites online.
The principal of your school wants to know how well your students can speak their FL. She is too busy to visit your classroom in person.
You’ve left your wallet on a train. You have gotten off in a town where you are visiting a school. How do you get a ticket home?

2. Thinking about Thinking: A Model of Metacognition

3. Activity: What are your own strategies for communicating when using technology?

Discuss with a group or partner: When you find that you have to communicate with someone at a distance, what mode do you usually choose? How about communication with someone whom you know has a disability such as loss of sight or hearing? What do you do if someone is in a situation such as a class or a meeting?

10:30 – 10:45 Morning Break
10:45
4. Web 2.0 – Applications that allow 2-way communication online

Tim O'Reilly explains the distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 as the difference between publication and participation. He points to Netscape as the epitome of Web 1.0 because it allowed users to publish web pages. Google is the epitome of Web 2.0 because it connects users to the infinitely expanding set of data that we know as the Internet.

5. Activity: Techno-Think aloud

Choose one of these tasks. Sit at the computer with a partner and think aloud as you solve the technical problem. How to think aloud: tell everything you are thinking; what steps you begin with and why, how you react to meeting a problem, and how you feel at the end of the task.

Locate a song in the target language you teach. Save it for use in your class.
Find an online newspaper in your TL.
Find a radio station in your TL
Find a TV Station in your TL
Type in another character set
Make the computer talk to you

(see instructions for Thinking Aloud in handout)

6. Enhancing learning about culture through technology
Guest Speaker: Christine Meloni, NCLRC's Culture Club

7. Attitudes and involvement with community: accessing electronic authentic materials
One example of authentic material that is local are the radio stations of heritage language communities. See Ethnic Community Radio: The Voice of Home in America by Renee Domogauer http://languagemuseum.org/languageinsociety.html What other resources have you found for the community of your target language speakers?

Afternoon Session
1:00
8. Narratives for teaching Metacognition (Sachiko & Mt. Kumo, Native American Folk Tale)

Form groups of 4 -5 according to grade level. Plan how to integrate a metacognition narrative into a lesson for typical content you teach.
9. Designing lessons for grade levels
2:00
10. Employing 21st Century Skills http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/ toward effective language learning
11. Hands-on Practice:
· Instant messaging in FLs
Why IM? A survey by the Pew trust states that "email is increasingly seen (by teenagers) as a tool for communicating with “adults” such as teachers, institutions like schools, and as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information to large groups. Meanwhile, IM is used for everyday conversations with multiple friends that range from casual to more serious and private exchanges."

Study of student use of IMs

Blogging

Blogging refers to the use of web logs, which are easily updated web pages that can contain multimedia content and can be automatically sent to readers/viewers. NCLRC has a Blogport with some tutorials. A good simple explanation on how to get started is here.

Podcasting

World language teachers have 3 options in using podcasting:

Using podcasts that others have created to provide authentic, motivating materials for your students.
Creating podcasts that are closely tied to the content of your course and sending them out into the ether for use by your students in class or in a mobile immersion environment.
Having your students create podcasts as a way to increase their listening and speaking opportunities, give them an authentic audience and motivate them toward greater engagement with the language.

Apple has made podcasting accessible to many schools, with partnerships to provide server space and software, and has some great online tutorials. You can watch videos on how to get started in podcasting (using Macs and Apple software, of course) here.

To record audio, you can use Audacity (Mac or Windows) You can use a built-in microphone on some computers, but using one with a headset usually works better. Save your file in .wav format or in .mp3 format. Another way to record on Mac is using Garage Band, which will save the file in a format native to iTunes.

Online Podcasting Community: Promoting Oral Proficiency with Odeo.com

Three language instructors, J. Ruth and L. Teixeira from East Stroudsburg University and S. Villa from The New School, showed how they use Odeo in their Spanish and Portuguese classes. http://odeo.com/ is a community-based podcasting service which allows everything created there to be shared via email. The presenters explained this process for using it:

The teacher posts a picture and some audio to accompany it. For example, a picture of four people would have the audio, "Describe estas personas." Another teacher might send students to a BBC news clip in Portuguese and ask particular questions.
Each student responds orally, recording and saving the audio that is sent to the teacher automatically. The instructors say this greatly increases the amount of time students are listening and speaking in the target language.

Podcasts as Instructional Tools: Taking Language Tasks Beyond the Classroom.

Two teachers, J. Torres and R. Araujo, from St. Lawrence University, in Canton, NY, told about a project in their advanced Spanish Conversation class.

First, they listened to examples of native-language podcasts; http://radio.planetachat.com/ and personal podcasts.
Next, they trained students in how to create podcasts, using Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net ( a free, cross-platform sound editor) or Garage Band (on Mac) or Loudblog: http://loudblog.de/, which sets up an iTunes-ready RSS feed.
The main aspect of the project required students to produce four 10 – 20 minute podcasts about topics that would be of interest to other students. The course website can be seen at: http://jennatorres.net/span346 where you can hear examples of the student podcasts.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication

RSS is like getting a newspaper subscription in cyberspace. It's a way to keep up to date on what's happening on a number of sites without navigating to them. You can look at RSS from two perspectives, as the content receiver (reader) or as the content provider (blogger or podaster). I'll give you a quick explanation for each perspective.

RSS For Content Receivers

You have to set up an RSS "aggregator" to handle the flow of content coming to your computer. Mac users an use NetNewWire (I have this on my laptop) while Windows users can go to Downloads.com FeedDemon for Windows

RSS For Content Creators

You can create an RSS feed manually but most prefer using software that creates an xml webpage for you. One site I used is FeedBurner, which allows you to create and easily update your RSS feed.

2:45-3:00 Afternoon Break
3:00
12. Hands-on Practice:
Online listening iTunes
Digital video YouTube
Games: Quia

13. Follow-up: Future directions for professional development
4:15
14. Institute Evaluation
4:30
15. Conclusion

Participant Comments:

I use this website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/news/ to teach Listening Comprehension to adult students in the Foreign Service Institute. This led me to other links with very valuable material that I would like to be able to use like the second address. (Languages and Travel search page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/langtravel/ )

I have just purchased an ipod microphone and am using it to record student work. In third grade they are introducing a "new student" and in 4th they wrote and performed lyrics to a song of their choice. That's about it. Our school would like more accountability in reporting progress. This is hard when your students are in K-2, unless you can do these types of recordings. Posting them on our website and other options are things I would like to learn about. Also, at Northeast I saw the clickers, and I am interested in incorporating them into the classroom as an assessment tool.

More technology tutorials, lesson plans, guides, etc:

Microsoft's Education section: http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.mspx
Tutorials are available for various applications: http://www.microsoft.com/education/tutorials.mspx
Purdue University's annotated list of online resources for ESL students: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/eslstudent.html
Creating a web activity for a foreign language class http://oncampus.richmond.edu/~rterry/Middlebury/webactivity.htm

Strengthen skills with PowerPoint: Demonstration in PowerPoint

More tips on how to use PowerPoint

Here's a web video on the colors in Spanish: http://cfbpodcast.cfbisd.edu:16080/blojsom_resources/meta/stacyc/Los%20colores.mp4

Apple has a nice set of lesson plans on Language Arts using technology: http://ali.apple.com/ali_sites/ali/ilifesearch.php?Subject=Language%20Arts

site search

contact me