On occasion, I've been blocked from sending Powerpoint presentations via email because they've been too large (file size) for either my email system or the recipient's email system to accommodate. I've had to chop them up into smaller pieces. I've just experimented with a free website that allows anyone to easily upload a file as large as 100MB for a specified period of time and receive a URL that can be distributed/emailed to others so that they can visit the site and download the file within the specified period of time (1 to 90 days). Files so uploaded can also be password protected. To check it out, click on the link below to download a 2.9 MB file of a book that I uploaded. The password is "test" and the file will be there for 15 days from today!
http://wikisend.com/download/470158/MerchantsOfDeception.pdf
To try uploading something, click on the "upload" tab at the screen you reached when you clicked on the above link.
This could also come in handy when you're at a conference and just realized you left your flash drive/cdrom/computer/handout with all of your presentation files back in the hotel or in your office or in my case at the most recent CATESOL, brought along the working files of some video presentations and not the final correctly formatted versions. If you upload anything related to the conference to the wikisend website before you go and email all of the URLs to yourself, you'll be able to retrieve them from any computer at the conference.
Finally, instead of passing out multi-page paper handouts (expensive to produce and heavy to carry through airports), you could pass out a one page version at the session that includes the URL and direct participants to download the full version when they return to their school sites.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
You can always learn something new!
This past Friday, Paul Yung, a colleague in the Division of Adult and Career Education of LAUSD, co-presented with me in one of the monthly Technology Colloquium workshops that I organize and present. He presented techniques for using do-it-yourself multimedia for the first hour and I completed the session with simple ways to get your students to start using the Internet as part of the ESL curriculum. I'm pleased to report that the session went well and the participants were pleased by both presentations. The purpose of this post, however, is more to reflect on the fact that sometimes it takes the enthusiasm of another individual for a process or technique that causes you to re-evaluate your own processes and decide to try something new.
Basically, Paul's main point was that the Internet can provide easy access to a huge resource of images and since using images has always been a large component of language instruction, ESL teachers can access images on the Internet and easily integrate them into very simple PowerPoint presentations that can then be used as grammar or language practice in the classroom if the classroom is equipped with a projection system (LCD or TV) that enables the entire class to view the presentation. He compared it to the "old days" when he used to hold up pictures in front of the classroom that he had collected from magazines.
Paul's second point was that an ESL teacher can easily enliven or provide additional practice to the typical conversation practice found in typical textbooks. You know the type. A basic conversation is presented and the students, working in pairs, are supposed to replace various items or vocabulary words with alternate items or words. For example, the first student would say something like "I need to buy a book." The second student would ask "How much is the book?" there would be a response "It's $14.50" and finally a comment like "That's not too expensive!" Following the conversation there would be a picture of a "car" and a price tag "$24,500" and the comment "That's expensive!" The students are supposed to practice the first conversation, then replace all of the appropriate vocabulary with the "new" vocabulary. Paul's idea is to create PowerPoint slides containing all of the new information in image and text format. One one slide, he would insert an image of the new object, the price tag, and the final comment. As he goes through the slides, the students generate the new conversations using the image and text as cues.
Now all of this might not necessarily be a new idea (I used to use clipart in the same way) but his enthusiasm for the process and the demonstration about how easy it is to prepare the slides "on the fly" made me resolve to try it out at the first opportunity. That opportunity turned out to be the very next day when the unit I was teaching to my new Beginning High class turned out to be descriptions of people. The standard conversation was in the unit with the typical suggested replacement text. I instructed the students to practice the conversations in partners per typical practice. But this time, while they were working, I used Google image search to find online images with the key vocabulary featured in the unit (tall, short, heavy, slim etc.) and created a simple PowerPoint in the 10 or 15 minutes the students were practicing. When I felt that they had practiced on their own for a sufficient time, I turned their attention to the new presentation and went through the slides as a group. It was a tremendous success! I was able to find an assortment of images with enough contrasts that the students were able to practice most if not all of the adjectives or expressions introduced in the chapter, enthusiasm and participation were high, and it was clear that viewing and describing images of real people provided a realistic context for further practice. Best of all, I can continue to work on the presentation to add even more images and I'll be able to use it again at a click of a button.
Finally, the process is simple enough that students could do it on their own as a project demonstrating what they've learned. Click here to see the presentation! (it's the link labeled PowerPoint Slides in the section labeled Simple Ways to Start Using Web-Based Instruction
Basically, Paul's main point was that the Internet can provide easy access to a huge resource of images and since using images has always been a large component of language instruction, ESL teachers can access images on the Internet and easily integrate them into very simple PowerPoint presentations that can then be used as grammar or language practice in the classroom if the classroom is equipped with a projection system (LCD or TV) that enables the entire class to view the presentation. He compared it to the "old days" when he used to hold up pictures in front of the classroom that he had collected from magazines.
Paul's second point was that an ESL teacher can easily enliven or provide additional practice to the typical conversation practice found in typical textbooks. You know the type. A basic conversation is presented and the students, working in pairs, are supposed to replace various items or vocabulary words with alternate items or words. For example, the first student would say something like "I need to buy a book." The second student would ask "How much is the book?" there would be a response "It's $14.50" and finally a comment like "That's not too expensive!" Following the conversation there would be a picture of a "car" and a price tag "$24,500" and the comment "That's expensive!" The students are supposed to practice the first conversation, then replace all of the appropriate vocabulary with the "new" vocabulary. Paul's idea is to create PowerPoint slides containing all of the new information in image and text format. One one slide, he would insert an image of the new object, the price tag, and the final comment. As he goes through the slides, the students generate the new conversations using the image and text as cues.
Now all of this might not necessarily be a new idea (I used to use clipart in the same way) but his enthusiasm for the process and the demonstration about how easy it is to prepare the slides "on the fly" made me resolve to try it out at the first opportunity. That opportunity turned out to be the very next day when the unit I was teaching to my new Beginning High class turned out to be descriptions of people. The standard conversation was in the unit with the typical suggested replacement text. I instructed the students to practice the conversations in partners per typical practice. But this time, while they were working, I used Google image search to find online images with the key vocabulary featured in the unit (tall, short, heavy, slim etc.) and created a simple PowerPoint in the 10 or 15 minutes the students were practicing. When I felt that they had practiced on their own for a sufficient time, I turned their attention to the new presentation and went through the slides as a group. It was a tremendous success! I was able to find an assortment of images with enough contrasts that the students were able to practice most if not all of the adjectives or expressions introduced in the chapter, enthusiasm and participation were high, and it was clear that viewing and describing images of real people provided a realistic context for further practice. Best of all, I can continue to work on the presentation to add even more images and I'll be able to use it again at a click of a button.
Finally, the process is simple enough that students could do it on their own as a project demonstrating what they've learned. Click here to see the presentation! (it's the link labeled PowerPoint Slides in the section labeled Simple Ways to Start Using Web-Based Instruction
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