Classrooms that Matter
Over the last three months I’ve been working with lots of interesting people. We’ve been studying powerpoint and presentation styles with the help of Guy Kawasaki and Dick Hardt, we’ve been learning how to write email that is faster, and more efficient, we’ve been delving into podcasting in education, and most recently, how to use RSS and Bloglines to enhance market research.
Sound like your typical ESL classroom? Well, in one way, it shouldn’t. I think every ESL classroom should be buzzing about something uniquely important to its participants. There should be no cookie cutter classrooms, where you drop in on the intermediate level folks of one classroom, and then drop into another room of intermediates in another classroom and hear/see the same content being taught.
I think, if we want to be successful at what we do, then there must be strong personalization of classroom work.
So lately I’ve been doing a lot of listening to what my clients tell me. One group, that has turned out to be the one of the most interesting for me, are regional sales reps at a major credit card company. They do tonns of presentations, and are constantly having to troll the news for what their clients are up to in order to offer better services.
They’ve loved Kawasaki’s stuff, and were floored by Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation. (So was I the first time I saw it.) Then we tried applying it to their own work. One student profusely thanked me. She was terrified of making her first English presentation in front of the "big bosses" of her company. She showed me her presentation one class before her debut, and it was the perfect candidate for a Kawasaki makeover. We spent the rest of the class talking about how we could transform her presentation, and she went to work all that night, giving it a total makeover.
The next afternoon she called me and excitedly told me how well it went. Before the makeover, she was deadly nervous because she was trying to cram as much info as possible onto her ppoint slides, scared that she might leave something important out.
We worked on cutting all the "stuffing" down to key words and phrases, which would force her to really know what she had to say. The result: some nervousness, but far greater confidence in the actual presentation. She said that it went brilliantly, and had Kawasaki to thank.
And lately we’ve been working on using RSS to enhance market research. A few of my students rely on outside news sources to help them do their job, so the other day I started talking with them out RSS coolness and how Bloglines could help reduce their workload.
I totally loved this article by Anita Campbell around removing the "geek factor" from RSS. While explaining RSS, I focus my attention on helping my students understand what it would allow them to do, instead of the more geeky side of feeds, and code, etc.
The result: One student who has already used bloglines to spot some new services she could offer to a client she manages in Peru.
This is my vision for ESL classrooms that matter. There shouldn’t be a disconnect from what you do in class, and what you do when you leave class. There should by synergy. What do you think?
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