Introducing ALTopedia by Jake Whiton

by Jake Whiton

Bio: Jake is an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) working in Nagano prefecture. He has taught junior high school for 6 years as well as some high school classes.

He's from Washington state in the US. In his free time, he learns about web design, tries to get some exercise, and eats tonkatsu.

If there’s one thing an ALT needs, it’s ideas. ALTs are expected to bring fun, relevant, and accessible activities into their classes. Coming up with new games and activities on top of all of the day-to-day tasks of teaching can be a challenge - fortunately ALTopedia is here to help!

ALTopedia is a new site designed to help English teachers find activities tailored to their unique circumstances. I've worked hard to develop it in my spare time. There have been thousands of ALTs working in countless Japanese schools over several decades, and we think it would be to everyone’s benefit to have a place to gather their accumulated wisdom and ideas.

Whether it’s a warm-up game that requires very little explanation but energizes the class, or an in-depth speaking and writing activity to make a tricky grammar point relatable and interesting - we’re hoping ALTopedia will be the best place to find the ideas that have worked well for other teachers in the past.

You might be familiar with another site called Englipedia which was set up for the same purpose, and indeed, ALTopedia is its successor.

How is ALTopedia any different from its predecessor or several other sites which do something similar? I’ll start out by giving a brief history of Englipedia and how the new site has come about.

Englipedia was originally started in 2007 and grew to house over a thousand activities for elementary, junior high, and high school classes. I first came across the site when I was starting out in 2012.

It was recommended to me as the best source to find activities for class.

I remember that it was really helpful to be able to look up which page I was on in our school’s textbook and finding activities based on what that part of the textbook I was covering.

But I also remember that the site was a little creaky even back then. I would suddenly stumble across another corner of the site with a couple dozen activities that would have been really useful to me if I’d found them a month or two earlier.

I noticed that textbook listings or activities sometimes referred to previous versions of the textbook. I remember trying to contribute my own activities, but the submission form was broken. I noticed that no new warm-ups ever made their way into the listings, and new activities only trickled in in bursts.

It seemed like whoever was running the Englipedia site wasn’t keeping up with it by the time I’d found it.

A couple years later I met Al, another ALT here in Nagano. I was surprised to hear that he was the person running Englipedia. He wasn’t the original creator, but he was managing the site and looking for volunteers to help modernize it.

To hear him tell it, the site was originally built using some particular web software called Sharepoint. As the site grew larger and larger, it only became more difficult to manage.

If a user submitted a new activity, Al said it took him about 30 minutes to add it to the site. He had to copy and paste all of the information, upload files, and then go through the site and manually add links to it on any page that might be relevant. To make matters worse, the platform that the site was running on was being shut down, so there was no choice but to seriously rebuild and redesign it.

My understanding is that Al and the site’s original owner had different ideas about where to take the site in the future. Al decided it would be better to make a new site using the lessons he’d learned from managing Englipedia. I got in touch with him about a year ago to start outlining ideas for what would become ALTopedia, and we launched it in the spring of 2018.

The big advancement of ALTopedia is that it’s a modern web application designed to do its job right from the site’s code.

Englipedia, and other sites that function on a wiki-style model, can suffer from one big weakness as they grow larger - they were designed to be static web pages where users manually create links between them.

On a small site where one administrator can keep track of everything, this can be manageable, but a site the size of Englipedia ran into problems with discoverability.

Should this board game be linked under “Junior High School - General”? It uses mostly past tense questions, but also “can” - should it be linked under both grammar points? Maybe a teacher has discovered that the game works well for a small class of elementary-aged students, but there may not be any effective way to communicate this alongside dozens of other small tasks the site’s administrator needs to perform. And how much time is it going to take to rebuild textbook listings when they get revised?

ALTopedia addresses these issues of categorization and discoverability using tags.

You’ve probably seen them on sites like blogs. They’re similar to hashtags from different social media services. An activity has a big list of tags on it - things like its grammar point, the appropriate school level, which parts of learning it uses, and even if it applies to a particular textbook.

If you want to find more activities using that grammar point, you can click on the tag and go to a listing of all activities that use it. The listing will always be up to date, and since the site’s database was designed with them in mind, they’re updated automatically.

Submitting an activity is as simple as signing up and filling in a standard web form. There’s a list of grammar points and other information, which will become tags that help users find the activity.

We have a moderator check activities really quick to make sure that they aren’t spam, but all they have to do is click a button and it’s up on the site.

If you realized you forgot to add something or want to edit it, it’s no problem - you can revise your activities as many times as you want.

If you really like an activity (including your own) you can give it a thumbs up, which will make it show up higher in search results.

I’ve tried to design the site so it can be an effective vault for a huge number of activities, while still being easy to search and use.

The design is lightweight and works with mobile devices and tablets, so even if you’re stuck using your school’s ancient computer (or your smartphone), you can still use the site. I’m still coding and adding features to the site, so you can always drop a line and I’ll see what I can do.

Having operated the site for a little while, I’ve developed an appreciation for the large community that developed in Englipedia’s early days.

A lot of people went to considerable effort to share their activities and games with other teachers. In its last few years the community seemed to shrink a lot, but we’re hoping we can build something even better.

I’ve uploaded a lot of my activities that I’ve come up with over the years, but the site won’t be a great resource until it has contributions from a wide variety of people.

We’d be happy to see yours!

-          A note from ALT training online’s David Hayter

If you have something 'ALT' to write about that hasn't been covered in these blogs, email me at alttoblog@gmail.com so we can work together and spread your story.

Don't have any ideas? We have a list of topics to write about that need a writer. Email in your interest to write and we can set you up. 

For upcoming blogs see the blogs tab here:  http://www.alttrainingonline.com/blog.html

Five Free Ed-Tech Resources to Educate, Enhance, and Engage English Efficacy by Huy Tran

by Huy Tran

Educational Technology Columnist

Bio: Huy Tran is a Global Education Designer who trains ALTs, JTEs, and teaches ESL learners how to harness the powerful tools of the 21st Century.

He received his Bachelors of Science in Education from the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. He was a math, science, and English JHS teacher for LAUSD for seven years.

He then founded a private tutoring company online during the very early days of e-learning while testing out the potential of VOIP software as a teaching tool. 

After seven years, he realized he missed the living classroom and desired to see how an education system outside of the United States functions. Initially, a one year break from Los Angeles city life turned into eight years, a wife, a five year old, and his own private English school in the rural town of Yamaga.

He has been introducing active learning, group project based learning, computer assisted learning, and other innovations into the Japanese education system of teaching English; first as an Assistant Language Teacher with Interac, then a direct hire by the local Board of Education to train and mentor new ALTs.

He now devotes his time as an educational consultant to private schools, BOEs, and teachers on 21st Century, globalized, active learning strategies through workshops and presentations. He is an active member of JALT (the Japanese Association of Language Teachers) and conduct workshops, presentations and demos on the benefits of Skype in the Classroom, computer assisted learning, and autonomous learning. 

He has presented at conferences in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. As a Microsoft Innovative Educator, he has mentored, trained, collaborated and connected with over 30 teachers in over 14 countries in the past five years. He firmly believes that the next 20 years will see an educational transition in methodologies, and that 20th Century institutional learning will be completely transformed.

ICT (Information and communication technology) is fundamentally used in today's classrooms around the world. Although Japan is perceived as a hi-tech country, in reality it is sorely lagging behind other Asian countries such as Korea and Vietnam. Computer coding is primed for mandatory implementation in Japanese primary schools by the Ministry of Education in 2020. It’s an excellent goal but it comes at least a decade behind schools in Silicon Valley.

Early student exposure to computers and smartphones as learning tools and not just entertainment devices in the early stages of their education will motivate them to seek more knowledge over the Internet and build critical thinking skills through interactive digital resources.

ICT may also be the magic toolbox in regards to students’ learning and strengthening their engagement with collaborative learning. Here are five tried and tested digital resources that have significantly helped my students at The Language Kitchen, an English Immersive Organized Learning Environment.

ABCya - Yasss Queen!

ABCya specializes in computer games and learning apps for kids but the learning skills that are practiced are just as fun and useful for adults. Don't let the cute graphic design fool you. Packed in are tons of English, logic, critical thinking, and activities to boost the creative skills that students of all levels will enjoy.

Basic computer literacy is a key skill that I noticed many of my newly enrolled English students were sorely lacking. Mouse navigation, comprehending the graphical user interface, and keyboarding skills are easily practiced with the use of hundreds of learning games aimed at the Pre-K to 5th grade level.

Organizing students into pairs or small groups allows them to problem solve together on how to play the games and learn. Students who have challenges in social communication, perhaps on the autistic spectrum, can greatly benefit from computer based learning platforms. Some may even argue that their brains are more naturally wired to transition their autistic brain into a blossoming career in computers.

Starfall – Shoot for the Stars

Phonics, reading, and pronunciation are the key skills that Starfall provides in a fun way no matter the age or skill level of your students. A complete guide for parents and teachers is available with tips and tricks on how to effectively use the digital resource to support students' learning.

Predominantly for use on computers, the company also has some of its learning activities for mobile apps as well. Key skills such as phonetic and phonemic awareness, reading aloud, and computer skills are aimed at primary school level students but English students of any age will benefit from the easy to use point and click format.

The animated interface is well designed and sound quality is high. The use of young voices is a nice subtle touch for your own young learners as a model to practice their pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm.

Students in groups of three or four can work together by playing the educational games while also freeing the teacher to give more one on one attention to lower skilled students who require more social interaction to effectively learn.

Skype in the Classroom – Ten Years in and Skype is Now a Verb

If you have not implemented Skype as part of your curriculum then your students are missing out on one of the biggest opportunities toward authentic language learning in the 21st Century.

Skype in the Classroom is now ten years old and I have been successfully using it connect my students with classrooms around the world. My students have been actively using Skype to meet and build friendships with students from over 17 different countries and over 100 different classrooms over the past ten years. Joining Skype in the Classroom is free for educators and has online courses, projects, lessons, and, most importantly, connections to fellow educators who want to build strong interpersonal relationships between globally minded classrooms.

Teachers can also connect with guest speakers such as scientists on the bottom of the ocean, explorers summiting Everest, and even people like the astronaut, Randolph Bresnik, web chatting from the International Space Station. An almost endless amount of like minded teachers from around the globe are ready to make your students' English communication skills real and meaningful.

Kahoot! - An Awesome Hoot and Ninja Learning to Boot

Kahoot is a game based learning platform that takes your old fashioned flipping flashcard recall skills to a fun and engaging game show format. Teachers custom make their own game shows to assess students' skills and understanding.

If you are pressed for time, simply utilize any one of the thousands of other learning game shows that have been created, uploaded and shared by collaborative teachers around the globe.

The platform has the ability to embed videos from YouTube so that teachers may incorporate listening comprehension skills.

The game based and trivia learning platform is able to be used on smartphones, computers, and tablets at the same time. Students' scores and results are automatically recorded in detail on an Excel sheet and can be downloaded for the teacher to review the students' competency.

A few caveats are that your classroom does require internet access, a main screen for the teacher and student players to collectively see the question screen. My students, from as young five to fifty years old, have had great fun while being focused and engaged playing Kahoot. We have often played the game for the entire class time.

I sneakily review concepts, check their listening and reading comprehension and assess their learning at the same time. We have even played across time zones and continents with the use of Skype's “Share the Screen” function with students in Japan competing with classrooms in Vietnam, Korea, and Germany. It certainly delivers on its promise to “Make Learning Awesome!”

Schoology – Pronounced as Skoo-luh-gee

Schoology is the self-dubbed “world's leading learning management system (LMS)” that connects educators around the world to support student achievement and cultivate teacher collaboration.

I have only used it for about a year with a Japanese high school class in Fukuoka connecting with an American high school class in Texas and garnered positive responses from both classrooms as an authentic communication tool for the students’ second language development.

Its potential as a second language learning tool is limited only by the students and teachers own creativity. The platform utilizes a familiar graphical user interface of social media sites such as Facebook in a closed circuit system. The teachers are able to monitor, control, and delete all interactions between students and users outside of the classrooms are unable to join.

Students and teachers are able to upload photos, videos, links, reading materials, and even worksheets for everyone within the closed classroom account. Students can post reactions and comments to each other in the social media styles of Instagram, LINE, and WeChat.

The platform also has an app available for mobile devices which makes it natural for students to share their thoughts and interests. Teachers can create a specific topic of discussion, assign reading and even give YouTube lectures while monitoring students' engagement on those projects.

Schoology also comes pre-integrated with over 200 tools and other educational apps such Dropbox, Google Drive, Kahn Academy, Voicethread and Quizlet to a name a few.

An Old Dog Must Learn New Tricks

Some parents and even a few teachers will seem reticent at first to implement ICT literacy as part of the language acquisition curriculum. Most likely, this is due to their own lack of exposure to e-learning and m-learning from their own educational experience.

Yet, it cannot be denied that ICT has become an integral part of everyday life in the 21st century. This information trend and the essential skills necessary will only continue to evolve and become an increasingly integral learning and communication tool.

The use of ICT in education not only adds value in teaching, and enhances the effectiveness of second language learning, but adds an extra qualitative value to learning that was never available before in human history. Your classroom is now in the digital age of information, instantaneous cross cultural interaction, and knowing answers to questions is only one smartphone assistant query away. There is no looking back.

-          A note from ALT training online’s David Hayter

If you have something 'ALT' to write about that hasn't been covered in these blogs, email me at alttoblog@gmail.com so we can work together and spread your story.

Don't have any ideas? We have a list of topics to write about that need a writer. Email in your interest to write and we can set you up. 

For upcoming blogs see the blogs tab here:  http://www.alttrainingonline.com/blog.html