Russell Stannard joins me to talk about online teaching. We discuss some of the current challenges that teachers around the world are facing due to Covid19 forcing classes to go online, and we also talk about what the longer term effects on teaching and learning will be. How will this encourage learner autonomy? How will it change the role of the teacher? And how could it create more learning outside of the classroom?
Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this episode again, we're doing something about teaching online. I know this is a huge issue for so many of you at the moment.
We really have someone top‑notch to help us with issues about teaching from home and that's Russell Stannard. Russell's founder of teachertrainingvideos.com which is a great resource with so much information on how to use different technological tools and education.
Russell in 2008 was awarded the Times Higher Outstanding Initiative in ICT for his work on that website and trusting that he beat the University of Oxford who came runners up to him there, which is quite amazing. Russell also won in 2010 the British Council ELTons Award for technology.
He's also worked at University of Warwick, University of Westminster, at the moment he's a tutor at NILE, Norwich Institute for Language Education, where he's an MA tutor and in fact he's a Miami tutor.
Russell's going to talk to us today about some different platforms that teachers can use, what teachers can be getting students to do outside of online classes and really just gives us some top tips for teachers using platforms like Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. Enjoy the interview.
Ross: Hi, Russell. Thanks for joining us. Russell, someone who's an educational technologist, what do you think are some of the advantages to what we're seeing now, which is so many teachers using technology to teach online?
Russell Stannard: I'm not sure at the moment there are that many positives in all honesty. I think there will be, but I think at the moment is just too much for most teachers to deal with. They're really scrambling to. I've been watching quite a few classes and some of them are just a disaster.
Where the positives will come eventually is that it will kind of open up a lot of people's eyes to the options that are available as people begin to move beyond just thinking about the live session and start to think about how they can combine, for example, working with a live session and working with a platform.
Whether that be mood law rep model, because they'll need to understand that really there are two paths to teach an online. There's the live session in some sort of platform. People are beginning to see that. I think that will be one good thing that's going to have a big impact in the future if they go back to blended learning.
Number two that could be really interesting is if it begins to change the role of the teacher in terms of their relationship with the student. We've really now got to bring to reality this whole idea of students becoming more autonomous.
Because when you work online, the students do have to do a lot more work. In the live session as well because they need to learn to technically screen‑share and to technically be able to work themselves with the technology, they can't just be a passive consumer of a live lesson. They've got to get involved in it and that requires some skills from their part.
Also what they're expected to do outside of the class and how really they've got to take much more responsibility now for their own learning. That the contents are there, the technologies are there, the platforms are there, but really up until this moment, that hasn't happened.
Now, one of the things that we start to talk about in that area about autonomy is that it's a vast exaggeration to say, "There's masses of material that students can do everything." That's not actually how you learn the language. There are routines that you always do. For example, you might study some vocabulary every day and use Quizlet.
You might listen to some videos on YouTube with the subtitles and study those. You might go onto a platform and do some exercises or do some listening activities. It's not as if this world of technology outside of the classroom means that there are 101 different things that you can do or possibly there are but they're very small things.
What we really want to concentrate on these continuous routines that you need to do to develop learning a language.
Ross: Russell, you mentioned there the different platforms that teachers can use, and you mentioned the two halves of that equation. If Zoom and Skype are teaching synchronously, teaching students in real time as one half of the picture, what's the other half?
Russell: There's two types of platforms. There's the platforms that are developed by the publishing companies. Now you've got the advantage that the students can log in to that platform and the teachers can give them assignments to do and track what they're doing and see their scores, etc.
They aren't so good on the communication side because they are really more platforms for content but you normally can email the student through the platform. We know why a teacher's almost got a choice.
Do they go for a publisher platform where they've got loads and loads of content but maybe they can't do so many communicative collaborative type activities or do they go for a platform like Edmodo or Moodle, which does offer lots of opportunities for collaboration and working together but of course there's no content on there.
My feeling is for people in ELT, the best direction to go if you can is to work with the platforms that the publishers have because that is going to save you a lot of time. It's going to allow you to set up activities for the students to do at home and it's going to allow you to track and see what they've done in and allow you to connect that to the lesson.
The other thing that's happening at the moment is that people are just thinking about the Zoom class. There's no relationship to any content outside of the just doing a lesson. I've been watching, Ross, some of the lessons would give you a heart attack. Absolutely. It was a complete waste of time for the students to be on.
The teacher just rambled on, played a few videos, ask the questions. The students said yes, the students said no, a couple of them, most of them didn't do anything, and then that was the end of the lesson.
Ross: Yeah, I'm afraid I've also seen my fair share of bad online classes, but why do you think these teachers are, are so ineffective at teaching online? Why do you think all of a sudden from teaching online these classes end up becoming so teacher centered?
Russell: I was really interested in that. That's a really good question. I do think that when you work with technology, the whole kind of thing of it making you very nervous at the beginning and you don't really know how the technologies work until you've really got control of the technology.
It's sometimes very difficult to become creative and to start to think about how you can get the students engaged in an activity. I think that does happen because it's even happens to me. I see technologies in a very narrow way at the beginning when I've learned in them. It's only when I really follow fade with the technology, then I start to think I could do this or I could do that with it.
That's been my experience even working with Zoom and if I look back how I used to work with Zoom and Adobe connect and say how I might be using them now as I've got more confident with them. I've passed more control over to the students. I've done the same thing with screen capture technology.
There might be something almost psychological about this need to feel secure about the technology you're using before you feel you can start to get creative with it. I think that thing, that's quite a lot of truth in that. I think that that's true of almost anything we try and learn.
Ross: Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost like a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for using technology or something, isn't it? That first you have to become comfortable with using it yourself before you can maybe hand over control to some of the students.
Russell: Yeah.
Ross: In terms of that passing ownership over to the students, can you tell us a bit more about how teachers can do that in live online classes?
Russell: First of all, if you actually look at a live session, there are four or five things that the students simply need to know how to do. They need to know how to screen share. They need to know how to minimize their screens so that they can open up content and get it ready for screen‑sharing.
They need to know when they're in a screen‑sharing situation that they've got everything prepared before that so they can go into their breakout rooms and share their content. There's certain things that the students need to do. Then there's other things that they might need to do to make sure that the Zoom session works well.
For example, if we're looking at almost like a flip classroom where the students do the lower order thinking skills at home, they're maybe watching a video in preparation for lesson, taking some notes, preparing a presentation.
Let's say, for example, we teach them to use Google Earth and we say, "Go home, go onto Google Earth, choose a famous location that you want to talk about. Get a basic presentation together because tomorrow in the lesson I'm going to get you to open up Google Earth and show a monument and talk about it."
All of those things require way more work on the part of the student to make sure the lesson works. If they don't do that preparation it won't work. There's a whole thing about responsibility and I'm in a bit of a dilemma myself. It's the fault the teacher in it was always wanting to control the lesson.
If you give more responsibilities to students, they will actually adapt and take it up and make use of it. Or is there a problem with just controlling students? If you do that and then the whole lesson is going to fall apart. I'm not really sure.
Is going to be a case now of inculcating into students this understanding that if you want to progress, you've got to learn to study on your own, which is a general theme. It's coming out of the 21st century anyway.
Then the other thing is about starting routines, because I really think that that whole thing about autonomy is a bit exaggerated. We ended up giving out the wrong message sometimes because they're like, "Oh yeah, there's so much on the Internet."
Well, tell me, where is it? What is it? How are we going to use it? That's not true. I see that with students even up to master's degree, in their papers and telling me about how they're going to encourage the students to be more autonomous, but they don't actually give them specific things to latch onto. I think we've got to do that.
Ross: In terms of learner autonomy online, one of the first steps in that would be getting students to use breakout rooms. Can you tell us a bit more about how teachers can use those breakout rooms and how can they help students to use them?
Russell: Ross, you're absolutely right, mate. Unless you train the students in what they need to do in a breakout room and what task you've set up and how they should approach it. They've got screen share because if you put students into a breakout room, they're the ones that have got our open up whatever it is that you want them to discuss.
Let's say you've set up some discussion questions in a PowerPoint, you need to make sure that the students have already got that PowerPoint open on their computer so that when they go into a breakout room they can it open it up and then discuss it.
When you're working in breakout rooms is you need to make the task a little bit longer sometimes because you need to structure the tasks much more. If you're in a class and you've got your students working in groups, you can quickly see if an activity is not working. You can stop it very quickly and then reorganize it or if they've not understood exactly what you want them to do.
When you've got students working in breakout rooms, you can't do that so easy because you have to jump in and out of one room and you might come to the fourth room and realize they're sitting there in silence and no one's doing anything.
Working in a breakout room takes a lot more preparation. That means more training for the students. That means setting up the actual activity a lot better. You have to do the activities as a group first with the teacher may be screen‑sharing and then one of the students screen‑sharing into the whole class.
I'm making the activity clear before you then put them into breakout rooms and get them to do the activity and breakout rooms.
Everything has to be rehearsed much more. Everything takes a lot longer when you're doing the Zoom's lesson as well, which is another reason that we have to put more responsibility on the students to work at home because simply not going to be able to cover the amount of content that you would in a normal lesson.
Ross: Russell, one of the things that I'm quite passionate about is helping teachers really take advantage of things that they can do online that they can't do elsewhere. Can you tell us from your experience, what are some features ‑‑ you mentioned for example screen‑share earlier ‑‑ that teachers can use with online platforms that maybe you don't see them using very often at the moment?
Russell: I'll tell you where I think you could have a lot of power with these breakout rooms. For example, if you sub some type of collaborative activity. Let's say you've got the students to have a discussion and brainstorm some ideas in a Padlet. They go into their breakout rooms that open up a Padlet, they work together.
They put their ideas up onto that Padlet. Then they come out of their breakout rooms and individuals could then open up the Padlet on the screen for the whole class to see.
That can be really quite powerful way of working with a technology or even to a degree interacting with a coursebook because if the students have the PDF version or the interactive version of the coursebook, when the students go into groups, they can open up the coursebook onto the screen. The whole group can see it in the breakout room.
They could even interact with it by writing on it or marking things on it. There are actually quite a lot of activities that in a way are almost easier to do in a breakout room than they would be, for example, if the students were sitting down with their books open simply because of the visual element of the book itself or even say for example, sharing video content.
When you put students into breakout rooms, you haven't got that problem that you might have if they're all trying to bundle around of computer screen to watch the video there is sitting in front of you. The students move into a breakout room, one of them plays the video, and it's all completely clear to everybody.
One other thing I'd say about kind of the live sessions is you've got to take a break. At the moment, one thing is the teacher thinks that they've got to be on task all the time. Why not tell your students, "Open up your book, read this text and come back in a couple of minutes and we're going to then do a brainstorming activity around the vocabulary."
You've just come across all the words that you don't understand or something like that. That might be jumping off and going on and completing a Google form. I did in some contents of the strategic and say, "Right, OK, I've got this Google form here. I'm going to share it with you and you can answer the questions and then we're going to come back in about five minutes."
You can do activities like that as well.
Ross: I think that thing was silence is so interesting because in a classroom it would be pretty normal to just have a period of silence where the students are just sitting reading. If for example, if we had a minute of silence on this phone conversation now it would be awkward. I can see why teachers would be quite hesitant just to have no talking for a period in the class.
Russell: I wonder whether or not, for example, the student, teachers might have to learn to be able to do things like putting a bit of music in the backgrounds or thing while the students are doing a reading activity.
Use something to mark the time. "I'm going to go off and do a reading now." I'll even put a timer onto the screen and, "You've got three minutes to read this passage. Now come back into the lesson." Teachers have got to get used to that to accept that there might be silence in their Zoom session.
Ross: Russell, thank you so much for joining us. What's the best place for listeners to go to find out more about you and to access some of the great resources that you've got to help teachers teach with technology?
Russell: Just go to teachertrainingvideos.com. It got lots of free videos that basically show teachers how to incorporate technology into their teaching and learning, and obviously at the moment it's very relevant and very popular.
Ross: Great. Russell, thanks one more time. Everyone else, thank you for listening and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.