You can see all the lessons we built on the Indian workshop page, including our second Panjabi lesson and this great podcast lesson on asking permission, which was written from scratch by two teachers who were completely new to Wikiotics. It was a great two days and I am excited to continue working with the whole group as they build Wikiotics into their classes going forward.

Group of teachers from the Last Language Textbook workshop held at the NIIT offices in New Delhi

I want to thank NIIT’s Yuva Jyoti centers for hosting the workshop and our sponsors Gandi.net and the Linux Fund, whose continued support makes this LLT campaign possible. I am particularly grateful to have met all the Yuva Jyoti teachers, who came from half a continent away for the workshop. It was great to meet everyone and I learned a lot about the different challenges and opportunities of teaching in many of India’s regions.

We are looking to run the third LLT workshop over winter break or early in the spring semester. If you are interested in participating in this next workshop, or your school or organization might be interested in hosting that workshop, please send me a note at: contact@wikiotics.org.

During a few short hours we designed and created 4 new lessons, brainstormed topics for 11 more, and, while we were at it, recorded audio for all of our Spanish lessons. You can see the results of our work on the workshop’s wiki page.

End of the day at the Wikiotics Workshop

There was so much enthusiasm during the workshop that we have decided to expand it into a series.

I am excited to announce that we already have the next workshop lined up for later this month. Our next workshop will be in New Deli, India where I will be working with teachers from the Yuva Jyoti educaiton centers and the Hole in the wall computer project.

Thanks to the support of our sponsors at the Linux Fund and Gandi.net, we are able to start planning the third workshop in this series, back in New York during winter recess. If you want to participate or your school may want to host that workshop, just write to contact@wikiotics.org.

Many thanks to our great participants, to our hosts at Adelphi university, to our sponsors who made this workshop possible, and to the rest of the community for your great ideas and support. See you this winter!

Last week we looked at the Picture Choice lesson format, which combines text, audio, and pictures into a type of interactive flash card format. This week the focus is all audio with our Podcast lesson format. A Podcast lesson is what we call any lesson made up entirely of audio.

These can be short dialogues, traditional "repeat after me" courses, or any combination of purely audio elements you can imagine. It is a simple, flexible format that students can easily download to listen to offline on any kind of mp3 player or phone that plays music. Because these lessons are all built on Wikiotics, they have ease of customization and collaboration, and re-use built in. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples and you can see how this built in flexibility makes the Podcast lesson.

FSI

Back in the 1970′s and 80′s the US State Department wrote a series of audio language courses for their staff about to leave the country to work at an embassy. Because these are works of the US Federal government, they are part of the public domain and a number of different people have worked to pull those materials together and make them available. We processed some of these for Wikiotics from the Mandarin Chinese and the French language series.

Because these were uploaded in bulk most of the individual elements have not yet been transcribed but this lesson is a great example of the finished product. If you need some examples of how to build a professional series of Podcast lessons, listening to a few of these will give you a feel for the format.

The introductory Mandarin lesson, like most of the FSI materials, focuses on a short dialogue, breaking it up into small pieces for the listening student and explaining each one as it appears. Any time a new phrase is introduced, it is repeated twice before being defined or explained, and as the lesson progresses previous elements of the dialogue are repeated until every part has been covered and then repeated in context. The format is relatively standardized and straightforward. Thanks to the internet, the way you build these lessons doesn’t have to be.

Flexible authoring

FSI lessons were built in a professional recording studio by a group of professional teachers and native speaker voice actors working closely together. On Wikiotics, you can accomplish the same task much more easily. Take a look at this introductory English lesson designed for French speakers. The format is very similar to the FSI but this lesson was built by two people working independently on separate continents. I wrote the original version (available here) but I don’t speak any French so I left the parts of the lesson designed to translate and explain the English for French speakers in English. You can see an example of what this looks like with this lesson. Then another user came along and translated the relevant parts into French and later this week we will get two different users to record the audio bits necessary to complete the lesson.

The ability to work in groups separated by time, distance, and that may not even know each other makes it much easier to produce professional podcasts by sharing the work and resources required. It also makes lessons much more flexible. Because Wikiotics lessons are broken down into individual sentences or other small bits of audio rather than as one large audio file, it is easy to customize and re-use whatever bits you want.

If you want to make that introductory English lesson for Spanish rather than French speakers, you can simply make a new copy of the version that is all in English and translate the explanation bits into Spanish. If you want to learn Mandarin only hearing tenor voices or voices of one particular gender, you can copy the FSI lesson and replace just the few bits of native audio. At the October workshop we will be preparing lessons with multiple different voice options so the Kids on Computers children can choose what voices they want to model when learning English.

To read more about the potential of this flexible authoring, take a look at this piece from last year when we debuted the Podcast format.

Next week

Next week we will take a look at the third of four lesson types supported on Wikiotics: the Phrase Choice lesson.

Review Lessons

Review lessons are basically just decks of multimedia flash cards. You can use almost anything you want to review and the elements are put together in any order. Some examples of this include this adjective lesson and this one on irregular plurals. Each row in these lessons has a sentence to be studied and a picture that clearly illustrates the sentence. Those sentences are roughly arranged in the lesson by topic but the order is not very important for the lesson to be effective at review. However, these lessons are unlikely to be effective for new students who will have a hard time picking up all the different things to learn without a guiding structure or a clearer focus.

Teaching Lessons

I call lessons that are designed to lead students through new material “teaching lessons”. These lessons have a clear focus and present new material in a structured way designed to let students build their understanding gradually. Our intro lesson is a short example of this. In the first group, lines 1-4, the basic vocabulary is introduced with simple sentences. The next group builds on that simple vocabulary to introduce slightly more advanced terms. Having learned the terms for “Man” and “Woman” in the first group you are then asked to pick out the pictures “The man is sitting” and “The woman is sitting,” reinforcing the earlier vocabulary while introducing the term “sitting” and its use. In each of the four groups, new material is built on top of the old little by little. This approach is designed to enable students to identify new material contextually, without an explanation or formal introduction from the teacher.

The Structured Approach

For a better look at how the structure of a lesson helps students identify new material, we turn to the Colors and Vehicles lesson. This lesson teaches both color and vehicle vocabulary without ever increasing the complexity of the sentences used. In the first group of pictures, all the vocabulary is introduced at once with four pictures presenting vehicles of different colors. This first group looks much like a review lesson but from here the structure starts to guide things. In Groups 2-5 (lines 5-20), the sentences continue to use both vehicle and color vocabulary with phrases like “This is a green boat” but each group of four focuses on only one type of vehicle so that the only changing element that students have to base their picture choice on are the color words. Then in the rest of the lesson students are asked to choose between groups that always include two items with the same color or of the same vehicle type. This tests their mastery of both sets of vocabulary and provides some diversity of choices and visually appealing pictures.

This kind of lesson structure makes for a very engaging picture choice lesson and a solid foundation for additional, more complex material. Best of all, because this is a wiki, if you have an idea on how to build on this lesson material, you can copy the lesson and make your own version. I built a version that introduces the “and” conjunction after the first two thirds of the lesson. Try making your own version of the original lesson by clicking it here: Colors and Vehicles (copy) and entering a new page name in the title box. Or you can copy my version from here: Colors and Vehicles – Ian (copy).

Later in the week we will take a look at Podcast lesson format and keep building up to this October’s NYC workshop on October 13th.

Choose a topic

The first step in building a lesson is choosing a topic. Since language covers anything you can express, there are an almost limitless number of potential topics. Honestly it is a bit daunting so we have created a simple curriculum of introductory English topic here on our Last Language Textbook campaign pages (Level 1-Stage 1, Level 1-Stage 2, Level 1-Stage3, Level 2-Stage 1, Level 2-Stage 2, Level 2-Stage 3). If you need some help picking a topic, take a look at those pages for inspiration, or feel free to just use one directly and help out while you build.

Lesson Context

While building a language lesson it is easy to get caught up in what you are building, all the little bits of planning and searching for the right material that will make your lesson effective for students. However, to build a truly effective lesson it is important to remember all the other elements that surround your lesson. One way to do this is by writing a short introduction for your lesson that says who your lesson is written for, what things you assume those students will already know, and what new material you plan to use in your lesson. We call this your lesson’s “context” and writing it out early on is a useful way to focus your lesson building by making sure you’ve considered the basic design decisions and have an idea of who your audience is.

For example, my lesson is an introduction to counting. I am writing for students in their first month or two of English study. I assume students have a small English vocabulary, limited to some basic nouns like man, woman, cat, dog, etc and have some experience with plural nouns. In order to keep my lesson useful to many different students I am going to keep the new vocabulary I introduce limited to common household items, mostly dishes and utensils. Because basic counting is a very simple topic I am also going to use colors to vary the material for my lesson. This will help keep the material more visually interesting, which is very important for keeping students engaged with picture choice lessons.

If I wanted to write for a formal school environment I might consider using something other than household items. For a school setting I could use common school items like writing instruments, books, desks, etc, whereas if I were writing a lesson for adults traveling to the United States I might use US currency or the kind of food and beverages ordered while traveling.

You don’t have to actually write down your lesson context, though that can be very helpful to look back at while you are in the middle of building your lesson, just take a moment and see if you can answer these three questions about your lesson as you begin building it:

1) Who are your students? (Old, young, formal students, or self-directed?)
2) What should they know when starting you lesson? (Vocabulary, other language knowledge, etc)
3) What are you going to introduce in your lesson? (Vocabulary or other language knowledge you will use to illustrate your topic)

Lesson building: step by step

Every lesson on Wikiotics is built with these three steps:

Here I’m going to cheat by pointing you to our detailed “Creating a lesson” page, which goes into more detail on each of these steps.

Next week we will go over an example of all this as I build a new picture choice lesson and point out some great ones already on the site.

This week I’ll introduce you to the foundation of lesson building on Wikiotics. Today we will look at each of the four lesson types and what their various strengths are. Then tomorrow we will go over how to physically create a lesson and some general lesson building considerations that are useful with any type of lesson.

Over each of the next four weeks I will devote a blog post to one of the four lesson types until we have covered them all and are ready to get together and eat some dim sum.

The Lesson Types

Picture Choice

In a picture choice lesson students must choose one picture from a group of four based on a text and audio prompt. The other three pictures in each group are the answers for other questions in the group so that eventually the students will identify every picture used in the lesson. Because every element in the lesson ends up being the correct answer at some point it can be useful to think of the material in a Picture Choice lesson as a deck of flash cards.

As a lesson designer your role is to arrange these flash cards in a way that shows students what each one means as they move through the lesson. Students must correctly answer each question in a group of four before proceeding to the next group. Within each group of four questions are presented to students in a random order and pictures are randomly ordered in the group.

What are they good for?

Picture Choice lessons are particularly useful for building vocabulary and explaining easily picture-able relationships like number, size, location, relative position, color and other physical adjectives, etc.

Podcast

Podcast lessons are pure audio lessons that students can either stream online or download for use offline or on mobile devices with expensive data connections. Podcast lessons come in many forms, from lectures, to explanations for bits of practice audio, traditional “repeat after me” drill tapes, or any other audio-only lesson format you can imagine.

A note on editing podcasts

Non-Wikiotics podcast lessons available online are generally produced as a single audio recording. This makes them difficult and time consuming to edit.

Our podcasts are composed form a series of short audio snippets that we combine into a single recording for playback. That means that means that lessons can be edited on the site like all our lessons, enabling easy collaboration, reuse of materials, and personalization.

What are they good for?

Podcast lessons are particularly good for teaching how to interact conversationally in a new language and for learning how to discuss concepts that are hard to visually illustrate.

Phrase choice

In a phrase choice lesson students must choose a text answer from a group of four based on a text prompt. Much like a Picture Choice, the other three answer choices are actually the correct answers to other questions in the group so students will eventually use all answers in the lesson. Students must correctly answer each question in a group of four before proceeding to the next group. Within each group of four questions are presented to students in a random order and individual phrases are randomly arranged in the group of possible answers on the page.

What are they good for?

Phrase Choice lessons are particularly useful for issues related to word order, punctuation, and words that have similar written or spoken forms. Because this lesson type does not use pictures or audio illustrations for the phrases it is the most drill-like of the lesson types and also one of the fastest lessons to create.

Storybook

Storybook lessons have a picture in the center of the screen with a text and audio element underneath it. Each row in your lesson creates one of these “pages” and students move back and forth through them as if they were navigating a book.

What are they good for?

Storybook lessons are particularly good at illustrating concepts that involve movement, a sequence of events, complex mental concepts like emotions, cause and effect, etc. Storybook lessons work very well in conjunction with other lesson types that can reinforce and clarify material presented in a storybook, for example a Phrase Choice lesson might ask students which character in a story book caused a certain event described in the story.

During the workshop we will expand and customize existing lessons, adding our voices, pictures, and experience with English to help some great kids begin their studies. Native English or Spanish speakers, photographers, language teachers, students, and general open education supporters welcome. Lunch of vegetarian dim sum will be provided to participants and the cameras and microphones we use during the day will be given out by lottery at the end of the workshop.

Saturday October 13th
10:00am-4:00pm
Adelphi Manhattan campus
75 Varick Street, Second Floor, New York, NY
RSVP to contact@wikiotics.org so we can coordinate food ordering.

Update September 25, 2012
In addition to the camera and microphones mentioned above we have also secured one of the new 7″ Google tablets for use during the workshop and for one lucky participants to take home after a day of lesson building.

As the name indicates, the course is part of our Last Language Textbook campaign and will focus on building materials from the curriculum guide for that project. The course starts today and will run for ten weeks, covering how to develop a basic language lesson, how to use the Wikiotics system to build each of the four lesson types we support (picture choice, podcast, multiple choice, and storybook), and how to get additional help from the community.

Enrollment is open and you are all welcome to check out the course materials and sing up here: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/build-the-last-language-textbook/

The Last Language Textbook is a campaign to build a completely free collection of language lessons that can serve as a textbook replacement, available on the web, for anyone learning introductory English. We are building this material collaboratively using our existing picture choice, podcast, and multiple choice lesson types, along with a new “story book” one and traditional text wiki pages.

Unlike traditional textbooks, our materials are open and designed to grow and change with the community. Open materials can benefit from the expertise of the millions of language teachers and billions of language students in the world, growing into better resources for the community one correction or personalization at a time.

With your help we can build the Last Language Textbook into an instruction tool so flexible and accessible that it makes all non-open English textbooks obsolete. There are many ways to get involved, regardless of your skill level or experience with teaching. You can:

• Write example sentences for use in lessons,
• Transcribe or record existing sentences, or
• Organize and explain these source materials into a new language lesson.

If you know English well enough to read this blog post, you have something to contribute. The new participate page has more details about the different ways to lend a hand, even if you only have two minutes.

At the end of the summer, we will host a summit for all participating organizations. If your organization would like to partner with us in this campaign, write to: contact@thelastlanguagetextbook.org.

Please, take a minute to join us and follow our progress.