At the chapter workshop for April our president, Daniel Svoboda, and vice-president, Dieter Knowle, will be presenting together. Here are the details:
TOPICS: Survey of Google Docs, Office Online, and Naver Office Apps for Use in the Classroom
and
Does a flipped classroom help L2 learners complete tasks and activities during class? Can this model be used effectively in ESL classes throughout the Republic of Korea?
First up: Survey of Google Docs, Office Online, and Naver Office Apps for Use in the Classroom
Much has been made of apps specifically designed for teachers to automate or digitize the classroom. What is less commonly considered are the functions of free-for-use online office suites that can help teachers and students interact. The key elements of these online applications are ease of use, cost (or lack thereof), flexibility, and anonymity. This workshop will introduce participants to some ideas about how to use Microsoft Office Online and Google Docs apps in a way that helps increase student participation.
Daniel Svoboda has taught at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), the Catholic University of Daegu and other schools in the Daegu-Gyeongbuk region. His professional interests include Korean-English translation theory and literary criticism as well as teacher training and speaking activities in the classroom. He is currently President of the Daegu-Gyeongbuk KOTESOL Chapter.
Our second presentation: Does a flipped classroom help L2 learners complete tasks and activities during class? Can this model be used effectively in ESL classes throughout the Republic of Korea? The flipped classroom model was used for a group of university students and high school students taking ESL classes to explore these questions.
There has been a revolution in a FEP in Korea. The entire philosophy of the FEP shifted from a linguistic only approach to a holistic approach in which facilitating student learning especially for developing learning skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, etc. became the main goal of the program with the linguistics aspects becoming the secondary goal. To implement this new philosophy, FEP classes shifted from teacher-centric to student-centric classrooms. Now learner-centered teaching is the new pedagogy of the FEP.
Of course, this means drastically reduced teacher talk time and more student talk time and activities. In other words, no more lecturing and droning on by FEP instructors. Moreover, to help implement this new pedagogy, task based learning (TBL) was employed in the FEP using an in-house textbook written specifically to meet the goals of the program. It only seemed natural that in a country with the fastest internet and LTE network in the world with 97% saturation of smart devices that a flipped classroom should be the next logical step in learning-centered classrooms. The core idea is to flip the instructional approach; instruction that used to occur in the classroom is done with teacher-created videos and interactive lessons that are now accessed at home or anywhere, prior to class. The classroom becomes a place to carry out task based learning and to engage in collaborative learning. This allows teachers to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time. One of the most important benefits of a flipped classroom is that now, teachers have even more time to individually meet each particular student’s learning needs.
This observational study investigated the use of the flipped classroom model using instructor created videos, webpages, and material for a FEP at X university, and English Discoveries Online-Mobile (EDO-M) from Edusoft (http://www.edusoftlearning.com/about-us/about-us-more/edo-mobile/) at multiple high schools throughout a large metropolitan city in the Republic of Korea. This study used convenience sampling. For the university students, at the beginning of each class, students were given homework in the form of completing the assigned steps on a web page. Students were given a handout that included the web address and QR code of the web address as well as a picture of the web page with the steps on it. The students were required to complete the web homework before coming to class. In class, students performed various tasks that were related to the lessons they did at home. For the high school students, they were required to spend 30 minutes in the mornings and evenings learning English through the EDO-M app which uses a story based approach to teach speaking, listening, vocabulary, and idioms. Their high school teachers had the students perform various tasks during class that were related to the lessons taught by Edo-M.
Dr. Dieter Knowle has traveled all over the world to more than 30 countries and has extensive teaching experience in diverse cultural backgrounds. Dr. Knowle has taught in Korea for ten years now. He was a Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul and currently is a member of the Faculty of Liberal Education, College of Humanities, Kyungpook National University teaching credit and non-credit general English courses. His interests involve using engagement theory in the classroom instead of classical motivation theories such as the ‘carrot and the stick’ approach. In addition, Dr. Knowle is interested in using CALL, MALL (both mobile and multimedia), and gamification in the ESL classroom. Besides teaching, Dr. Knowle is a ghost writer, developmental editor, and proofreader helping authors all over the Korean peninsula publish their work in SCI and SSCI journals. Furthermore, he has taught a variety of writing courses covering diverse areas such academic, manuscript and grant writing at the Daegu Institute of technology (DGIST). Finally, Dr. Knowle has worked closely with public and private companies in Korea’s English E-learning industry for over 8 years. dknowle@knu.ac.kr
