{"id":1671,"date":"2012-12-17T09:18:40","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T09:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/?p=1671"},"modified":"2012-12-17T09:18:40","modified_gmt":"2012-12-17T09:18:40","slug":"what-i-learned-in-2012-scott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/2012\/12\/17\/what-i-learned-in-2012-scott\/","title":{"rendered":"What I learned in 2012 – Scott"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Fairly Tech-y Year \u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Scott<\/a>
Academic Director<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What have I learned this year? What am I still learning?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s significant perhaps that most of my learning experiences this year have related to the uses of educational technology, not in the language classroom, but more as an aid to my day-job as teacher educator.\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n

I learned how to write and design a complete MA TESOL module, and how to upload it onto a learning management system, without having to prevail upon our IT team back in New York. Previous courses I have written I simply handed over to them to put up. But, having learnt how to edit existing courses, I figured that it was not a major step to design and mount a whole course from scratch. I managed fine, and am proud of the fact that the course is multimodal, including text, videos, links to external material, and so on. The only thing I couldn\u2019t master was pop-up answer windows. A learning objective for 2013?<\/p>\n

I learned how to improve my webinar technique \u2013 I did three or four this year, including one with 700 online viewers and a Global Webinar for iTDi. \u00a0I\u2019m still not happy with the way I handle interactivity in this medium, easier obviously, with smaller groups, but they lack of eyeball-to-eyeball contact, and the continuous chat stream, is a challenge I\u2019m not yet comfortable with. I\u2019m still learning that one.<\/p>\n

I learned about the power of blogging, and that even when you stop blogging, the blog has a life of its own. My blog continues to get a fair few hits on a regular basis, even though I haven\u2019t posted for six months. I also learned that it\u2019s very useful to have an index on your blog, and the number of hits this gets is testimony to its usefulness for people looking for specific posts.<\/p>\n

I also learned that adapting blog posts for e-book publication is more challenging than I had expected: trying to condense and summarize the comment threads and to incorporate these into the body of the text was an interesting exercise, while the more frozen form of an e-book \u2013 more like a book than a blog \u2013 requires a degree of concision and precision that blogging normally doesn\u2019t. I\u2019ll be interested to see how it turns out.<\/p>\n

I already knew how useful YouTube is as a medium for broadcasting short video clips about matters relating to methodology and language, but this year I\u2019ve learned how to incorporate text and graphics into video clips, such that they have become a substitute for blogging, perhaps.<\/p>\n

I learned \u2013 through doing a Pecha Kucha on second language acquisition at an iTDi event following the JALT conference in Japan \u00a0\u2013 how much content can be packed into less than seven minutes:\u00a0 it\u2019s salutary to know that even big ideas can be delivered in small packages, especially when accompanied by some kind of mnemonic scaffolding \u2013 and I don\u2019t mean a lot text! The value of concision, logical sequencing and simplicity was also something that I\u2019ve been learning as I write and edit the lessons for the iTDi Teacher Development course.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned the value of occasional Skype calls with my online students, both as an opportunity to touch base but also as a way of personalizing the somewhat faceless online learning environment.<\/p>\n

Finally I\u2019ve learned how to use Twitter for mainly public and professional purposes (announcing talks, forwarding interesting links, etc) and to use Facebook for the private and personal. But I\u2019m not sure I haven\u2019t got it the wrong way round!<\/p>\n

So, all in all, it\u2019s been a fairly tech-y year. \u00a0Maybe, as counterbalance, next year I need to get back in to real classrooms, low tech, and blackboards with a small b?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Fairly Tech-y Year \u00a0 What have I learned this year? What am I still learning? It\u2019s significant perhaps that most of my learning experiences this year have related to the uses of educational technology, not in the language classroom, but more as an aid to my day-job as teacher educator.\u00a0 For example, I learned … Continue reading What I learned in 2012 – Scott<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":42,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-what-i-learned-in-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}