ORIENTATION

List of URLs for This Course

For teachers that are using computers behind a firewall, or with a strong filter, please download this list of URLs and ask the tech-support people in your schools to allow you to access these websites. Not all the students in the class will be using all of them, but they should be available if you want to see them. 

Quick Overview

Concepts and Tools

This course will explore concepts and tools. Some of the concepts will relate directly to teaching (and particularly teaching EFL/ESL). Some will relate to our responsibilities as educators to prepare our students to participate in the digital world. 

The tools will belong to a wide range of general technologies and specific applications that could improve teaching. Some of these tools will be relevant to your current teaching environment. Given the wide range of ages of your pupils; obviously, not all of the tools will be relevant. In addition, some of your schools have weak, or non-existent, technological infrastructures. But your future teaching environment may be very different. You may move to another school, you may teach very different grade levels, and your school may upgrade its technological infrastructure. Given our experiences with COVID-19, many conservative schools are making the jump into the digital age.

There will be a reasonably short assignment for most lessons in this course. These assignments can take two forms: a written response or a small-scale "proof-of-knowledge" task with the digital tools. This work comes under the syllabus's term of "ongoing work." Hopefully, the tasks will be well defined at the bottom of each lesson's webpage. (Please be aware that, given your varied backgrounds, some assignments will be more complicated for some students than others. but this will tend to average out over time. Other assignments will be easier for the former than the latter. In all cases, assignments will be easier and faster if you ask your peers for help. You are all in the same boat, so row together! Ultimately, email me or WhatsApp me if there are any questions, problems, or other concerns for which your peers can't provide  answers.) 

Please see your short textual responses as an opportunity to practice Standard Academic English (a dialect that you will need for your seminar papers and final project in the M.Ed. program). Occasionally, I will grade the quality of the written reviews according to rubrics I will provide, but most tasks will receive full credit if reasonably done and submitted on time. You will submit these written responses in the proper MOODLE forum. (Make sure you follow the instructions to post your written responses into the correct forum. If you don't, then your work will not appear in the correct discussion, other students probably will not see your contribution to the discussion, and I will not be able to grade your participation.) 

I will record the grades for the "ongoing work" in MOODLE which has an online grade book that presents the grade and calculates the cumulative grade. You will be able to point out if I have made any mistakes in the grading. (I depend on vigilant students to help me keep their grades correct.) 

The Major Project of the Course 

Besides learning about each tool throughout the course, you will demonstrate your accumulated knowledge about them in a class website that you create as the major project of this course. So keep track of where you SAVE each of your tool-based tasks. If you do your weekly work and keep track of your weekly output, you will have completed 98% of the website even before you get to the end of the course! 

Your website project will be for a hypothetical (or real) EFL class that you might teach. In general, the grade will reflect the usability of your class website in the hands of your own students (as defined by the rubrics). So check the evolving PUBLISHED version of your project. Ask yourselves: Can my students see and use each item in the easiest way possible?  In particular, can my students see all the important elements in the item, as it appears in the class website? (Note: Check this in an alternative browser - not the one you use to create the material.)

The exact details for the website project are in the rubrics for the project; but at the moment, those instructions will have little meaning. As the course proceeds, the pieces of the puzzle will become clear and fall into place. Please note the importance of keeping on schedule! If you fall behind, the requirements of the major project at the end of the course may become overwhelming.  

The Seminar Paper

A seminar paper, which has something to do (directly or indirectly) with technology and EFL, is a requirement in this course. Learning how to do a seminar paper will be part of the course, appearing at logical times to help you with your progress. You will have to submit the final draft of the seminar paper by the beginning of next fall's semester. Please note: Do not procrastinate! The deadline arrives much too quickly!  To help you, there will be deadlines for drafts of certain sections of your seminar paper throughout the course. Here are two of the first deadlines:

1. You should choose a general topic well before Hanukah vacation.  Once again, the topic has to deal with technology and EFL. You can just email me a short message (a few sentences) and get permission for the general topic. 

   • Please note: You will present new data, generated for your individual seminar paper. While you may have learned important concepts in other courses, you may not use data produced in other courses. In addition, while I encourage you to discuss your ideas with other students, your seminar paper must be the product of your work alone. 

   • A potential topic is: using a particular A.I. tool in your classroom. Although you would not be able to directly measure its influence on the students' knowledge, you can measure how motivated your students felt about using that AI tool. After citing (in your literature review) some of the abundant literature indicating the link between motivation and successful foreign language learning, you would be able to suggest that your students learned English (assuming they did indeed enjoy using the AI tool). 

   • In fact, because you will not be directly able to measure any of your students' learning within any bounds of statistical significance, the most productive route is probably a "motivational study." Let your students use a tool at least twice. (The first time will be for learning how to use the tool. The second and subsequent times will be for actually using the tool.) Then ask your students at least the following four questions:

     1. Did you enjoy using the tool? (a multiple choice question)

     2. Would you like to use the tool again in class? (a multiple choice question)

     3. Do you think that you learned English while using the tool? (a multiple choice question)

     4. To what extent do you think that you learned English with the tool (a scale-based question)

Make sure that you have reported in your Literature Review on at least one recent article that points to the correlation (or even causality) between motivation and successful foreign language learning. This will allow you to suggest (although suggestion may not be a strong assertion) that your chosen tool does (or does not) increase student motivation and therefore probably increases the success of learning a foreign language. 

2. You must submit a brief (less than a page) seminar paper proposal as an email attachment to me by Chanukah vacation.  This should have: 

   • a brief introduction, explaining your general topic and why you are interested in it; 

   • your research question; 

   • a brief description about how you plan to deal with your research question (with a questionnaire, interviews, observations, etc.); and 

   • a short bibliography of potentially good sources.  

(Please see the document entitled: Doing a Seminar Paper with Dr. Backer.)  

Once again, the topic of your seminar paper has to be connected, directly or indirectly, with the nature and content of this course. (You can examine the menu of our class website and skim the various pages to start thinking about possible research topics.) You will develop and present the seminar paper as a traditional research project (although on a very small scale), including original data collection and analysis. 

A problem for some Sha'anan grad students is the weak, or non-existent, technological infrastructure in their schools. This means that examining a particular tool might not be possible. Alternatively, you can survey and report on the knowledge and attitudes of teachers and/or administrators about the concepts or technologies that we deal with during the course. 

Download and skim the two documents:

• "Instructions and Rubrics for Seminar Papers" and

•  "Doing a Seminar Paper with Dr. Backer." 

In the future you will be going back to these two basis documents and closely examining the specific sections that you need at any particular point. Please do not waste time (your time, the other students' time, and my time) by asking questions about the seminar paper process before you read the relevant sections of these two basic documents.

These two documents should get you thinking about your seminar paper. Please remember that you must submit a brief seminar paper proposal by Chanukah vacation. Please do not put this aside until later. Time passes much faster than you think!

IMPORTANT: 

1. You must first get approval for your seminar proposal before you start any other work (other than searching for sources and reading them). 

2. When you get approval for your proposal, the next step is to get approval of the questions for your questionnaire or interview. DO NOT use your questionnaire or interview questions without approval. This will avoid poorly designed questionnaires and embarrassing mistakes of grammar, diction, spelling, and the logical ordering of the questions. 

3. At the same time, you are encouraged to search for sources and to read them in preparation for your Literature Review section of the seminar paper. When you find a potentially good source, make sure you write down the following information (which the Reference List needs): author's family name and first initial; the title of the article or book; the year of publication; if it is an article from a journal, get the name of the journal, the volume number, the issue number (if there is one), and page numbers (if there are any); if it is a book, get the publisher's name; if it's an online source, get the URL; if its a chapter in an edited book, get the name(s) of the editor(s), the name of the book, the name of the chapter, the page numbers of the chapter, and the publisher's name.   

4. In order to get credit for your seminar paper, you must receive a cumulative grade of at least 70% for your weekly tasks and your Website. If you keep to the schedule, you will probably receive a cumulative grade in the 90s. An assignment that you submit late will receive 80% of its normal grade. So, please keep to the schedule and do not fall behind with the assignments.    

This Google Site

This class will be in a hybrid mode: usually one week f2f (face to face) and one week online. Officially, we will have two asynchronous online sessions, with all the rest being synchronous. In reality, most of the online sessions will start synchronously and then transition to individual work. During asynchronous work, I will have online "office hours."  That being said, all the content of the course is in this website and will be functional as a mode of instruction.  When we meet on the Sha'anan campus, the website will be back-up and support (particularly if you missed a f2f session or you want to review). For online sessions, it will offer a sufficient base for a full educational experience. 

Homework in the Course

For many lessons in our class website, there will be work (done in class or at home), which will relate to the content of the lesson. It will appear at the bottom of each lesson page. I strongly suggest that you submit the homework by midnight two days before the next lesson. This will give time for other students to read your first post and perhaps respond to it. You MUST submit your work by midnight of the next lesson. 

Please note:  

• Late homework (without a really good excuse) will receive a penalty of 20% of the normal grade. 

• Your initial post is worth 60% of the grade.

• Your REPLY to al least one other student is worth 40% of the grade. Make your REPLY meaningful, after reading other students' initial posts.

• If you do not post your work to the proper place (i.e., the proper MOODLE discussion forum), you will not receive a grade because your post is not part of the class discussion on the current  topic.

These penalties will encourage you to be on time and post your work in the proper location (so that the other students can benefit from it and respond to it). This means that the entire class will be working on the same material during the time period. Posts and replies will be real student interaction and will be educationally functional, not just some isolated texts added to get a grade. 

Once again, there will be one of two possible forms of assignments (explained in each homework section):

1. A written response to the content of the lesson in the MOODLE forum for the particular lesson. I don't intent to count the words of every response, but if someone obviously has hurriedly typed a very short response, then that person should not be surprised by a less-than-perfect grade.  

After reading the other students' comments, you will REPLY to at least one of the students in a meaningful way, under the specific student's text. In that way, all the conversation about the homework will be in one place and easy to follow (and grade). Please note: a "meaningful" REPLY is more than "Great," "I agree," etc. You must explain why you agree, disagree, or (even better) add to the information.

2. You will share your experimentation (i.e., your mini-task) with tools presented in a particular lesson in the appropriate MOODLE discussion forum. You will also REPLY to someone else's mini-task by the midnight before the next lesson. Remember: You depend on other students and they depend on you for really understanding the tools (and completing the course with the highest possible grade). Because each of you have different experiences, you probably can suggest ways of using the tools for non-obvious audiences and in non-obvious ways.   

Email and the Class WhatsApp Group

Two additional avenues of communications in this course are email and a class WhatsApp group.  

The WhatsApp group will be for short and quick announcements, questions, and other class-related matters. Everyone in the group will receive the messages. Please keep messages that do not relate to the course in other WhatsApp groups.

Please use email for individual communications with me. Please use: drjamesbacker@yahoo.com 

Searching for Sources for Your Seminar Paper and Other Academic Work

As grad students, you will have to write seminar papers, final projects, and smaller academic papers; all of which must be based on sources. The best sources are academic articles from peer-reviewed journals. You can access a number of databases with such journals via the online library services of Sha'anan College. Form your search terms logically so that you will find what you are looking for.

The next best type of source is the large pool of academic articles and books that are not peer-reviewed. Once again, you will be able to find many of these sources via the online library services or with a search engine (e.g., Google Search).

One step lower in the quality of academic sources come from "trade journals." These are periodicals that deal with specific topics and often carry advertising from companies offering goods and services relating to the specific topics. The quality of the articles in trade journals can vary from excellent to absolute garbage. Make sure you know who is writing the article and if the writer represents a company in the field. (Btw, a representative of a company may present excellent information, but obviously has a financial interest in doing so.) You can easily access these articles via regular search engines, like Google Search, Bing, etc.) If you form your search term correctly, you will be able to find these articles in the first few pages of search results.

Search engines will also bring you to blogs, websites, podcasts, video clips, and a host of other sources with information that may be worthwhile to your paper, or may be total trash. It's up to you to find out who is presenting the information and why.  

Warning: Using AI tools may or may not be a good way for finding academic sources. AI tools quite often "hallucinate" and provide you with good-sounding, but non-existing, sources. Whenever you use AI tools for factual information, check the results!!

Here's a short video tutorial that will point you in the right direction when thinking about the sources you found.

Some Searching Tips:

• Think about alternative search terms, not just synonyms but also conceptual alternatives. 

• Some common domain names:

.com = commercial 

.co = commercial outside of the United States

.edu = institution of higher learning in the USA 

.ac = institution of higher learning outside the USA

.gov = governmental

.mil = military

.org = organization

.net = network

• You can search for a list of country domain extension names, like this one: https://www.worldstandards.eu/other/tlds/ 

Here are some tips for Google Search, but they may also work on alternative search engines.

• Create a lexical unit with quotation marks. Example: "Charlie Brown" will not waste your time on all the Charlies and all the Browns in the world.

• The asterisk is a wild card. Example: poe* will return items with poem, poems, poet, poets, poetic, stuff about/by Edgar Allan Poe, as well as longer words that start with "poe." 

• The "site:" search operand (followed immediately by a domain name; without a space, but with the initial period) will bring back all the items with that domain name. Examples: site:.gov will bring back pages published by the government, site:.ac.se will bring back pages published by academic institutions in Sweden.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar will help you find good articles, but it probably will not provide the full text of the articles. You will have to take the reference information to a data-base, like those at the Sha'anan College library's online services.  

Alternative Search Engines to Google Search

Google Search is the most widely used search engine in the world, but the are many other search engines. Some of them, like DuckDuckGo promise not to store and sell your personal data to third parties (something that Google does). Ecosia is a search engine that fights the global climate crisis. Its profits go to plant trees in various countries around the world, particularly in the southern hemisphere. Ecosia claims that it does not save your searching, track your browsing, or sell your personal data to third parties. For the average user, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia perform like Google and most of the other search engines. 

Important links for this course:

Syllabus for this course

Doing a Seminar Paper with Dr. Backer

Sha'anan English M.Ed. Department - Maintaining Academic Integrity - for students

The Ministry of Education's Regulations about Teachers' Research (Hebrew)

• Unofficial English Version of MoE's Regulations about Teachers' Research

Sha'anan College Instructions and Rubrics for Seminar Papers (updated: 29.8.2024)

Instructions and Rubrics for the Major Project (class Web site) (updated: 21.7.2024)

PPT: Basic APA-7 Requirements for Sha'anan College

APA Headings and Sub-headings

The OWL instructions for A.P.A. in-text citations

The OWL instructions for A.P.A. reference lists

Video about making hanging indents for APA reference lists

Homework:

Please note: Late homework will be penalized 20% of the initial grade. Your first post is worth 60% and the second post (a meaningful response to some one else) is worth 40%. 

A. Go to our MOODLE class and do the following:

1. Either upload a personal photo or a personal avatar (a representative picture) for your  MOODLE profile. 

2. Look for the "Personal Introductions" forum and click on its link.  In that forum please briefly introduce yourself to the class. How long have you been teaching? What grades do you teach? Have you had previous experience with using educational technology in your EFL class? (Perhaps you have done this in other classes, but I don't have that information.) 

3. In the "Lesson 01- Orientation" forum, please write a brief description of your experience with search engines (online libraries, internet search engines, etc.) and evaluating sources that you find using them. Make sure you answer at least two of the following questions:

1. • What do you know about the pros and cons of using Google Search?  How much do you know about alternative search engines? 

   • Do you feel that teachers should spend time teaching their pupils about search engines? Why? Why not? 

   • What did you think about the video about the CRAP method? Does it help you? Should you show this to your high school students? 

4. Read all the initial posts in the "Personal Introduction" forum AND the "Lesson 01 - Orientation" forum REPLY to another student in EACH of the discussion fora with meaningful messages. (Please note: "I agree" or "Good work" is not a meaningful message. Explain why you agree, or not. Your REPLY is part of the peer-interaction of the class. Let's learn from each other!)

Make sure you post your messages by midnight before the next lesson.

Please note: If you post your initial text in the wrong place, it will not be part of the class discussion on the current topic. Few will see it. Few will benefit from it and few will be able to respond to it. Thus, your post will be (almost) worthless and will receive a grade of zero. Just follow the instructions and get the full grade!