Tag Archives: language education

The Last Language Textbook – New Delhi workshop

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On October 25th and 26th I was in New Delhi running the second workshop in our Last Language Textbook workshop series. A dozen teachers from all over India and I spent two days exploring the capabilities of the Wikiotics tools and building lessons for their students.

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

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.

Building a lesson: Picture Choice

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This week we are going to build a picture choice lesson, which is an interactive lesson format that combines simple text, audio, and pictures. As mentioned last week, picture choice lessons are particularly good for building vocabulary and explaining easily picture-able relationships like number, size, location, relative position, color and other physical adjectives, etc. There are two basic ways to build a picture choice lesson: to review material or to lead students through new material. Lets see what each of these look like and when they are useful. I’m going to link to the edit view of all these lessons so you can see how they are put together. If you want to see what they are like as lessons, just remove the “?view=edit” part from the url.

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.

Building a lesson: The Foundation

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This second post in the “Building a lesson” series will give you some general tips for building online teaching materials along with Wikiotics-specific instructions to walk you through building lessons on wikiotics.org.

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:

  • Step 1: Go to the new lesson page and click on the type of lesson you want to create.
  • Step 2: Add text, audio, or pictures to your lesson.
  • Step 3: Save your lesson on the wiki.

    • 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.

    Building a lesson: The Lesson Types

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    On October 13th we will be running our first workshop, “Wikiotics and Dimsum”, where we will be working with a number of first time lesson builders. To help all of them, and all of you reading this who want to help but have never built a language lesson before, I am starting this series of “How To” blog posts giving you an in depth view of how to build each of the four Wikiotics lesson types: Picture Choice, Podcast, Phrase Choice, and Storybook.

    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.

    Lessons just for you

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    Last week we explored how to use collaboration inside the Wikiotics community to build better lessons for each other and we saw how this can produce great results for material like weather vocabulary. But what about the parts of language that are more complicated? What about concepts like “beautiful”, “fun”, “boring”, and “interesting”? We each have different ideas about what these concepts look like and we are unlikely to be able to come to a consensus opinion.

    Different worldviews welcome

    This week we are shifting the focus from consensus to individuality and asking everyone to build personal lessons based on some shared vocabulary. We want to see your take on some common concepts, your viewpoint. Don’t worry about making lessons for someone else, build a lesson as practice material for your self and at the end of the week we will take a look at the different versions people have built for themselves and see how useful moving away from consensus can be.

    How To Participate:
    1) Log in.
    2) Go to the lesson: http://alpha.wikiotics.org/en/Adjectives and click on "Copy" at the top.
    3) Enter "user:YourUserName/Adjectives" into the copy box and hit enter
    4) Click on "Edit" at the top and change the images using the "find new image" link next to each page. That will let you search on flickr for a better picture. If you are getting too many results, try clicking the "Restrict to project's Flickr group" box when you are searching.
    5) Save your new lesson and add a link on the Adjectives talk page.

    As always, thanks for being part of the community!

    A note on user pages

    If you want to know more about User Pages and how to use them, our User Page Instructions has what you are looking for.

    Crosposted with churchkey.org

    Pictures keep you honest

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    One week later I am proud to announce that our weather lesson is both more attractive and much more effective thanks to some great collaboration by our users.

    Weather lesson (after)

     

    ← Before

     

     

     

     

     

                 After →

     

     

    You can see that the new pictures are much easier to tell apart, especially the raining and snowing ones. In addition, the sun is now clearly visible in the “sunny” picture and there is no Eiffel tower in the “cloudy” picture to cause confusion about subject.

    Lessons of the collaboration

    It was great to collaborate with some other users on this lesson, try out our tools for working together on a single lesson, and all the other things this push was designed to accomplish, but the best part for me was seeing how the structure of the lesson helped to keep us honest and keep our work useful.

    The original weather lesson contained three types of vocabulary: words to talk about light (cloudy/sunny), words to talk about precipitation (raining/snowing), and words to talk about temperatures (hot/cold/cool/warm). As we all tried to find better pictures for the lesson, it became clear that this last group, the temperature words, was giving everyone trouble.

    The problem was simple, we fell into the native speaker trap of trying to combine too many concepts in a single lesson. Temperature is much more easily illustrated as a property of things, like foods or beverages, rather than by pointing a camera outside and trying to capture the essence of “cold”. When we tried that, we all came up with different representations, some were animals in the sun, some were people outside surrounded by fall foliage.

    Instead of depending on these personal cues, we broke temperature out into a separate “Temperature lesson” and combined all of the best weather pictures into a Best of Weather lesson. The result is much more grounded and easy to incorporate into other lessons through shared vocabulary.

    Temperature lesson

    Teaching what they need to know

    It is all too easy when trying to teach someone material that you know very well, like your native language, to gloss over the complexity underneath and forget just how much information there is to share. Breaking that material apart and illustrating it are great ways to keep your lessons useful to those who are coming at them with fresh eyes. If you are interested in trying such a system, give wikiotics a try.

    Special thanks to jchan, Qalthos, stevensne, colannino, and trose, for building their own versions of the lesson and making the collaboration possible.

    Crossposted with churchkey.org

    In the News

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    The collaboration with RIT's FOSS@RIT campaign I blogged about last week is now the subject of a press relase from the school here.

    Currently we're at the top of the University homepage!

    Welcome to all the RIT students who have found Wikiotics through that release.

    Crossposted with churchkey.org.

    Wikiotics week 2: Talking about the Weather

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    Last week

    Great job last week everyone! We got the Introduction lesson translated into 14 new languages and made five more languages available for Wikiotics users building lessons. This week we’re focusing all that effort on one lesson, talking about the weather: http://wikiotics.org/en/Weather

    This week

    Talking about the weather is a daily activity in people’s lives, but many of the concepts are difficult to represent in pictures. "Cold" vs "Cool" or "Cloudy" vs "Overcast" for example. The pictures we have right now could use some help, and that’s where you come in. Please take a moment to help us clear up the weather lesson by finding better pictures.

    How To Participate:

      1) Log in (we’re going to use some special abilities of logged in users to make collaboration easier).

      2) Go to the lesson and click on "Copy" at the top.

      3) Enter "user:YourUserName/Weather" into the copy box and hit enter

      4) Click on "Edit" at the top and change any of the images you want to replace using the "find new image" link next to each page. That will let you search on flickr for a better picture. (If you are getting too many results, try clicking the "Restrict to project's Flickr group" box when you are searching.)

      5) Save your new lesson and add a link on the Weather talk page.

      As always, thanks for being part of the community!

    A note on user pages

      Think of user pages as a wiki section just for you.  No one else can edit pages in your section so you can build or collect lessons there and know that they will always stay as you left them. Now that you know how, feel free to copy any other lessons on your user pages and tinker with them, or build your own material to share with students and colleagues.

    Crossposted with churchkey.org

    Students of Free Software

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    Thanks to the FOSS@RIT program, Wikiotics is proud to welcome two new developers to the project, Taylor Rose and Nate Case . Both are students at the Rochester Institute of Technology and veterans of the FOSS@RIT program.

    FOSS@RIT houses an innovative introductory class “Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development” designed to give students real experience with free software all the way from the principles of copyleft through the communication and development tools used to build systems like Wikiotics in a global community.

    You may have seen some of their projects before, like the video chat client for the deaf that landed on BoingBoing back in June. Once students complete the class they are eligible for independent studies, campus jobs, co-ops and Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships. The goal is to partner with interesting mentoring organizations where their development talents can help solve real world problems, which is where we come in.

    Regular Drumbeat users may recognize Taylor from our comments page. In fact our Drumbeat project launch is what brought Wikiotics to the attention of Taylor, Nate, and the folks behind FOSS@RIT, spurring this collaboration into existence.

    As our team of developers continues to grow, we will continue expanding and stretching what is possible for the Wikiotics community. The weeks ahead are going to have more activity pushes like this week’s Translation push so it is a great time for any interested developers to come on board and see how everything fits together

    Crossposted with churchkey.org

    Time to Translate!

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    After a productive summer of software building, we would like to
    introduce the first version of the Wikiotics community site. In order to
    test everything out and introduce the site’s new capabilities, we’re
    asking everyone to help out and translate our Introductory lesson into as many languages as possible.

    If you know how to write “This is a boy” in one or more languages, we need your help.

    This will be the first of four week-long pushes that will culminate with a lesson building session at the Drumbeat festival in Barcelona. Each push will focus on a simple task that should only take a few minutes of your time and we’ll be blogging about the whole effort each week. As always, your participation is what makes this project work, so come over to the site and take a look.

    How to Translate

    Translating a lesson is done with three easy steps.

    First, load the lesson you want to translate.

    Second, copy the lesson into the right area of the wiki for its new language. To do this, hit the “copy” botton at the top of the page and enter in a new name for the lesson, starting with the language code for the new language and a “:”. So, if you are translating the Introduction lesson into Hungarian, you would enter “hu:Bevezetése” for the new name, which is the Hungarian for “Introduction”. If you are translating it into Portuguese, you would enter “pt:Introdução”.

    Third, hit the “edit” button on your new lesson and replace the English sentences with versions appropriate for your language.

    Now you have a brand new language lesson that you can share with anyone! Congratulations and thanks for helping improve Wikiotics. When you are done, please add a link to your lesson here so we can all appreciate it: http://wikiotics.org/en/Take_a_lesson

    The Languages

    Currently the system has areas for 25 languages and we have the introduction lesson translated into five of them:

    (ar) Arabic http://wikiotics.org/ar/مقدمة
    (af) Afrikaans http://wikiotics.org/af/Intruction
    (bs) Bosnian http://wikiotics.org/bs/introdukcija
    (ca) Catalan http://wikiotics.org/ca/Introducció
    (cs) Czech
    (da) Danish
    (de) German http://wikiotics.org/de/Einführung
    (en) English http://wikiotics.org/en/Introduction
    (eo) Esperanto
    (es) Spanish http://wikiotics.org/es/Introductoria
    (fi) Finnish http://wikiotics.org/fi/esittely
    (fr) French http://wikiotics.org/fr/Introduction
    (he) Hebrew http://wikiotics.org/he/הקדמה
    (hi) Hindi
    (hu) Hungarian
    (id) Indonesian
    (is) Icelandic
    (it) Italian http://wikiotics.org/it/Introduzione
    (ja) Japanese http://wikiotics.org/ja/緒論
    (ko) Korean http://wikiotics.org/ko/소개
    (nl) Dutch http://wikiotics.org/nl/introductie
    (no) Norwegian
    (pl) Polish
    (pt) Portuguese http://wikiotics.org/pt/Introdução
    (ro) Romanian
    (ru) Russian http://wikiotics.org/ru/Введение
    (sk) Slovak http://wikiotics.org/sk/Úvod
    (sv) Swedish http://wikiotics.org/sv/Inledning
    (tr) Turkish
    (uk) Ukrainian
    (zh) Chinese http://wikiotics.org/zh/简介

    If someone has already done the translation you were planning to do, you
    can skip right over to the final step and edit the existing page to
    improve the lesson quality.

    Let’s see how many more of these we can create by the end of the
    week. Just let us know if you would like to translate into any
    additional languages and we will add them to the system.

    Sincerely,

    The Wikiotics Team

    Update #1 (12:01 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

    We’ve got Portuguese and half of the Japanese translation done
    already. This is great work everyone! I’m going to keep updating here
    and adding links to new lessons as we get them so check back. And don’t
    forget to add a link to your new lesson to http://alpha.wikiotics.org/en/Take_a_lesson when you’re done translating!

    Update #2 (14:23 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

    Thanks to Soassae from #learnanylanguage on freenode, we now have an
    Italian version of the lesson. We have also added Hindi as a possible
    language on the site so we’re up to 8/26 now. For anyone who is curious
    about how we selected the initial languages to support, we based it on Wikipedia size, but just ask if you want any other languages.

    Update #3 (16:18 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

    #learnanylanguage on freenode comes through agaimember psychicist doing a Dutch translation. That brings us up to 9/26, possibly with more languages supported tomorrow.

    Update #4 (17:27 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

    And by “tomorrow” I mean right now. We’ve added support for both
    Slovak and Bosnian since anonymous users made the translations without needing a place to put them. Those are both now in comfortable homes and while we were in there we added support for Hebrew so Arabic wouldn’t need to be the only right to left script in the collection. So that brings us to a total of 12 translations out of 29 languages that we have support for. Clearly we need to add more languages! Keep up the great work everyone.

    Update #5 (18:00 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

    Ask and you shall receive. Thanks to yosko from #learnanylanguage we now have a Hebrew translation. Much appreciated yosko. We’re now at 13 of 29 languages.

    Update #5 (10:43 Eastern Oct 13, 2010)

    The multi-talented yosko starts us off strong today with a new French
    translation as well as a native speaker’s take on the Spanish version.
    We have also added support for Icelandic to the system and will be
    adding Afrikaans later today.

    Updte #7 (13:54 Eastern Oct 13, 2010)

    Thanks to Manel from #learnanylanguage, we now have a Catalan
    translation of the introduction lesson, as well as the correct spelling
    of “Catalan” in this blog post! Thanks Manel. That brings us up to 15/30
    languages.

    Update #8 (15:40 Oct 13, 2010)

    …And then there was Arabic! I also forgot to mention in the last
    update that we’ve added Afrkcaans as a supported language, which is how we got to 30 possible languages. With the Arabic translation, we’re now back up past the half-way point with 16/30.

    Update #9 (10:46 Eastern Oct 14, 2010)

    Thanks to an annonymous user we now have an Afrikaans translation, bringing our total up to 17/30. Great work there. It is also worth noting that a couple of users have been going through and improving some of our existing translations, particularly the Chinese and Japanese ones. So if you looked at those earlier, take another look and try out the “history” tab at the top to view different versions.

    Update #10 (11:34 Eastern Oct 16 2010)

    Thanks to one Martin Falk Johansson, we now have a Swedish
    translation up. Thanks Martin! That brings us up to 18 of 30 languages
    here in the final days of the translation push.

    Update #11 (13:10 Eastern Oct 17, 2010)

    As we wrap up our first activity drive, it looks like a rough Korean
    translation is going to bring us up to 19 of 30 languages. That means
    that we’ve had 14 new translations done over this week, while expanding the Wikiotics language support to five more languages. We’ve also had a couple existing translations, notably Spanish and Chinese, updated and corrected by native speakers. All told, a great week. Thanks to everyone who has helped out!