The Tree: Some Viideo Activities

I am republishing one of my old posts here. I believe The Tree is a great clip for those first classes when your students are getting to know each other and you want them to learn how to work as a team.

The Tree is one of my favourite short videos of all times. It always puts me in a good mood. You can read the story behind this clip here.

How would you use this video in class?

Here are some ideas:

1. Why did the boy try to move the tree? Surely he knew he wasn't strong enough for that?

2. Why was the boy first joined by the children? Why did they look so happy?

3. Discuss: "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” How would you define the boy? A born leader? A crazy kid? Or just someone who felt that he had to do something?

4. Why did the people join the boy?

5. Give the clip a new title.

6. If you had to define the force that moved the tree, what would you say? Was it the boy's initiative? Or the team spirit of everybody else? Both? Something else?

7. Can we always change the circumstances in which we live, or are we sometimes helpless? Discuss.

8. How important is team work in today's society?

9. How important is team work in a language classroom?

10. Do you feel that you are a part of a team in your classroom? Why/not?

Now retell the story in the first person singular, pretending to be one of the people you saw in the clip.

What would you do with The Tree in your classroom? Please add your ideas in the Comments section.


Image of the fallen tree: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Fallen_Tree_%282451075658%29.jpg By Mary-Lynn from Taos, NM, United States (Fallen TreeUploaded by Vux) [CC BY 2.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Keep Your Online Learners Motivated

Another round of EVO sessions ended some time ago and this post has been sitting for some time in my Drafts folder, so it's time I finished it. You can see here which sessions were on offer and, if you want to keep up with EVO all year round, you can join our Facebook group, or our Google+ community. EVO is a great way for teachers to learn new skills and to connect. EVO 2018 was no exception and the discussions were lively.

This year I took Nelly Deutch's wonderful Moodle for Teachers session. It was the only session I took, contrary to my habit to multitask, but I was more than busy. In Week 4 we created collaborative courses and I teamed up with my BFF Sneza Filipovic and Kim Z. to create a teacher training course on Moodle. My segment of the course was called Keep Them Motivated and in it I revisited a topic that is very dear to my heart - student motivation. I focused specifically on the motivation of online course participants. I believe this topic is very relevant, so I would like to present it here as well.

What I tried to do was examine common reasons for high dropout rates in online courses and explore the use of icebreakers, forum discussions and badges as ways to engage and motivate our online learners.

As you may be aware, creators of MOOCs and free online courses in general often complain of high dropout rates. When you join an online session, you are often guided by your natural curiosity only and that sometimes makes it hard to stick around until the end. I myself have dropped out of more free online courses than I can remember, but I did get hooked a couple of times. I am addicted to online learning, and I looked at the topic from the point of view of a learner, rather than that of a teacher. And, while I don't have any magic solutions, I did come up with a couple of things that might help.

Most of the students who drop out of an online course apparently do so during the first week. Again, a large number of dropouts will be those who never even logged in. Those people might be lost as course participants, unless you are willing to write a personal email to each and every one of them (which might not be very practical in a MOOC). One way to prevent this might be sending an email with instructions on how to join and how to use the platform before the course starts. Or you might try one of the solutions I offered in this short tutorial:

Icebreakers are very important during the first week and they can serve both to introduce the participants to the platform and to each other.

I looked at icebreakers in more detail here:

If you have managed to get your course participants to join and introduce themselves, you are off to a good start. If you want to keep your learners engaged, however, you need to prepare well before that first week. I think the battle for participation is won or lost before the course begins and that's where course design plays a vital role. Still, even if you have designed a most wonderful, most engaging course and survived the first week, don't sit back and relax just yet. A lot of people disengage soon after the first week and again, as a learner, I have done this many times. Some of the courses I dropped out of were really great and I am sorry I didn't persevere, but, you know, life happens.

In my second PowerPoint presentation I looked at some ways you can keep your learners engaged in later weeks and some measures you can take if things don't go all that well:

And I apologise for the way that video ended abruptly. I was using the free version of Screencast-o-matic back then. I have upgraded in the meantime and I hope to write a separate blog post about this great and inexpensive tool. I also hope to write a blog post about badges. I love badges as a learner and I find them very motivating, but they deserve a separate blog post.

There are no easy answers to how you motivate your online learners. The fact that you have created a great course and offered it for free should be enough to make you proud. Online learning is different from face-to-face learning and we shouldn't expect the same level of commitment from our online participants that we get in our classrooms. Besides, if the course stays online and if it stays open, people will keep returning to it, the way I returned to this post after almost two months. I would love to see more online courses that stay open for participation year-round and where people can keep connecting to each other and to the instructor whenever they decide to.

My Blog is Ten Years Old

I started this blog ten years ago on this very day. I had just bought my first internet-enabled computer (back then the digital divide was a real thing and Serbia was really lagging behind other countries). The whole wide world was opening before my eyes and that's when I joined my first two EVO sessions. One of the sessions I had joined was Blogging for Educators and, with the help of the moderators, I started this blog. It was January 2008.

I have always liked writing, so I quickly became passionate about blogging. Back then, many English teachers were. There was a whole network of bloggers and we supported each other. Then, one by one, we got a little tired. A lot of us started blogging less and less often. To me, this happened gradually and I was in denial for a long time. No, my blog was doing fine, no, I was still passionate about blogging, I just didn't update as often any more. Several times I declared that my blog was out of hibernation, that I was back. Then, some two years ago, I had to admit it to myself: I had given up blogging, maybe for good.

This wasn't happening to me only. Others were giving up blogging and some blogs I enjoyed reading were no longer being updated. I am talking about English language teaching blogs here and I am not generalising. The blogs I have in mind are the ones that originated around 2008, more or less at the same time as mine. We were just tired, I suppose.

Then, about a month ago, Janet Bianchini brought her blog back to life. Janet and I have been blogging buddies for a long time now. We have encouraged each other with comments and kept each other going. When Janet stopped blogging, I told myself that it was OK to stop too. But now her blog is back and thriving, so I have no more excuses not to do the same. I have promised Janet I would get back to blogging. Also, I believe if a blog has been online for ten years, it deserves to be treated well. So, here I am. EVO sessions are back and I always have so much to say during EVO sessions. I have some other ideas too (I have basically planned my next few posts), but more about that later. I even have an idea about another blog I would like to start (maybe next summer, during the holidays) and it will be something completely different from what I have been doing so far. I will say no more except that this new blog will not be about English language teaching at all. And, of course, there is always my poetry blog, which comes to life every April, during the GloPoWriMo challenge. So, once a blogger, always a blogger, I suppose.