It seems that no matter how hard you try students just don't ever seem to put in as much work outside of class as you would like them to; or, and this can be even more frustrating, students practice their language skills in highly ineffective ways (more on that in a future post). This fact leads to the following conundrum, how can you, as a language teacher, get students to work outside of class?The answer is you can't - people are going to do what they are going to do. However, what teachers can do is try to make the work they assign as relevant and (gasp!) fun as possible.It is in this spirit that I suggest the following activity given to me by Anthony Teacher. I haven't tried it yet but I have a good feeling about it.Read more »

Zarina Subhan is an experienced teacher and teacher trainer. She has taught and delivered teacher training at all levels, across the world. She joins us on the blog today for the fourth article in a series focused on boosting classroom participation. Last week, she covered embracing different learning styles to widen your reach in class. This week, Zarina examines how changing your questioning technique can boost interest and interaction in your EFL classroom.  "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers" - Voltaire The above quotation can also be applied to teachers, whatever their gender! Questioning is a vital part of most language lessons, but this essential technique can be difficult to master. Do you find that some students never answer? Do you avoid singling out members of your class who find direct questions intimidating? And what do you do when your questions are met with resounding silence? In this article, I’ll be suggesting some creative ways to get around these common problems. Accepting non-verbal responses When asking questions to a class, we can often rely on the same students to participate and hope the rest are paying attention so that they learn from others’ answers. To encourage participation from as many students as possible, you could consider accepting responses in other ways: Use a voting system which encourages students to offer a kinaesthetic, rather than a spoken response. For example, stick a "Yes"/ "No"; "True"/"False"; "Agree"/"Disagree" label on opposite sides of the room and ask students to move and stand under the correct answer. If you have access to mini-whiteboards held by each student, ask your class to write down their answers in response to your question. This is useful if multiple choice answers are possible, when asking for synonyms/antonyms, investigating parts of speech or grammar, and for brainstorming ideas as well as voting. Distribute cards labelled ‘true’ and ‘false’, and ask students to hold up their responses. If you use a colour code, for example, making ‘true’ cards green and ‘red’ cards false, it makes it easier to quickly assess the opinion of the group. Provide more thinking time We all know the feeling when we ask a question and no one answers - but what do you do about it? Silences can feel uncomfortable, and one common occurrence is that the teacher ends up answering themselves, without giving students enough thinking time. Studies have shown that on average a teacher waits 1-3 seconds for a response. Thinking time in the first language actually takes 7-10 seconds, so for students who are studying a foreign language, we need to be giving 10-15 seconds at the very least for a response. Otherwise they will be unable to process the question and consider the answer in English before saying it out loud. (Boyes and Watts, 2009) Here’s a technique you can use in class to allow for more thinking time. It also has the advantage of bringing more students into the discussion. Choose a student (student A) to answer your question, but don’t say whether you think they are right or not. Ask a second student (student B) if s/he agrees with student A. Still not saying what your opinion is, open it up to the whole class to get more involved, and only then give the ‘correct’ answer. This provides much more thinking time and keeps students on their toes as they may be asked next. It works particularly well if students have had time to consider the questions in pairs or groups beforehand. They can then test out possible answers in the safer environment of their small group first. Also, if you monitor your students during this discussion time, you can pick two opposing answers which the whole class can then go on to exploit. This should encourage a flurry of agreements and disagreements, as the other students reconsider their answers. When you single out individuals, be sure to create a safe atmosphere. If teachers randomly choose a student to provide an answer without providing the chance to discuss things, it can cause a lot of anxiety. Another way of creating a feeling of safety is to praise all answers, not only the correct ones. Praise the participation or the fact that they are thinking about a different point that you weren’t considering, before rephrasing the question and throwing it out there again. So for an incorrect answer: Accept the incorrect answer. Add some additional questions (which may seem like baby steps) until the student who got it wrong can see what you were expecting from the original question. Go back to the student who got it wrong, to give them a second chance. If students are embarrassed in public, they are far less likely to answer next time, so we need to avoid this at all costs. Why ask questions? And finally, it’s worth thinking about why asking questions is so important. The 2012 handbook of the UK Office of Standards in Education says inspectors must decide whether teachers use questioning to assess the effectiveness of their teaching and promote pupils’ learning. By using questions to guide our students towards particular answers, we are checking that what we are teaching has been understood. Just in case some students have slipped through the net of understanding, questions should be a way of catching them and preventing them from falling into the waters of confusion. By encouraging more students to respond to questions, we promote the expectation that we require our students to contribute, and that we won’t accept "Don’t know" as an answer. By thinking carefully about how we set questions up and how we phrase them, we can help our students to reach the answers that they previously thought they couldn’t. And from their answers, you learn a lot about your teaching! Look out for my next article in the series next week - I’ll be exploring the benefits of really listening carefully to your students. This article was first published in the September 2014 issue of Teaching Adults. To find out more about the newsletter and to sign up, click here.  References Boyes, K. and G. Watts (2009) Developing Habits of Mind in Elementary Schools. ASCD http://www.fromgoodtooutstanding.com/2012/05/ofsted-2012-questioning-topromote-learningFiled under: Adults / Young Adults, Professional Development Tagged: EAP, questioning, Teaching adults, verbal skills

For trainer-teacher-learners with backgrounds in journalism—and I suspect there are plenty of us—attending the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC)  98th Annual Conference (held here in San Francisco this year) is a bit of a homecoming. It’s not just the joy of being around more than 2,000 thoughtful, innovative colleagues from all over the world as we explore trends, challenges, and developments in journalism and mass communication; it’s an opportunity to see how our training-teaching-learning colleagues in a vitally important part of our contemporary world are continuing to hone their own skills while fostering the next generation(s) of professionals who will shape the face of the industry and the world it serves. As is the case with any ambitiously-designed conference, the number of sessions to explore is overwhelming and hints at the importance of incorporating at least a couple of digital-literacy skills into the experience of treating conferences as part of our lifelong-learning experiences: the skill of sifting through torrents of information (in this case, to initially identify what is most likely to contribute to our own lifelong-learning needs), and an ability to use digital resources to enhance our learning. These skills, I might add, are clearly essential not just to the journalism and mass communications colleagues whose company I’m currently enjoying, but to any of us involved in the constantly-evolving world of training-teaching-learning. The sifting, in this case, takes place at a variety of levels. Access to the online schedule before arriving onsite at the conference gave us an opportunity to make preliminary decisions regarding which sessions would most likely meet our learning needs. Receiving the printed copy of the 270-page conference book onsite allows us to fine-tune those choices a bit more. Following the Twitter feed from the conference draws our attention to colleagues’ recommendations for opportunities we might otherwise have missed. And hallway conversations add the icing to the conference cake by giving us opportunities to meet presenters whose sessions might otherwise not have made it onto our must-attend lists. Using digital resources to enhance our learning not only while we’re here but long after the conference formally concludes is something equally worth noting and exploring. The simple act of tweeting highlights from sessions we attend pays off at several levels: we produce a set of online notes to which we later can return to continue our learning; we see onsite colleagues’ tweets from those sessions and others we are not physically able to join, thereby increasing the breadth and scope of our conference/learning experience; we occasionally engage online with colleagues who couldn’t be here physically but feel less "left behind" because of our online exchanges; and the natural inclination to occasionally, while a session is underway, go online to find a site that further explains what is being discussed means we are extending the reach of these physical learning spaces well into the virtual world to create an onsite-online classroom that is limited only by our imaginations and access to the Internet. This plays out nicely, as I saw during a "State of the Industry" panel discussion—the first session I was able to attend at the conference—yesterday afternoon. At the heart of the learning experience was a first-rate set of panelists: panel moderator Bob Papper, Director, RTDNA (Radio Television Digital News Association) /Hofstra University Annual [Industry] Survey; Teri Hayt, Executive Director, American Society of News Editors (ASNE); David Smydra, Executive Producer, Google Play Newstand; and Robert Hernandez, Associate Professor of Professional Practice at USC Annenberg. Adding to the experience was our ability, while tweeting highlights of the session, to see tweets from colleagues in other sessions where subject matter occasionally complemented what we were absorbing—which provided an opportunity, at a limited level, to actually create a much larger virtual learning space than any of us might have anticipated. Another element—common to what I experience while attending conferences these days—was the opportunity to extend that virtual classroom to include online resources that could provide additional background to unfamiliar topics the panelists were presenting. The online-resources-as-extension-of-learning-space opportunity was particularly rewarding when Smydra introduced us to the concept of Structured Journalism—something he described as being "what digital media wants journalism to be" in that it makes the various bits and pieces of data (in various media) collected by journalists and the numerous resources going into news stories more accessible and reusable than they otherwise might be. While he was valiantly attempting to describe this somewhat complex concept in a brief period of time by providing visually-appealing examples (e.g., the Thomson Reuters Connected China project), I continued to listen to him and glance at his slides while also doing a quick online search to see whether he had any online resources providing a more in-depth exploration of the topic. And there, among the gems, was the article "Structured journalism offers readers a different kind of story experience," written by Chava Gourarie for the Columbia Journalism Review and including quotes form Smydra, including this one that captures the concept beautifully: "It not only produces incredible stories but creates this reservoir of material that reporters and readers can call upon for future stories." It was at that moment that I realized I was experiencing a key learning moment described by so many of our best training-teaching-learning colleagues: that moment of learning that builds upon what we previously learned. As a blogger (as opposed to the broader role of writing articles and co-writing a book), I’ve come to appreciate the obvious and unique art form online writing offers: the ability to develop a cohesive piece of work that, through hyperlinks, allows readers to read start-to-finish or take as many detours as they care to take—and if I also make the piece more visually stimulating by embedding photographs or images of videos that include live links, I’ve further taken advantage of what this particular art form offers me and those who read my work. Smydra’s comments inspired an instantaneous building-upon-previous-learning leap from what I have been seeing in blogging to what I was beginning to see in Structured Journalism: a form that includes writing, imagery, video work, and more combined as unique, innovative, creative mash-ups providing another cohesive form of work/writing/journalism—with the added benefit of producing additional unique elements/source material that could be repurposed elsewhere. As I continue thinking about what Smydra and his colleagues provided through their presentations, I continue taking advantage of the numerous streams of information and other resources that make conferences so richly rewarding as part of our lifelong learning landscape. There are the tweets. The conversations over a meal during an opening-night reception last night. The Storify recap of conference highlights from sessions yesterday. The bookmarked websites I accessed to write this piece as well as the websites to which I haven’t yet had time to return. My own stream of conference-related tweets (August 6 - 9, 2015) through my @trainersleaders Twitter account. And links to PowerPoint slide decks and other resources allowing us to draw upon our digital-literacy skills to continue the learning that is proving so rewarding in this and expanded moments of learning. All of which makes me suspect that Structured Journalism is already claiming a place in my training-teaching-learning-writing world. N.B. - This report from the AEJMC 2015 Annual Conference is also the fifth in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions "Rethinking Digital Literacy" course.

Mobile learning, or mLearning, is one of the most popular topics in the L&D industry, but it certainly is not anything new. InfoPro Learning has been creating mobile learning solutions for more than 10 years, starting with the development of learning content to be consumed on the Palm Pilot. Back then, devices were not readily connected to the internet and virtually no company had a BYOD environment. It is a stark contrast to the mobile environment we have today. The mobile learning environment today is as complex, as it is dynamic. Data is being transmitted faster than ever, through networks that are larger than ever, on devices that are smarter than ever. This has created serious challenges for L&D professionals trying to keep pace. As an answer to this dynamic environment, InfoPro Learning invented the Mobisode for mobile learning. In the video above, you will learn more about the challenges that led InfoPro Learning to create a Mobisode, the definition of a Mobisode, and most importantly, how you can create a Mobisode using the resources within your own company. About the author: Nolan spends the majority of his time performing marketing research in the L&D industry to help understand the most common and pressing challenges of the industry.  He uses this information to help formulate cutting-edge learning solutions that are designed to maximize business performance and return on investment. The post Understanding the Basics of a Mobisode appeared first on .

We are excited to be heading to ASAE Annual Meeting & Expo 2015 at the weekend!   The ASAE Annual Conference is the biggest Association Conference and draws the widest audience of technology and hospitality attendees. The event runs from Saturday, August 8 to Tuesday, August 11 and the schedule is jam packed with educational sessions, learning labs and social events.   We are looking forward to making the most of our time there, both by attending sessions and while exhibiting in the Expo Hall.   TopClass LMS, the most flexible way to truly integrate with your AMS   With our Learning Management System, you can setup all forms of training courses in your Association Management Software and have them automatically published to the LMS. Without re-keying any data, our two-way AMS product bridge will automatically synchronize the information, regardless of how your education products are setup in your AMS.   For the learners, the workflows are kept simple. Consistent branding, single sign-on, and automatic user creation allow your members to access training directly from your website. User achievements, including CE credits, are sent back to your AMS for real-time synchronization to allow you to reach and connect with your Education and Certification members in more effective ways.   Want to learn more about our LMS and our AMS bridge?   We will have Gilles Defer, VP of Sales and Marketing, Mike Bourassa, Director of Business Development and Alison Clery, QA Manager, representing WBT Systems over the course of the conference.   They will be demonstrating TopClass 9.8 at booth #505, so be sure to stop by!   Or if you prefer, you can make an appointment online by logging in the ASAE Attendee Service Center (ASC) and clicking on ‘Expo Connector‘.

The awesome community of ELH has a weekly challenge for e-learning enthusiasts. Amazing challenges, and contributions! This particular challenge is about building interesting and interactive ‘Gate Screens’ for courses. Here is my contribution. I applied a different approach - mOTP. In this, a person has to give his mobile number for authentication.… Read the rest...

Happy Summer! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, aea365’s Lead Curator and sometimes Saturday contributor. Last year at this time, I contributed these ideas for enjoying AEA’s annual conference even for those not attending, and they’re well worth repeating this year. Hot Tip #1 - Leverage the all new beautiful Evaluation 2015 site to Build Your Professional Network: The Evaluation 2015 Online Conference Program is searchable by Topical Interest Group, time slot, presenter name, organization, audience level and keyword. If you are attending, researching the conference program in advance of attending is a must-do in order to make the most of your time. Even if you are not attending, you can search the conference program for colleagues working in your area and connect via email to raise a question. Hot Tip #2 - Check the AEA eLibrary for Handouts and Related Materials: AEA’s online public eLibrary has nearly 2000 items in its repository and that will grow considerably as the conference nears and immediately following. All speakers are encouraged to post their materials in the eLibrary and anyone may search and download items of interest, whether attending the conference or not. Hot Tip #3 - Follow Hashtag #Eval15 on Twitter: If you are on Twitter use hashtag #Eval15 to tag your conference-related tweets. If you aren’t attending, follow #Eval15 to stay abreast of the conversation and @aeaweb, AEA’s Headlines and Resources Twitter Feed in particular. Check out #Eval13 and #Eval14 for an idea of what folks were tweeting last year and the year before! Bonus Cool Trick - Get the H&R Compilation: Not up for joining Twitter quite yet, but want to get the field’s headlines and resources for the week nevertheless? You can subscribe to AEA’s Headlines and Resources compilation to arrive via email or RSS once each week. Learn more here. Hot Tip #4 - Check in Regularly or Subscribe to EvalCentral: Chris Lysy maintains EvalCentral, a compilation of 57 evauation-related blogs where you can always find the newest posts. Lots of bloggers will be in attendance at Evaluation 2015 and EvalCentral allows you to find many of them all in one place. You can also check out AEA’s list of evaluation bloggers and evaluators on twitter. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Greetings! I’m Leslie Fierro, Assistant Clinical Professor of Evaluation at Claremont Graduate University and AEA Research on Evaluation TIG Chair. This week, aea365 is focusing on Research on Evaluation (RoE). As an avid fan of this topic, I’ll offer a working definition for RoE and provide some thoughts on where future fruitful research may emerge in our field. Lessons Learned: People don’t always know what we are talking about! If there is one thing I’ve learned as an evaluation capacity builder, evaluator, and professor engaging in RoE it’s that that the first question people ask about this topic is…"What is RoE?" To date, we do not have a central definition - although scholars are busily working on creating definitions as you read this entry! As a frame of reference, I’ll offer up a definition I developed to orient my students to this topic, "A research investigation that generates findings with the intended purpose of creating a stronger evidence base and infrastructure for the applied practice of evaluation." We are too insular - let’s leverage information from other disciplines to stimulate RoE. When students embark on RoE it is a rare occurrence that they are not stunned at the lack of research available in evaluation to build upon. Although it is often refreshing to learn that the "world is our oyster" that isn’t always so comforting when the goal is to do something of interest, add to the literature, and well…move on. All hope is not lost, I find in RoE we are often a bit to insular. Why not pursue studies that integrate decades of research in other disciplines (e.g., cognitive psychology, adult learning theory) when creating new RoE studies? Rad Resources: Interested in doing RoE, but not sure where to start? Here are some examples of what we might call "Integrative Evaluation Science" to stimulate creative research ideas that build upon established work in other fields and have great potential to benefit our growing field! As early as 2003, in their article published in AJE—Beyond Use: Understanding Evaluation’s Influence on Attitudes and Action—Mel Mark and Gary Henry pushed our thinking to consider how we might leverage information from several disciplines (e.g., social psychology, public administration) to enhance our understanding of evaluation influence. In 2011 Mel Mark, Stewart Donaldson, and Bernadette Campbell edited a book Social Psychology and Evaluation, which provides several suggestions for integrating the world of social psychology and evaluation. And most recently in AJE Online First, Jane Buckley, Tom Archibald, Monica Hargraves, William Trochim tie the familiar evaluation concept of evaluative thinking to years of work in critical thinking in their article Defining and Teaching Evaluative Thinking: Insights from Research on Critical Thinking. The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Research on Evaluation (ROE) Topical Interest Group Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our ROE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Hi there! I’m Anne Vo, Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education and Associate Director of Evaluation at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. I’m also Program Chair of the Research on Evaluation TIG. I’ll share a bit about what we have learned about evaluation use within the education sector. Evaluation & Knowledge Use The evaluation field’s knowledge base on use can be traced to the 1970’s—a period that Mel Mark referred to as the "golden age of evaluation," when research on evaluation use was particularly prevalent. The development of our knowledge base on evaluation use is connected to thinking and research that had been done about knowledge use. Rad Resource: To learn more about this history, consider the following resource as a starting point: Rich, R. (1977). Uses of social science information by federal bureaucrats: Knowledge for action vs. knowledge for understanding. In C.H. Weiss (Ed.), Using social research in public policy making. Lexington, MA: Lexington. Research on Decision-Making in the Education Sector Cynthia Coburn and colleagues conducted a series of studies on decision-making in elementary schools and urban school districts while the State of California was in the process of implementing new reading instruction policies. They learned that: Teachers in the study relied on their professional experiences and mental models to make choices about classroom practice in response to new reading policies. Going about decision-making in this manner seemed particularly prevalent when a robust, school-wide collaborative culture; explicit connections between policy and classroom practice; and the space for exploring differences in worldviews were not available. School and district administrators’ interpretive processes—informed by experience and previously-held beliefs—had greater influence on their decision-making than actual data. This was attributed to lack of relevant information and varied use of the same information within an organization. Further, the administrator’s choice to use or not use available information was contingent upon what’s organizationally and politically feasible at the time the decision needed to be made. Rad Resource: To learn more about decision-making in educational settings and to locate leads for further reading, consider the following resource: Coburn, C. (2001). Collective sensemaking about reading: How teachers mediate reading policy in their professional communities. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 23(2), 145-170. Evaluation use will continue to be an issue of interest to the evaluation community. For the latest perspectives on the use of evaluation for decision-making, consider the following edited volume. It includes contributions from some of the field’s leading scholars and practitioners on use and decision-making as related to internal evaluation, evaluation influence, cultural responsiveness, and misuse: Christie, C.A. & Vo, A.T. (Eds.), Evaluation use and decision-making in society: A tribute to Marvin C. Alkin. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Research on Evaluation (ROE) Topical Interest Group Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our ROE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

We are Chris Coryn and Lyssa Wilson from the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Evaluation program at Western Michigan University. In the last decade, research on evaluation theories, methods, and practices has increased considerably. Even so, little is known about how frequently published findings from research on evaluation are read and whether such findings influence evaluators’ thinking about evaluation or their evaluation practice. To address these questions, and others, we (including our colleagues Satoshi Ozeki, Gregory Greenman II, Daniela Schröter, Kristin Hobson, Tarek Azzam, and Anne Vo) recently completed a study using a random sample of AEA members and a purposive sample of prominent evaluation theorists and scholars. Lessons Learned: Nearly all (96.94% ±38%) AEA members and all (100%) theorists and scholars consider research on evaluation important A majority of AEA members (80.95% ±60%) and theorists and scholars (84.21%) regularly read research on evaluation A majority of those sampled indicate that research on evaluation has influenced their thinking about evaluation and their evaluation practice (97.00% ±38% and 94.00% ±4.79% [for AEA members] and 100% and 100% [for prominent theorists and scholars], respectively) The American Journal of Evaluation and New Directions for Evaluation are, overall, the most frequently read journals by a majority of AEA members (70.35% ±76% and 51.18% ±7.44%, respectively) In addition to the American Journal of Evaluation and New Directions for Evaluation, prominent theorists and scholars tend to also read other journals semi-regularly or regularly (e.g., Evaluation: The International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation) AEA members most often read articles on evaluation methods (92.85% ±64%), reflections on evaluation practice (87.80% ±6.15%), or research on evaluation (80.95% ±7.60%), whereas theorists and scholars most often read articles on evaluation theory (94.73%), evaluation methods (89.47%), research on evaluation (84.21%), and evaluation ethics (84.21%) For AEA members, research on evaluation has significantly influenced their thinking about evaluation and their evaluation practice (97.00% ±38% and 94.00% ±4.79%, respectively) Research on evaluation has influenced all theorists and scholars’ thinking about evaluation as well as their evaluation practice (100% and 100%, respectively) AEA members and prominent theorists and scholars believe that findings from research on evaluation contribute to ‘improving, informing, and guiding evaluation practice’ (40.59% and 50.00%, respectively) Rad Resources: Christie’s article ‘Advancing empirical scholarship to further develop evaluation theory and practice’ in the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation (2011) Henry and Mark’s article ‘Toward an agenda for research on evaluation’ in New Directions for Evaluation (2003) Szanyi, Azzam, and Galen’s article ‘Research on evaluation: A needs assessment’ in the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation (2012) The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Research on Evaluation (ROE) Topical Interest Group Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our ROE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.