This week I attended a presentation for Christine Coombe from the Higher Colleges of Technology, Dubai as an invited speaker in our FPDE department in Doha. Her session was about “What the Research Tells Us About Teaching Effectiveness”. I would like to share some of the interesting points I had during this session.

The session started with a good question about what makes an effective teacher and how we all perceive this idea. Out of the several discussions that took place, similar key aspects were highlighted among the audience. Some of these aspects include motivation, respect and skills. Many students may agree or disagree on what makes an effective teacher. However, they most of them find an effective teacher as someone whom they like. S/he is a teacher who has good popularity and is liked by students.

I believe it is a hard mission for any teacher, especially for junior teachers. However, there is no secret trait - at least from my own view point -other than hard work, perseverance and interest in the subject and the field. Also being unfair or tough with some students is normally discouraged by most learners.

According to Christine, some other unrelated aspects that may affect how students teacher effectiveness are teacher’s age, experience, amount of additional responsibilities, qualifications and career history. These can tell us something about the variety and wideness of aspects that may affect teacher-effectiveness in class.

In all cases, It is obvious that the teacher has the main role and responsibility in creating a successful learning environment. Professional development opportunities through workshops, action research, focus groups, discussions, conferences, communities of practice and reading about current practices/ issues in the field represent important keys in shaping the characteristics of an effective teacher. it is a great mission to help your learners become motivated and successful. Obviously it will create an experience that your learners will never forget.

After many years of using technology in education and working with websites of all types, I thought of this topic. I summarizes my current experience with several educational websites and portals. The ideas is to help manage your online presence rather than being scattered in so many places. I have introduced this vision to TESOL Arabia organization during my work as a webmaster for their web presence. I managed to introduce a new CMS to maintain and manage all electronic content within a dynamic and flexible free platform. The other experience was through TACON Online free conference portal that is introduced for the second year. Both represent good examples of how CMS is important in shaping our Web 2.0 look at things. It is an attempt to look beyond what web 2.0 is and move towards something more independent.

Few weeks ago no body would have ever believed the amazing political changes that happened so far. It was and still looks like a big dream all Egyptians along with many other Arab countries still experience against oppressive regimes.

The question that arose to my mind and to many others right after the success of the revolution is “How to change Egypt?” People have always wanted to see it as a developed leading country as it was years ago.. Now it is time for that and many have called it the “Egypt 2.0 new initiative”. Egypt 2.0 seems to be a call for a new real renaissance like the one started in the early 20th century.

The other provoking question that I asked myself was “What would I do to develop the country if I’m the president of the new Egypt?” It seems that many keep asking the same question now since I read many interesting ideas and comments from people and groups in Egypt new through articles, tweets, and social networks.

While thinking about this I remembered a case study that was introduced by our professor at Ain Shams University when talking about curriculum models around the world. He briefly described how Russia that had a wise leader at a certain age managed to change into a developed country and compete with the US within 20 years only. The reason and secret behind that was giving highest priority to “E D U C A T I O N”. Yes, it was education and not WMD or military power, etc. It is obviously that has been ignored and deliberately targeted by the old regime for the last 30 years.

I also remembered suggesting an online educational reform initiative for Egypt that I suggested to a group of online educators about 5 years ago. The idea was surprising to them and one professor even commented that her colleague professor in Malaysia is Egypt which means there can’t be a problem with education in Egypt! What she didn’t realize at that time that Egypt and many other Arab countries have been experiencing a brain drain for many years where educators, genius and motivated people leave the country to fulfill their dreams and achieve success abroad since they can’t achieve it in their own country with the oppressive regime that people used to face.

I do agree with my professor and I also believe that we must look into developing education as the highest priority now. We need to give learners that missing motivation. We need to appreciate the efforts of all teachers and educators across the country. We need to encourage academic and social research efforts. We need to educate all people. We need to get rid of monotony and rigid rules that used to kill hopes and dreams of educators.

Egypt and Arab revolutions have been widely tagged with the use of technology and web or social networks to organize their efforts along with the role of media in sharing their voices after losing that voice for decades. I think that was normal with new technologies emerge among individuals and youth. Social networks made it very easy for poeple to get together and share media files with other thousands of people although they were not allowed to gather with other few peoples by the previous strict laws..

Many discussion groups and social websites have already started inviting others to share their dreams in the way they want to see the new Egypt, Egypt 2.0. One of the interesting websites that is used to fulfill this tasks invites users to suggest ideas and gives others the chance to comment or vote on each idea. So far over 1,200,000 ideas have been shared in that website.

It is time of the year again to prepare for TEOSL Arabia conference. I can’t deny the enormous amount of skills I have learned in the last year while helping this non-profit organization.

TESOL Arabia is one of the most prominent TESOL organizations in the ME and the gulf region. This means lots of responsibilities and commitments. I feel proud supporting this organization and offering help in renovating their main website to a new dynamic site. The new one is actually based on a CMS system. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about CMS integration and its dynamic structure through working on this project.

Additionally, I help in maintaining their conference site which is a serious duty indeed. With hundreds of proposals, request from members, inquiries about proposals and updates that take place for months before the conference, I sometimes feel it is a big job indeed.

Finally, here comes my baby project which was introduced for the first year ever in 2010. It was the introduction of TESOL Arabia Conference Online 2010. This initiative meant to promote TA internationally and to bring the conference to the world. Thanks to Josephine Kennedy of the HCT and Mashael Al-Hamly or Kuwait University for their support. As conference Co-Chairs, they offered me a great deal of help to introduce this idea. Since I personally believe in start small think big, I am sure that this project is going to grow to become a crucial element of TA yearly conference by years.

Because of all the limitations we experience in this context, we need to think for alternative ways for professional growth and development.To need to come up with the solutions rather than wait for them to approach us.So, since TACon Online came as a touchstone towards cloud computing teachers and educators in this region can find a good space for networking, sharing and professional interaction in the virtual world.

I have been enjoying this workshop organized at Qatar University OFID office. It is one of their regular PD events for our faculty. Since I have joined QU, I have seen how hard working and committed to providing all sorts of PD opportunities to all faculty and learners they are.

So, back to this workshop which was introduced by Dr. Souma Bajouda (AUB) and Prof. Ashraf Mohamed Salama (QU). The workshop entailed introduced a variety of interactive collaborative activities. Examples of these activities include the Think-Pair-Share (a good example can be downloaded here), the Think-Pair-Square-Share, the survival in the desert (ex. here), and a Jigsaw game.

Analyzing and reflecting on each activity was essential to understand some of the major concepts related to creative a group dynamic. It also helps in giving learners opportunities to process learning rather than just waste time or hide in their groups as free riders.

Dr. Bajouda highlighted the importance of differentiating between collaborating learning and the traditional group work. In the first, the learning opportunities and interaction level are increased to the maximum level. By practice and expertise, certain techniques can be used to guarntee group dynamics. These techniques may include:

• Give students clear roles in the group.
• Teach academic as well as social skills to your learners.
• Use cooperative learning; that is positive interdependence, individual accountability, social and collaborative skills within each group.
• Assign heterogeneous groups (of different levels) rather than homogeneous ones. A good approach is to choose (1 top student, 1 bottom student and two from the middle) based on their academic level..
• Again, social skills!
• Assign different sets of problems for each group.
• Ask a member of each group to teach the concept to his/ her group and then to teach the same concepts to the whole class to encourage the cognitive processing of learning.
• The teacher observes the different roles during the activity in order to (encourage, explain, summarize and give directions).
• Students teach the lesson themselves rather than the teacher if possible.
• Students use positive & encouraging keywords for interaction.
• Teacher applies techniques to assess collaborative learning occurred.

These activities and guidelines were extremely helpful in the way they were introduced or modeled during that workshop. I personally encourage all my colleagues to try them at some point and share their outcomes here or in their own networks.

I came across an interesting review of a recent study on multitasking. The study highlights the impact of multitasking on each individual using the internet, particularly web 2.0 and social web users. The review is in Arabic, but you still can watch the video or check the bibliography list at the end of that article.

I find this article interesting since I still ask myself the same question, do we really need to be multitask-ers? in other words, do you think people who perform multitasks are more productive or rather maintain the same product quality people in the past had? This could be another question for further investigation or studies..

This year I had the pleasure of chairing TESOL Arabia’s new initiative TACON online http://taconference.org. As a dream I had for the last two years, it was finally there for the ELT community in the ME and around the world.

Initiating this environment was not an easy process. However, it was a wonderful learning experience. It took me few months to prepare and understand most concepts related to this new system. Away from my teaching and other family duties, I think it was a wonderful experience that I enjoyed and feel proud of starting.

Many teachers nowadays need to realize the importance of initating or being involved in communities of practice or in other ways social networks of interests. Such communities provide great opportunities for development and collaborative support. You are all welcome too to join and access this year’s conference materials and discussions.

It might be a bit late in posting about my graduation, but I was overwhelmed with many things since I completed my MA program. It was a wonderful but challenging program that took me three years to complete from the University of Manchester. Taking the decision to make this program via distance learning mode in the Middle East might seem weird since many Arab countries still don’t accredit such kind of programs. However, I felt that it might be absurd that this is still the situation. It is becoming obvious that many Universities and academic institutions around the world invest so much in such type of learning and hence, it has to form a new dimension of today’s learning and educational systems.

In my final dissertation, I discussed the effect of online learning/ education on the current economical recession as well as other world crisis (e.g. H1N1 flu) in forming a solution to learner’s access to education. I also introduce Moodle as a friendly VLE in forming new ways of learning in the Secondary education. If you need further details regarding this study, please email me or add a comment. These are photos of my graduation, too.

This post is a suggested topic to include in the edtech chat series. I just would like to move a bit from discussing or debating the advantages/ disadvantages of technology to the actual implementation of it in the classroom. I would love to hear people talking from the field and sharing their real life and classroom practices.

I should confess it has been so long since I last visited this blog. Working on my dissertation took almost all my time. My initial plan was to use this blog for major parts of my research work. However, things turned to be very stressful at some points that I couldn’t stick to this. I should also confess that rely on technology could be very risky sometimes. May be that is why they say if you do not have three copies of your electronic files in three different places, then they don’t exist! I always needed backups of my files and writings sometimes newer versions on daily or weekly basis. Things are much better now and I think I should release some more time for this blog. Finally, it is nice to use it between classes and reflect on some my personal teaching context.

Ever wondered how some presenters manipulate data to show them in an impressive manner that attracts poeple’s attention. I came across this TED video which shows an amazing new initiative from the UK. The new service is based on the collaboration of some educators and programmers to integrate the use of powerpoint, flash, animation, and some other applications to produce amazing animated graphs and charts. You better enjoy watching this video yourself and think about the video of data analysis and interpretation in relation to this..

Talks Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen

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It is amazing what technology might look like in the future. Thinking about the possibilities and potentials of applied technologies for accessibility and life might drive one’s crazy. After all, what seemed to be a dream 10 years ago is now a simple reality because of technology! I leave you with this interesting introduction of the 6th sense of technology..

In one of the threaded discussions of the curernt IATEFL conference, Cardiff online 2009, a teacher about about websites that could be used to automatically grade students’ essays. Although it might look like a dream for busy teachers, I found quite few helpful responses on that thread. One of which mentioned using Moodle for peer marking where learners could anonymously grade their peers’ writings. This is an amazing option I have never tried in moodle. It gives moodle, as a VLE, a lot more power and encourage better use for writing practices and collaboration among learners. I hope to be able to share more findings on this regard latter.

Today I found monitor talents which is based on monitoring and interviewing some of the talented figures in several fields and share some of their ideas and perceptions about the future.

Access to Minds is a new trailer video where these leaders talk about innovation and the future. They describe it as

“Monitor Talent represents a wide range of the most provocative thought leaders shaping the agenda in business, science, and society today.

We invite the network to gather and share their thinking with one another. This year, we asked them to tell us something unexpected about the future of an area they know a lot about. We’ve collected some of the highlights.”

Some of the ideas I liked in that video is related to the spread of technology and networking solutions or ’social media’ even amongst those who always thought it is not for them. In other words, it became part of our daily life. They are also used by ‘everyone’ not just teenagers and so “we can’t ignore them any longer.” - Li. Another speaker, Kao, addresses the issue of innovation and its current capabilities in what he describes as ‘dispersed innovation’ and the change of global values.

The other good point Zuckerman shared is that there is a strong interaction among cultures, languages, and interests among social media users. This has created ‘citizen media’ as he describes it. He is also thinking about an answer to the question of ‘how you listen to other people’ in that big context? Perhaps it is a question we should all start thinking about. In fact, here are many questions and phenomena that we need to address and monitor nowadays when it comes to technology, innovation, marketing, education, and economy. In other words, we could say that the world is completely ‘changing’ into a new world. I think we will need more time before we be able to fully describe it or identify its characteristics.

Find more ideas or perhaps share your own here. Their youtube video channel is here, too.

This presentation give a nice simple clarification of the iphone potentials for educaiton. It was presented by Andy Rush and Jim groom. It starts with a nice summary of the different features that teachers and educators may use. You can download an audio recording of the presentation from here.

With the expansion of tweeter in many social networks, more users and educators are getting into twitter and use it for several networking purposes. This has led to the spread of many hundreds of widgets, applications, and partner websites that serve this tweeting idea. One of these is suppose to link itself to your blog page, sitetweet. I had some troubles configure it in my blog, but still thinking more about the best way to use from my portal. This page will be updated with any findings..

Last week I presented this topic for TESOL-Arabia. The participants were interested in the nature of task design and implementation. The presentation also gave participants an opportunity to explore and discuss ways for developing new language tasks to be implemented in synchronous mode using modern technology. See the abstract and other details below..

“With the expansion in technologies and wide adaptation of teaching and learning online approaches, there is a need to review and assess the current ways of educational task design and implementation. This presentation discussed examples of alternative synchronous tasks for EFL classes and learners’ self-access purposes. Klapper’s (2003) definition of teaching tasks as meaning-based and related to the actual communicative needs of real-world situations, urge’s today’s teachers and curriculum developers to reconsider the whole process of designing tasks with synchronous components.

A definition and rationale for using synchronous tasks in online or blended teaching contexts will be presented. A review of literature related to Computer-Medicated Communication and its role in SLA will be discussed, Lee (2002). Issues and concerns related to task design in accordance with the construction and negotiation of meaning and the types of tasks in a synchronous online situation will be discussed based on practice and the literature. This will be done in consensus with two sample models; where tasks are oriented towards goals, (Pica et al 1993) and the model of lexical negotiation for Varonis and Gass (1985).

The question of whether our current tasks and practices should be replaced or ‘virtualized’ will be discussed where findings and action plans will be developed. Finally, a demonstration of sample synchronous activities will be presented for further clarification.”

I received this list of resources for researchers for teaching writing from ELTECS. I thought it is worth to be shared here..

Resources for researchers

ERIC
http://www.eric.ed.gov

This database is for teachers and researchers who would like to download and
/ or read full-text articles. If you want to get full-text documents, choose
Advanced Search and then write your key words but do not forget to tick
“Show only results with free full text directly from ERIC”. I did and got
8568 articles as a result to the following two key words: ‘teaching’
‘writing’. Obviously, please notice that you can refine your search
according to level of instruction, type of publication, and date of
publication.
You can also consult abstracts of many articles and other publications if
you run a Basic Search. Highly recommended.

The Bedford Researcher
http://bedfordresearcher.com

This site is a good place for MA / doctoral students who are writing their
theses. It takes them through many tutorials on how to write, present,
report, etc. research findings. It also contains a tutorial on plagiarism
and how to avoid it. There are many payable options on this site but the
freebies are very interesting too.

The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing
http://bedfordstmartins.com/bb

This one is really my favourite! It contains a book of annotated
bibliography of different areas related to writing and composing. There is a
total of 704 documents. A major advantage of the online version is that it
contains hyperlinks for cross-references and it is easy to spot the
reference you are looking for.

The Research Exchange
http://wac.colostate.edu/research/
This is a plce where you can create an account for free in order to discuss
findings in research reports by researchers. Or else, you can use this site
as a starting point to navigate the findings of the reports in their
respective sites or to ask for the findings from the researchers.

Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives
edited by Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell (2003)
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/

This site contains a book for free. You can download it as one file or as
separate articles (chapters). The themes of the book cover three major
areas: “the role of writing in producing work and the economy; the role of
writing in creating, maintaining, and transforming socially located selves
and communities; and the role of writing formal education.” (in their own
words). There are more books here:
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/reference_guides.cfm

Please expect more interesting resources in an upcoming posting on: Journals
and periodicals.

*Selected and annotated by Abdelmajid

I came across this presentation which I find really interesting and referring to the type of skills needed for our students nowadays. The internet, as a learning ocean, provides many opportunities to fulfill most of the goals and requirements mentioned in these slides. However, it needs to be used with some control or observation in order not to lose connection to the real world and to keep that balance between what is virtual and what is real. Thanks to <a href=”http://mscofino.edublogs.org/” target=”_blank”>Kim </a>for putting this work together.The 21st Century Learner

In response to a recent short  article published today, I wrote the following. I would appreciate your comments about that and what you personally think regarding this subject.

There is a recent stereotype that I keep hearing these days in the UAE context that learning English will definitely lead to acquiring knowledge and skills needed for the workplace. As a teacher of ‘English’, I don’t really think so. A fact that I may argue about here is that many learners in UAE and the Arab world, are not fluent in their ‘native’ language, Arabic. You go to any school or approach a teenager in the street and ask him to say or explain the structure of a single Arabic sentence and you will be astonished with the result..

Moving to other very basic subjects will not make any big difference that what I mentioned before. I personally think it is not a language issue on the first place. I should also convey a personal and a crucial concern regarding the recent obsession with certifications and assessment in this same context where students are requested to sit for language, ICT, or other proficiency tests (i.e. IELTS, TOEFL, CEPA, IC3, SAT, etc..) The fact is that these new requirements are turning our institutions and organizations into entities that are completely structured as exam-oriented without providing a ‘friendly’ environment for ‘experiencing learning’ before we call it ‘learning’. In other words, we need to help our learners be involved in real-life situations before we expect them to ’study’ or ‘learn’.

In conclusion, we should not pin-point a single factor, (e.g. the teacher, curriculum, textbooks, a certain methodology, or a benchmark exam). Rather, we need to provide a practical, goal-oriented, motivating, and early-structured educational system that involves its counterparts from KG-12 in a ‘consistent’ educational philosophy. This vision or philosophy should be made clear to everybody involved. It should also consider all its partners as very important factors including those poor teachers who struggle with students. Maintaining loyalty, sense of belonging from learners and teachers, dedication, and stability to the educational system would evolve more talents and achievements. A final word is to keep a single vision, even if it is not completely ‘perfect’, keep it, review it, plan it ahead, pilot it, repilot and reassess it and maintain it before you keep it out of service to guarantee long-term stability and durability that lead to development.