Web-Teach

I’ve been looking around and haven’t seen anything that looks even remotely like the Web-Teach project.

Either I’ve come up with something truly revolutionary, or others have come and gone.

Personally I’d like to think it’s the former. In fact, I’m staking quite a considerably reputation on this so it’d better be true.

I’ve been looking at the way Language training has embraced Web 2.0 and can’t come up with anything. The only tangible proof that English Language Learning has embraced blog technology (or vice versa) was the sort of thing I found here, a delightful space within a general interest blog by Gradual Dazzle or the more adventurous, em, adventures, over on A.J.Hoge’s blog.

At an individual level, a blog/student interaction is always going to have difficultly replacing the teacher/student experience. Teachers react “live” to their students’ moods, confusion and - miracle of miracles - enlightenment. As dynamic as it may seem at face value, a blog is still a static media inasmuch as they express the teacher’s (writer’s) thoughts, and the student (reader) then has to follow. It’s just a modern take on the passive teaching system students have had to live with since time immemorial.

The most fun I ever had teaching was when I discovered how to make the students active members of their lesson groups. This happens when teachers give their students the tools they need to ask questions, keep them on the right track, and let them do the discovering.

Anyone can learn on their own. You just need a reason not to stop. When I came to Italy, I got hungry. That was enough to set and keep me on my way. If you’re learning a language, skill or subject, it’s not the complexity of the task at hand that makes it difficult to keep going, it’s your own pre-installed limits. As I see it, the role of a teacher has always been to get their students beyond that level. If you can do it by teaching them to take an active role in creating their own pace and rhythm, then you’ve got a much better chance of them making real progress.

A good course is one where the student learns at least twice as much as he or she thinks they are. That is to say, by making them study one thing, you give them a few more, preferably without them even noticing. If you give them the right tools to do this on their own and go beyond their own limits, then you’ve just replaced the teacher, or at least the need to interact directly with each step of your student’s learning curve.
Very Web 2.0 I hear you say. Well actually it is as Web-Teach was designed to do just that.

It started as a way of retaining my student’s interest in the didactic side of things when all they wanted to do was chat. I have seen and participated in enough “conversation” lessons to know that as a teacher, you come away empty.

So I created a magazine written in such a way as to teach without teaching (there’ll be more of this revealed as the Web-Teach project gathers pace). As a standalone idea, it’s an ideal candidate for Web 2.0 transition and not too far off what Jeremy Wright’s done over at B5Media.
Brilliant as it this may be, it isn’t a course so I reverse engineered the techniques I used in my lessons to create an adaptive learning programme that followed a set course to a degree, but adjusts the timing, content and complexity of the learning material in line with the student’s particular ability.

What I then did was map this course over the ‘magazine” so that the contents of the lessons are never the same.

The end result is an adaptive learning platform that harnesses the power and flexibility of RSS to deliver constantly renewed and topic-relevant content within an adaptive learning environment to an unlimited number of students, allowing teachers to follow them individually or collectively and finally break the 2-dimensional teaching mould we’ve been tied to for so long.

Sounds like fun huh?