EDCI 336 Technology Inquiry (With Pamela)

EdTech Inquiry Draft

Topic: Using Quizlet in a Core French or French Immersion Classroom

Group Members: Evan & Pamela

 

Quizlet: https://quizlet.com 

Company Instagram Handle: https://www.instagram.com/quizlet/ 

 

Our Inquiry Question is: 

 

How can Quizlet be used as a platform for creating resources for studying French and other languages? Quizlet has the potential to be a highly accessible resource, both in terms of content simplicity, technical simplicity and affordability (free). 

https://unsplash.com/photos/qAriosuB-lY 

 

How did Quizlet come about? 

 

The story of Quizlet begins with Andrew Sutherland, a 15-year-old high school student studying for a French exam in Albany, California. He had a whopping 111 new vocabulary words to learn. To accomplish this, he decided to create a software program. Quizlet was born. Flash forward two years and Andrew launched his creation on the world wide web, making him a young entrepreneur. The site went public on January 17th, 2007. 

 

Put this YouTube video in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilSPvgo0K38 

 

What is Quizlet?

 

At its core, Quizlet is a memorization tool. Users create flashcards with a specific term on one side and a definition on the other. The website based application also allows you to insert images into your flashcards. Additionally, it should be noted that there are numerous “modes” that you can choose from to do your studying. These modes are: “Flashcards”, “Gravity”, “Write”, “Speller”, “Match” and “Live”. Quizlet’s Live mode in particular has interesting applications that could be explored in a foreign language classroom.

 

Quizlet can be used on a computer, a tablet or on a phone. It is also free to play and create quizzes on Quizlet. You can also choose to upgrade to Quizlet teacher. This allows you to create multiple choice questions, format your text, remove all ads and track your students’ progress. Click here to learn more about Quizlet Teacher. They are having a sale right now for 40% off, making it only $3/month. 

 

Here is a How-To Video on Quizlet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo6ITr9yt4Y 

 

Quizlet has the following advantages:

  1. It has built in, multilingual vocabulary for instant translation and autocomplete. As we wrote flashcards for French vocabulary, options for French words would pop up. This has the potential to save a lot of time, especially for someone who is designing study resources for French but is not 100% fluent.
  2. The combination of several styles of resource and easy entry of content makes it highly customizable. Creating resources for a wide range of subjects and audiences will therefore be a fairly efficient process.
  3. Using the Quizlet Live game, you can incorporate cooperative work and team-building into your French class. This can be a fun way to allow students to learn from each other’s knowledge and also build camaraderie between class members.
  4. Quizlet’s simple, user-friendly format provides a quick and easy way for students to prepare for tests. 

 

Quizlet has the following disadvantages/concerns:

  1. The ads can be distracting. However, this is an essentially unavoidable feature of most free to use online resources, and most students probably have enough experience with such ads that they will have learned to ignore them.
  2. Students may learn misinformation. There is not really a built-in content control mechanism, so any mistakes made by people creating resources could be passed on to learners.
  3. Students may use Quizlet to cheat. Any Quizlet-based assessment may be vulnerable to students accessing the answers and cheating on tests.

 

To avoid the pitfalls of disadvantage 2, A teacher could partner with another teacher to proofread teacher-made study aids, and offer to approve resources made by students to improve their accuracy as well. To avoid the drawbacks of disadvantage 3, teachers can use Quizlet exclusively for teaching and formative assessment purposes, leaving the summative assessment and final marks to other, less vulnerable options.

 

Video on How to Use Quizlet Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt8BoEoZDKQ 

_________________________________

 

We made 4 sets of Quizlet cards. These are targeted towards grade 9 Core French.

 

Food Words: English to French: https://quizlet.com/ca/551350671/foods-in-french-flash-cards/

 

Conjugation of “Regarder”: https://quizlet.com/551365386/flashcards

 

Occupations: https://quizlet.com/_94f2lj?x=1jqt&i=3923ov 

 

Fill-in-the-Blank Sentences: https://quizlet.com/_94o9rg?x=1qqt&i=3923ov (some of these may be a bit more advanced for grade 9 students)

 

Works Cited

 

Stauffer, B. (2019, July 23) The Pros and Cons of Using Quizlet. Applied Educational Systems https://www.aeseducation.com/blog/quizlet-pros-cons

 

Wolff, G. (2016, November/December). Quizlet Live: The Game Now Taking the World By Storm. The Language Teacher, 40(6), 25-27. Retrieved from https://jalt-publications.org/sites/default/files/pdf/the_language_teacher/40.6tlt.pdf#page=27 

 

Wright, B.A. (2016). Transforming Language Learning with Quizlet. In P. Clements, A. Krause, & H. Brown (Eds.), Transformation in language education. Tokyo: JALT.

 

EDCI 336 Inquiry Project Wrap-Up Post

Time to finally tackle playing a complete song! The song in question is “Juanita”, a Spanish song that is the second exercise in my piano learning book. It has a catchy tune, and I have gotten quite good at playing the two parts separately, as you can see:

 

So, I should just be able to put them together, right? Well, not so fast. At first, I couldn’t seem to get it at all. However, I then realized that I should stop trying to combine the left and right hand parts at full tempo right away. After countless runs through it, I still could only manage to butcher it in very uneven slow-motion:

It appears that I have a lot more practice ahead of me to master the skill of playing different things with my two hands at the same time. That’s OK, though, as being able to stumble through at slow motion makes the whole thing seem not impossible. Continuing with my piano practice may be one of the things I do during a month-long winter break in which my social and other leisure activity options could be severely limited by COVID lockdown.

Overall, from this project I learned that putting learning and blogging about it off and doing binge catch-up was probably less effective and definitely more stressful than diligently staying on or ahead of schedule from day one. I am going to chalk that up to returning to full-time school for the first time in years during a pandemic and having to adjust to online instruction. I am no in a position to enter next semester feeling focused, motivated and decidedly not overwhelmed!

EDCI 336 Inquiry Project Post 6

After experiencing a discouraging level of difficulty last session, I decided I was in need of some inspiration to renew my enthusiasm for this project. Fortunately, I knew exactly whom to look to: Daryl Davis. Daryl is a very accomplished, veteran piano player who has played with legends like Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bruce Hornsby. Here is a little sample of his work:

However, his piano skills are only a small fraction of what makes Davis an incredible human being. The main reason I am a big fan of his, and the main reason I find him so inspiring, is that he has befriended hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members over the past 30 years. That’s right, KKK members.

It started at a gig, when a man approached Davis and told him he had never seen a black man play like Jerry Lee Lewis before. The irony of this statement struck Davis immediately, as many of Lewis’ important influences were black blues and boogie woogie piano players. He and the man struck up a conversation, during which Davis found out that this man had never held a conversation with a black person before and was a card-carrying member of the KKK. The man was intrigued enough by Davis to keep returning to his gigs, eventually befriending him and leaving the KKK. After that experience, Davis started seeking out Klan members, even attending rallies to talk to them. To date, over 200 KKK members have left the organization after their interactions with Davis:

 

EDI 336 Inquiry Project Post 5

OK, now I have definitely hit a difficult patch one session earlier than I though I would. What I thought would be really difficult for me was putting together the left hand part and right hand part of “Juanita”. As it turns out, the right hand part was a bit challenging on its own. There is a bit of jumping around that I found counterintuitive:

Piano 4

I am starting to experience some concern that playing the two parts simultaneously is going to be one of those skills one needs to develop from a young age or not at all. Given the fact that I am old enough to be past what the global average life expectancy was when my still living (albeit almost 104) grandmother was born, I am starting to think thoughts along the lines of old dogs and there ineptitude with regard to new tricks.

I am not going to lie; it took a lot of practice and several takes to make that video.  The only way I can This experience has me feeling pretty apprehensive about piecing them together tomorrow. Rather than just immerse myself in an overwhelming pool of frustration, however, I think I will find some inspiration and look up Youtube Videos specifically about learning to play left and right hand parts together.

EDCI 336 Inquiry Project Post 4

Moving on to the next phase of my learning, I am now starting to learn an actual song. In this case, it is a simple Spanish song called “Juanita” from the piano self-teaching book I picked up at the thrift store. Employing the Constructivist principle of mediated learning (scaffolding), I am focusing my efforts this time around on learning the left hand part first:

Piano 3

Unlike my experience with learning ukulele, in which I found that my guitar skills were highly, immediately transferable in spite of the fact that the chords, string notes and string order are all very different, playing the piano is too dissimilar to have the same effect. I wonder, if I were to take up a brass instrument, if my old tuba experience from elementary school band would resurface, or if it’s lost forever to the ravages of time? I suppose there’s only one way to find out (perhaps the subject of another inquiry  in the future?)

I am finding the aspect of playing separately with each hand a bit daunting, because most of my experience with musical instruments has been playing stringed instruments (guitar, ukulele, violin) on which the hands coordinate to play the same notes. Having to play two different sets of notes may very well confuse my brain…we’ll have to find out next time!

ADCI 336 A02 Week 10: Inquiry-Based Learning

For our second to last class, we had Trevor McKenzie as a guest speaker, talking about his experiences with inquiry-based teaching. Contrary to stereotypes about inquiry-based learning, He told us that it can include content-based learning and direct teaching, and that it was adaptable to subjects one might normally consider suitable for that approach.

In my own experience this semester, inquiry projects were initially a great source of stress. I felt very unclear and uncertain about what would qualify as an acceptable project, what would be an appropriate scope and size, and how to go about starting it. However, especially for my EDCI 780 Inquiry project, I really “got into a groove” as I progressed, and started to learn to have more faith in my own judgement and creativity. My project combined elements from my pre-PDP background: my experience with acting and film editing, as well as my history working at Craigdarroch castle playing the Dunsmuir family’s butler for school tours Christmas time. Here’s a sample:

This is one element of an interactive historical video tour of Craigdarroch that ties into the topics of the coal industry, politics and indigenous displacement in the late nineteenth century. This project has been increasingly enjoyable as I have progressed through it, and I have learned some interesting facts along the way!

EDCI 336 Inquiry Project Post 3

Rather than trying to learn completely on my own or spend even more time than I already do staring at a computer scree, I thought it would be nice to see if I could find some print resources for improving my piano skills. This time, I went to a thrift store near my house and purchased a piano book for $1.25. As you can see by the price tag, I got quite a deal! Although the description “Older beginner” rubbed me the wrong way a bit (I’m a bit sensitive because I am more than a decade older than most of my PDP colleagues), I do appreciate that it is not designed for young children and that it is the “Level 2” book, as I would suspect the Level 1 book to be insufficiently challenging, given my existing background.

As I tried learning the first exercise, I certainly developed the impression that having a musical background and being proficient in other instruments was largely a transferable skill. I felt as though I had made very good progress in a very short time:

Piano 2

My ultimate goal for this endeavour is to be able to actually play songs to accompany myself while I sing, and after this practice session I am definitely feeling quite optimistic about that!

EDCI 336 A02 Week 8: Educational Games

This week, we explored whether educational games could be an effective tool for learning. We started by evaluating the criteria for what makes a good educational game, which included that its level of difficulty should be challenging but not overwhelming, which is very similar in principle to Lev Vygostky’s concept of the zone of proximal development, which states that students learn best when exposed to material or skills at a level that is just beyond their current knowledge or ability. This theory component is very much in line with my own thoughts on game development as I developed activities during my career in child care and writing my book of original games for kids.

Today we tried out two educational game activities. The first was a game entitled “Bad News” from getbadnews.com, and the second was a virtual escape room using Google Classroom, in which the puzzle we needed to solve in order to escape was based on questions about Bad News and other educational game resources, such as Minecraft.

Bad News was very interesting, fun, and creatively put together with a lot of great humour, and therefore really seemed like an excellent means of getting students interested in learning about the fake news industry and keeping them engaged as they develop online media literacy and critical thinking skills. The game pokes fun at Twitter, Partisan News networks, bloggers, President Trump, and conspiracy theories and anti-science rhetoric in  a way that is both educational and funny. I think I would like to try having students play this game, others, or maybe even similar games I make myself!

 

EDCI 336 Inquiry Project Post 2

I am conservatory-trained as an opera singer, and I am proficient in playing guitar, harmonica and ukulele. I can read music and have a moderate knowledge of musical theory. However, proficiency in playing the piano has long been a glaring gap in my musical skill and knowledge. Through my participation in musical theatre, I have spent a great deal of time around people who play piano very well, and I have often thought that becoming at least competent myself would be a very worthwhile endeavour. In addition to being one of the best ways to accompany myself singing and an excellent mode of songwriting, playing the piano at least a little bit would allow me as a TOC to fill in for the occasional music class when they absolutely can’t find anyone better qualified.

Fortunately, I already have a keyboard right in my bedroom, which I have previously used only for finding my notes when practicing songs. I will also have no trouble finding a mentor, as many people in my life, including my dad and one of my best friends, are quite skilled on the keys.

I have opted for a mixed approach, with some written resources, some online resources, and some autodidactic techniques. To start out, I printed myself a piano chords chart and learned the basic major chords:

Piano Chords Major