Ixchell Reyes
The DIESOL podcast,

Brent Warner
Digital Integration English as a Second or Other Language,

Ixchell Reyes
Episode 26. How to evaluate and choose edtech for the ESL classroom.

Brent Warner
Hello, and welcome to DIESOL Episode 26. We are your hosts I am Brent Warner,

Ixchell Reyes
and I’m Ixchell Reyes.

Brent Warner
Hi Ixchell! Hey, this is quite different today. So what’s happening? This is a special a special occasion for

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, I’m just about six feet away from you.

Brent Warner
That’s right. We’re in the same. Well, we’re not in a room. We’re on a we’re on my patio,

Ixchell Reyes
in Orange County of all places in California.

Brent Warner
Wow. Together. This is the first time we have done this together.

Ixchell Reyes
Right. Right. Right, right.

Brent Warner
It’s been a long time since since we’ve been in a room. And now we are finally recording it. But like I said, we are on the patio. So you may hear quite a few engine noises that are not our sound effects. I live right on a fairly major Street. And so, but we wanted to record together I thought that you know, that was important. It was cool. An opportunity to do it. And so here we are.

Ixchell Reyes
And we are right, like super close to the beach. So it is amazing. It feels so good to be here. So thank you.

Brent Warner
Well, I mean, I don’t live on the beach, but

Ixchell Reyes
He’s lying. There palm trees everywhere.

Brent Warner
I guess compared to Texas, maybe that’s true. Okay, so, so good to see you. Glad We’re here. We’re having some coffee together. And it’s been a nice day, a beautiful day out and enjoying a little bit of the California weather. So welcome back from Texas temporarily.

Ixchell Reyes
Thank you, sir.

Brent Warner
So what else is new?

Ixchell Reyes
Um, well, as you know, we had que ocsla at Camp Keo CLA a week ago. And yeah, you were part of that. Yeah. And I was part of that. And that’s one of the great things about being able to join things online. I was very happy with the with both of the webinars I attended. How were your sessions?

Brent Warner
Yeah, they were good. So I was actually on the coordination team for that. It was it was great, really well organized, put together. And a great opportunity. So people really liked it. Yeah. And I didn’t, you know, I was kind of manning the ship at certain times. And so I didn’t get to go into every session. But but the ones that I did get to go into a really cool and we kind of split it up into two ways. So the first day was kind of more traditional presentations and those things. And then the second day was kind of the more proper edcamp style, where it’s just like, hey, let’s just go check. And, you know, let’s have an open conversation about this thing. And that was really excellent, too. So I was very happy. Yeah,

Ixchell Reyes
it’s actually been the first time I’ve been to an ED camp in a while because I haven’t attended, I haven’t found any over in Texas, maybe I’m not looking in the right places. But oh, man, it felt good to be back. Because he just makes so many connections. And I know that a lot of the people that I know, I’ve met at Ed camps and all the tips and tricks, I know, it came from Ed camp. So thank you for all of your work on that. Yeah.

Brent Warner
So today, we are talking about how to evaluate and choose edtech for the ESL classroom. So it’s going to be a pretty interesting session here, you saw you and I kind of decided that we wanted to do is actually going to turn into a three part series. So basically, we’re looking at October, November and December, we’re going to be kind of working on different parts of this and, and hopefully, you know, getting into some some things that are really useful for some of our teachers and some of our listeners,

Ixchell Reyes
right? I mean, with the COVID rush to teach from home. And for teachers to meet the needs of our students, we’ve been kind of pushed to sample all sorts of tech tools. And in essence, this urgency has exposed us in a good way to testing a plethora of educational technology. And while that’s exciting, it’s also been overwhelming. And as you know, many, many people are now going back to school. And we’re kind of settling down into a 2.0 version of this teaching, right. And so many institutions and individuals are actually having to make decisions about what tools are best suited for their student populations, especially since we’re hoping to carry these over. When we go back to face to face teaching.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the big deal, right? It’s like now, okay, I know about all these different tools and I play with them. I like some of them. I don’t like other ones of them. I want to start using them. I want to start integrating them. I want to I want my answer. tuition to pay for it. Yeah, I think a lot of these things are really, you know, ideas that are coming into people’s minds now. But, you know, it’s still, that it’s just like, Hey, here’s a ton of stuff and you get piled on. And so like you need a system to organize that, right? It’s something to think through that and process what you really need, what you don’t need,

Ixchell Reyes
right. And we just have to be careful not to fall for junk, just, you know, as we just did. So with that in mind, there’s some questions there. They’re sort of guiding questions. Okay. We should be asking. And so here they are. So, first and foremost, what is the purpose? What are what is the purpose we’re trying to accomplish? What learning objectives? Can we meet with this tool? Or tools? Do these tools maximize student engagement? What training might teachers and students and maybe administrators need? Also, how will we integrate this tool into our curriculum? And finally, and also very importantly, what language or tech standards? Are we meeting with this tool?

Brent Warner
That’s Yeah, those are great questions. We’ll put those up in the show notes, because I think those can help help guide people. But what we, we found an article called, what seven factors should educators consider when choosing digital tools for underserved students, and that was by Molly B. zelinsky. So you saw when we found this, we were looking through and saying, hey, that kind of overlaps with a lot of the questions that you just asked, right. So they’re, they’re not exactly the same, but they are really strong and important considerations and some ideas that we would want to look at. And so there’s articles quick, easy to get through. And a good. Like, if you have a bulletin board, it’s a good one to pin on your bulletin board when you’re planning your ideas out and trying to figure out what you need.

Ixchell Reyes
And I’d also like to point out that even though this is an article from 2016, those issues raised there are still relevant now and are probably relevant before. So these are not issues that we’re going to be able to solve right away. But we should constantly keep them in mind as we go forward with any adoption in technology. Right?

Brent Warner
So let’s look at these and we could talk about them briefly if we want to. But the first one, the first consideration, the first factor that we should be thinking about is student needs. So it says, taking into account students prior knowledge, level of technology, technological literacy, personal interest, and other things that make our students special and unique individuals. Right, right,

Ixchell Reyes
you want to make sure that our students are, right,

Brent Warner
we talked about this all the time, like, customize your work towards your students, right? If you have a bunch of students from, you know, China one semester, then you don’t, you might want to customize that to what their needs and their understandings are. And if the next semester all of your students are from, you know, I don’t know, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia. So then you’re gonna go, well hold on a second, they’re coming with a different worldview, they’re coming with a different understanding. So I don’t just want to apply the same thing. So the

Ixchell Reyes
right, another point is to consider the specific learning objectives and intended outcomes for using technology with students, right, we need to have a purpose for these What are we going to be accomplishing with? With these tools?

Brent Warner
That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. And being very clear about that makes a big difference in the quality of your, your lessons, too. Okay, so next, the details of the learning activities, it says those parts that include the tech and those parts that are wrapped around the tech. So I think that kind of ties in with the one above but but you know, like, what is the tech part of this? What is the context part of this? And how do they work together?

Ixchell Reyes
Right. We should also keep in mind, the skills mindsets and beliefs of the learning community, including the teacher implementing the tool, but also members of the wider community, including other teachers and administrators, IT staff and parents. This also includes the wider community of students beyond those engaged in the learning activity and of interest, and this is verbatim from the article, it is really important to make sure that we have buy in from everyone that’s going to be supporting the use of these tools, because you want to be able to extend it beyond the classroom and you want to have that support for the teachers and the parents.

Brent Warner
Right. And I do this a lot, you know, with with students at my school, I say like, Hey, we’re Community College, are you going to be doing a transfer degree? What’s your purpose for graduating? Who are you going to be in classes with the next semester? What’s your what’s your intended major? And so like trying to focus those things to understand the setting that they’re in? Right helps out? Right, right. All right, cool. So the next one is the specific features of the digital resource being used. Okay, so does the design of the technology stack up with its major selling points. Something really to think about and again, continuing from the article says those purchasing the text should be responsible for vetting the features through hands on engagement with the digital resource,

Ixchell Reyes
repeat that again, repeat that and highlight over and over

Brent Warner
those purchasing the tech should be responsible for vetting the features through hands on engagement with the digital resource. And you should be basically saying, hey, know how to work your way through it, make sure you understand what’s going on. And this is a really strong argument for, especially if you’re in a position to, to purchase or make recommendations for your institution, to say to any place that you’re testing out with, hey, you need to give me a semester long trial of this because of your

Ixchell Reyes
Let the teachers test it, Yeah,

Brent Warner
yeah. Cuz if you’re gonna get access for many years to, you know, a couple of thousand students every semester, or whatever it is, or however long your terms are, that’s a big investment. And those companies should it be willing to, to make that investment because they, they believe that the quality of their goods are going to actually support your students. So I always get wary of companies that do like, hey, one week trial. Like, you can test it once. And you have to know what you’re doing before you tested the ones and you don’t get to fix those things, you know, so I prefer really a three to six month trial on that thing. But

Ixchell Reyes
You’re right, you’re right about that.

Brent Warner
Yeah, something to think about. So,

Ixchell Reyes
okay, so the next thing to consider is the model students will use for accessing the technology, which can be defined as the organization of the learners in a particular device, as well as the time, place and frequency of access to this device. In schools, common models for access include one to one stationary computer labs, mobile computer labs, and BYOD, which is bring your own device, and that’s what the article suggests. But yeah, we need it. We need a model. How are the students going to access this? We know that with COVID right now, that’s an issue, right? No pressure, equity?

Brent Warner
Well, we’re struggling a lot because our students are using different tools, right? I’ve got students logging in on their Macs logging in on their PCs, logging on their Chromebooks plugging on their phones. Yeah, like all these different ones. And then they say, hey, teacher, how do I do this? And it’s like, well, what kind of computer you on? What How are you accessing the class? Like,

Ixchell Reyes
like, Oh, you don’t be done on a mobile device? What does that mean now?

Brent Warner
Yeah, exactly. So. So really understanding that? And do you have control over that or not? Because that’s going to be a different setup for for how you’re planning to write. And the last one is the site and district technology infrastructure, like the back end of everything. So what is your bandwidth? What are your servers look like storage data hosting? Now, I would guess that a lot of teachers listening don’t know, like, they’re like, I have no idea. Uh, you know, I mean, if you’re at a modern school, you probably can hopefully take care of many of these things, but not necessarily.

Ixchell Reyes
Not necessarily. Yeah.

Brent Warner
And so like, and this is a big, big, huge equity issue, too, is like, when students go home,

Ixchell Reyes
Right. They don’t- don’t control, right? We don’t we can’t control that. And that’s, that’s an issue there, right big issue there.

Brent Warner
And during all of this, like some schools are very kindly and wonderfully providing, you know, hotspots and things for their students. But even still, that could be a

Ixchell Reyes
depending on where the signal is coming from, you may not

Brent Warner
right, it’s not necessarily a Wi Fi hotspot, it could be a modem hotspot connecting to three devices, yeah, to an LTE or something like that. And then that’s data usage. So that can be a problem as well. So we were kind of talking about the easy shell. And when you keep these in mind, when you’re considering all of these things, we do need to understand and develop an understanding of frameworks that can help us think through these ideas. And so this is where we wanted to go with the next section is kind of understanding standards and frameworks so that we can apply these considerations and make sure that we’re making good decisions with our tech choices.

Ixchell Reyes
Exactly.

Brent Warner
Alright, so um, we have a little bit of a different break here. So of course, we always want people to listen and give us reviews. We always talk about that. And of course, we have pins. We don’t have any new reviews this week, which is fine. But we do have this Yeah. What’s going on?

Ixchell Reyes
We do have new listeners!

Brent Warner
Oh, yeah, we got a blast of new listeners. I don’t know where you guys all came from. But welcome.

Ixchell Reyes
Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining. Thank you for listening.

Yeah, I welcome you to the show.

Brent Warner
Yeah, so welcome in. As I was mentioning, just briefly, if you go back to previous episodes, we we do give away a pin a one of a kind enameled DIESOL pin that you can only win by either being a guest on the show or leaving a review for us on the show. So

Ixchell Reyes
hit us up.

Leave us a review if it’s awesome. Social media tag us.

Brent Warner
And we are really grateful. And we hope the show provides us with some value.

All right, so you show, one of the things we were talking about today is standards, right? And when we’re making decisions for our schools, for institutions for our own classrooms, how whatever level we’re making those choices on, you know, a lot of times, teachers might just say, Well, I like this, and so I’m gonna get it, right. It’s like, okay, that’s a good thing, kind of, but we want to have reasons and we want to have the, the why, right, we’ve talked to, I think, in the past about Simon Sinek. Start with why, instead of the what? Sure. So, so. So we want to kind of talk about that and really understand standards and frameworks.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, I mean, you can’t just go around picking up a tool and say, yeah, let’s get this for our organization without really understanding how that’s going to work. And you need a strategy, as you said, a framework without a framework, you don’t really have a guidance, and you want to make pedagogical choices that are sound, and that are meeting the goals of our students. And especially because many, many times the products or services that your organization might fund, you’ll have to make a justification for why they need this. And it’s really important, then that you have a list of standards that you know, the tools help you to meet. The list of standards helps helps you to justify the request, and then you have better chances of getting approval for funding. And remember that unless your organization has a tech committee or something similar, it’s very likely that the people in power of funding, you may not be well versed in what works, they may just go to whatever’s popular, but what’s popular, or you know, the hot thing out there is not what your students need. So you want to advocate for yourself and for your students by making sure that you are following some kind of standards. And when you make that process easier for the people in charge of funding, then it just makes the job easier for them. And if you’ve done the research, then they’re more likely to go with what you’ve recommended, right? But again, it’s important to have standards to guide this and for for the purpose of this episode, we’re going to be taking a look at the TESOL Technology standards. Now they do have standards for teachers, and they have standards for students. They also and we also want to later talk about the SD standards for teachers, students and beyond. For this section, we’re going to talk about the teasle technology standards for teachers and they do have a name. The name is the TESOL Technology standards framework. We’ll be linking those in the show notes.

Brent Warner
That’s right. Yeah. And so we were we are we got it, we got to kind of mention this. There’s two parts to this. So so the first thing is when we were doing a little research and looking at this topic, okay, hey, here’s, here’s the framework. It looks cool. And then we looked right in, you know, the very first thing it says, copyright 2008. And so that, like, put my spidey senses up and like, Wait, hold on a second. Something’s wrong here. That can’t possibly be right. Because we are now in 2020. If you don’t remember,

Ixchell Reyes
I started had a flip phone in 2008. Brett,

Brent Warner
yeah, well, okay. So to be fair, the picture on the booklet or the PDF booklet also has a flip phone on as well. So they knew where you were at that point. Okay, so, but I also want to be fair on the other side, which is that the teasle standards that they built out here are kind of more pedagogical, and they’re more, they’re a little bit broader. So they’re not like, so they work still, generally. Some of the things you’re reading in there, you’re like, Oh, hold on, this is not an understanding of modern technology. But if you’re saying, Hey, hold on, let’s just take a look at the broad steps, the broad ideas, then, okay, we can deal with that. So, so we are still, you know, we’re okay to share this, I would really strongly argue that teasle does need to update this. And it should be like every two year thing, just like hey, revising, let’s revise, let’s refresh. It doesn’t have to be all new stuff. But it should be at least a recognition that like, you know, means at this point, everybody has pretty much unlimited plans on their phones or not everybody I’m sorry. That’s that’s a bit of a assumption. Yeah, that’s an assumption. assumption. But many people do. It’s

Ixchell Reyes
an expectation. Yeah, it is an expectation now and that we can’t run away from that. And I think that that’s when when we are again, when we’re looking at a frame or we’re looking at a framework, what is it going to take for our students to have access and if you are, if you know already that an expectation is that you have bandwidth, then you’re going to make better choices because those are going to inform how you’re going to be choosing?

Brent Warner
That’s right. Yeah. So. So I think I think this is still a good place to go. I would encourage t soul to update this but or to revise I guess, for modern 2020.

Ixchell Reyes
Volunteering.

Brent Warner
I’m volunteering to be paid for it, I guess. So now that they do you know, I mean, teasle. They have great.

Ixchell Reyes
They have a committee, I think they do. And

Brent Warner
I committee, I’m not part of teasle. But, but you know, I trust them to do the right things. But some, you know, that that does need to be caught up on I would say. So let’s take a little look at the structure here. So the way they broke this down was four goals, and then a bunch of standards underneath each goal, right? So I think you should Let’s start by talking, we just kind of want to talk about the goals because I think it’s just gonna become dry. If we’re just like, Hey, here’s standard number.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, we don’t we don’t want to we don’t do that to you, especially over audio.

Brent Warner
Listen to standard number three. But I think we can, I think we can broadly talk about the goals.

Ixchell Reyes
And the goals is a really good place to start. If you’d like to take a look at the standards, again, we’ll link them in the show notes. And that’s the the more detailed examples of again, the standards and also what the student can do or should be able to do. So you’ll get more of a detailed description of those. Yeah, so let’s go ahead and start with Goal number one.

Brent Warner
Okay, so Goal number one. And by the way, this is the teacher’s goals, not the student. Right,

Ixchell Reyes
right. So

Brent Warner
today is standards for teachers. Stay tuned in November and December for students and then isti. So number one, is language teachers acquire and maintain foundational knowledge and skills in technology for professional purposes.

Ixchell Reyes
Ding, ding, ding, ding Dee, do you want to get a job?

Brent Warner
Pretty basic? Well, okay. I

Ixchell Reyes
mean, well, this is the expectation, right? A lot of jobs do require this. And, um,

Brent Warner
well, you hear that one?

Ixchell Reyes
That beautiful sounds of La guys. Yeah, well, Orange County.

Brent Warner
Yeah. Okay, so. So let’s see. Um, so language teachers acquire and maintain foundational knowledge and skills and technology for professional purposes. Now, as you’re saying, hey, that’s what you want to do to get a job. I think that most people listening to the show, get that. I don’t think that there’s going to be you know, but But I would also encourage that our listeners maybe convey this to their colleagues and friends don’t pursue that

Ixchell Reyes
very much. But it’s, the key word for me here is also maintain, because maintain, again, if we’re talking about updating where we are, think of how scary it was at the beginning of this COVID-19 shift to to distance teaching how scary it was, for some people knowing that the next day, they had to know how to communicate without cameras, with just a microphone. I mean, that is scary, right? So the the more actively, the more active you are in maintaining those those those skills, the less scarier it gets, plus, the more flexible you become because you’re resourceful.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and I think that, you know, that flexibility is super important. And I mean, it’s just a painful, not painful. I mean, to me, it’s like, it’s obvious. But for some people who don’t get jobs, it’s painful truth that like, Hey, I don’t know how to work with some of these really standard thing. The things that I’ve now, even within the last few years have become standards have become basic expectations. And so like, you know, when I, when we have someone, and they’re applying for a job, and they say, hey, I want to show you how to work this thing, and they’re like, how do I turn on this computer? And it’s like, oh, okay, like, and you know, not that not that. That’s the exact setting, but it’s like, Hey, I don’t sound

Ixchell Reyes
fortunate. Right, right. Well, and I think you mentioned something that teachers who already get this, you should, I believe, I believe you should be advocating for those who, who aren’t there yet. I think that there’s again, sometimes it may be a fear of technology, a fear of I tend to think that a lot of people say I’m too old for this, but I don’t believe in that I really believe that someone’s out there didn’t teach her the right step. And I think it’s just a matter of repeating because we we approach language in the same way with our students, right, we slow things down a little bit. And I just believe in encouraging each other to try things. Just try, just try it.

Brent Warner
And I would also point out here to one of the the standards in here, which which stood out to me, again, we’re encouraging you guys to go and look at all the standards individually, but just one point that I wanted to talk about it says language teachers use the technology in socially and culturally appropriate legal and ethical ways. So it’s an interesting one because I have straight up had teachers telling me asking me, hey, how do I, you know, illegally broadcast movies across They didn’t say the word illegally. I don’t think they really even thought about it To tell the truth, right? But they’re like, I want to show a Netflix movie across zoom for my entire class. And I’m like, I am not going to respond to that email. There will be no record of me saying anything about that. But, but this is the point is like, Hey, you can’t just do that. Right? So you have to kind of,

Ixchell Reyes
kind of model

Brent Warner
Yeah, you have to model the expectations. And so you know, there’s there’s other parts of these where we talk about, like, citing sources, and not just snagging the first image from Google without citing it, or, you know, all of these types of things. So I think these fall into this idea of like, what does it mean to be a professional when you’re using technology in the classroom? And, and and I really want to point this out to in America, there are different expectations of how these things might be you sure, right. And so we’re also showing these cultural points, or you know, whatever country you’re you’re coming from, you would want to think that through and say, Hey, you could

Ixchell Reyes
get in major trouble here. We’re doing that. Mm hmm. And all it takes is one time and you. That’s it.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. So. So those are, you know, they seem kind of silly. But this, sorry, they seem simple, but they might be really, really valuable to students who don’t understand the different ways of thinking and the different ways to process the information.

Ixchell Reyes
So Goal number two says that language teachers integrate pedagogical knowledge and skills with technology to enhance language teaching and learning. And that’s, of course, you know, when we talk about later, we’ll talk about models of integrating technology. But absolutely, we need to be able to integrate whatever we’re learning with directly to the to the language teaching and learning.

Brent Warner
That’s right. Yeah, so you need to be able to do it clearly. coherently all of these things, right? And know

Ixchell Reyes
which tool meets what need of the student, whatever you’re using one semester may not be appropriate for another group, depending on what you need to be able to make those decisions based on how you’re going to meet the goals of the students and how you’re going to enhance what they’re learning, right? Because

Brent Warner
I think some of these things is like, hey, what does this tool do? Okay, how do I use it? But it’s like, well, hold on a second, if you know that there is whatever standard whatever pedagogical standard you’re looking for. So let’s say that you’re looking for, you know, the zone of proximal development, right. back to grad school programs. Yeah, you got your CPD? And does the software that you’re looking at? Does it challenge students to move beyond

Ixchell Reyes
or into taxonomy? Oh, yeah, yeah,

Brent Warner
exactly. And so. So it’s not just a matter of saying, Hey, here’s a tool, it’s kind of cool. I’m gonna use it, it’s a matter of saying, Well, let’s think about my processes, the learning, the learning journey, and how it’s going to help the students move along each of those steps. Right. Okay, good. So, next is language teachers apply technology and record keeping feedback and assessment,

Ixchell Reyes
a time saver, I think, Mm hmm.

Brent Warner
How often do you use it for these purposes,

Ixchell Reyes
for feedback, as much as I can, I think there was a time when I wanted to go completely paperless. But of course, as I found out, there are certain things that are better done with paper that just, you know, just can’t be substituted, right. But if it saves time for me, and it saves time for the student, and it gets that information to the student faster than on a piece of paper, then I want to do that, because my students will then now have instant feedback. And they’ll be able to apply that they’ll be able to reflect on it. And it’s also a really good way, you know, for for record keeping and also building your student, your library of student samples. You don’t want to be you don’t want to clutter up your workspace with paper.

Brent Warner
Yeah. Well, I’m always kind of, I guess it’s disappointed when I when I hear teacher sale, I just keep all of my records in my gradebook. Oh, and then at the end of the semester. Yeah. Because it’s like, hold on a second. Yeah. Because the students then have no idea how they’re doing. Yeah. And they’re like, well, what’s going on? Where? Where am I? And then the teacher just, you know, says, hey, you’re fine. It’s like, Well, okay, what does that actually what does it mean to be actually fine, right Pacific? And then the teachers say, well, it’s your it’s your job to keep track of your own grades and do everything. It’s like, Well, hold on a

Ixchell Reyes
second aren’t the professional there they don’t necessarily always know.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I mean, it’s a really kind of an idealistic way to think of students which there are some students that share that, but those are always the Students are the ones who don’t need help with everything. So. So I think that it’s really I totally agree with this one. And then the feedback and the assessment point to, for me, I always have my students, I try to train them from early on, I say, hey, every time you send me a message, do it in Canvas inbox, because I want both of us to have that record, right. And I want us to be able to go back and see what’s going right. You send it to me an email, it’s gonna get lost in there somewhere, right?

Ixchell Reyes
No, it’s funny, you you mentioned that, because I find, again, we’ve had conversations about this before, but email is just such a fastidious way of doing things. The worst. Yeah, and and i still, you know, again,

not having a record in one place.

Make makes it harder to hold account each other accountable. So I find that having a record all in one place where there’s where you see the back and forth, helps you to remember how that student is doing. It also helps the student to refer to those points and and understand whether they were able to meet that feedback. You don’t want to say, Well, I sent it three emails ago. And we know that on a day’s worth of hours, you’re gonna get 20 plus emails now that we’re at home, you’re getting hundreds of them. That’s not a joke.

Brent Warner
Why are we laughing? Yeah, absolutely. So. So those can make a big, big deal there. I think all of those are. I think that’s a great point. Yeah. Great goal here, right.

Ixchell Reyes
And then the final goal, Goal number four says that language teachers use technology to improve communication, collaboration and efficiency. And I think that’s like, by far, one of my favorite goals. Because communication, man, just just learning different styles of communication, a different way of collaborating, we, you know, we’re constantly talking about engaging our students, giving them an audience, giving them chances to co go to collaborate, and build and co construct and also just not waste time, because it’s something that they have to do just being efficient at what we’re doing.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And I agree, like, I think this is one of the things we talked about with wayna. In the last episode was this idea of when students are working together on things. They’re building their language at the same time as collaborating. And they often don’t think of that, talking to each other and working through the technology as part of their learning experience, that

Ixchell Reyes
negotiation of the whole thing, right?

Brent Warner
Like to me, I’m like, I don’t actually care that much about your it’s all about like, how are you guys working together? How are you sharing how to get into the Google Doc together to leave messages to say, if you agree or disagree, that whole process is just amazing. And when I see students doing that, that’s where I’m like, you know, it’s like, I don’t have a spot for this, I should really put that into a gray like, that should be really where grades are coming in, because that’s where they’re showing a way deeper level of understanding, or their true abilities really come out in those moments, right. And there are limits at those points, too, which is what really helps us as teachers to say, Okay, this is where you’re hitting your breaking point. So now let’s move from this not really about you being able to go and search for, you know, okay, here’s a summary of, you know, RBG Life. And here’s the basic information. It’s like, I don’t care if you can regurgitate information, right? I care if you can produce something that you’re not even recognizing that right, you’re saying,

Ixchell Reyes
you know, you mentioned that. And I’ve had moments where I’ve sat in class. And of course, this is face to face, that I can remember where I hear in exchange, and I tell the students, Oh, my gosh, you guys, that’s the sound of learning. You just said this. And he said that, and you guys just exchange information in English. And it’s just like, you know, one of those moments that nobody else except Teachers Pay attention to. But yeah, absolutely. And and I’m also, it’s not just the students collaborating, right, it’s the teachers collaborating. And now you can share ideas you can add to lists, you can curate material you can really, there’s the the efficiency is just so much more powerful. Right? Um, yeah.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So, yeah, I totally agree. And so these, as we said, there are many standards underneath, you know, three or four standards underneath each of these goals. So there are 14 standards in here. But what we’re going to encourage people to do is to go in and look at them for yourself.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, take a look at them.

Brent Warner
Yeah, there’s, there’s valuable ways to kind of think about it. And I think what what we had talked about kind of in the pre show was that, you know, we all need reminders of these. Absolutely. We all need to understand that. Hey, there are people have already kind of gone through the process of figuring out how we get ideas working together and how we can best implement these things. So now, if we can keep those at the front of our minds, as we’re making our decisions, as we’re saying, Hey, is this going to help my students communicate with each other? Is this going to help me keep a track? keep records of everything? Or is this going to be just something that everything just disappears into the void? And I don’t understand how to work with this at all. Those are, those are good questions for us in terms of making our decisions and what we want to implement into the classroom, and to make good arguments with our, you know, for our arguments with arguments to our administration, in order to say, hey, there’s a reason why I want this thing. There’s a reason why, what you guys who are not, you know, feet on the ground working with the students might not see, I kind of bring up this example sometimes, which is, at my school, we did not have Google Docs. But once I started advocating for and then we got it. And so it was like, everybody said, Well, why isn’t Microsoft Word just good enough? We already have them. It’s like, Well, okay, I could say some number of the reasons but it wasn’t just about, you know, like, Hey, here’s a reason. Here’s the reason it’s like, Okay, I need to understand some of the standards, I need to understand some of these goals and being able to explain those put those clearly on a paper. And so then people can understand how they fit in with, you know, recognized goals and standards from legitimate organizations like teasle.

Ixchell Reyes
Right. And I think one last thing to mention here is that standards are definitely to promote, good, good choices, sound choices, but also, as an as an instructor, as a teacher, you want to reflect upon what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and how you’re growing and how you’re also passing on that information. So, you know, sometimes I believe most institutions will ask you to do like a self evaluation, or you’re going to have like some kind of review. And somewhere in there, there’s going to be something about how you’re meeting the why you feel your meeting, or what your what goals you’re meeting or how you’re growing. And if you have standards, and you know how to refer to them, then you’re gonna say, Hey, I focus on these standards, and this is how I meet them. And that’s how and it’s so important to quantify that because

Brent Warner
seriously, I mean, because people go, Well, what am I supposed to say about myself? I’m a good teacher. I have a class, this is what I teach. I

Ixchell Reyes
have colleagues who say, I don’t know how to brag about myself, I don’t know how to it’s like, no, it’s you’ve got to quantify what you’re doing because what you’re doing is so valuable. And and it’s not just because you speak English or teaching English, there’s so much that you know that you’ve you need standards, the standards give you the language that you can use to convey that. So please, please, please take a look at the standards you’ve got a lot. I mean,

Brent Warner
literally, your salary is riding on it. I mean, you can make an argument that hey, I deserve a raise because I’m able to do these things. Sure.

Ixchell Reyes
Absolutely.

Brent Warner
So again, go to the show notes. You can find it on DIESOL.org/26. And you’ll be able to get links to this and the articles that we’re talking about.

Ixchell Reyes
And it is now time for our fun finds. Today’s fun find for me is a beauty fun find. It is the she say though subaki moisturizing hair water.

Brent Warner
Hair Water? I have hair water. It comes out of my shower. That’s amazing.

Ixchell Reyes
This is the Japanese product as you know I love Asian products, especially if they’re very that the quality is good. It’s easy to find in a Japanese market but you can find it on Amazon as well. It might be a little pricier but it is a mist that jus spray on your hair. And it keeps the ends of your hair really moisturize. So if your hair is suffering from dry ends or split and ends or you know what the change in and whether that happens. You will notice a difference. It doesn’t leave it oily and it smells so good. And again, I just was like it’s like a flower smell like I think tsubaki is a flower right? Oh yeah, it’s a chameleon. Maybe.

Brent Warner
Okay, I thought I just thought tsubaki was part of the brand. Yeah, part of the brand

Ixchell Reyes
it is it is part of the brand. Oh, but it all say that’s about

Yeah, but it’s the flower that the Japanese use a lot for their hair product. So okay, check it out. You might want to use it on your beard. Oh, look stringy from here.

touching it.

Brent Warner
I have I have come into a habit of stroking my beard with

Ixchell Reyes
It’s Hagrid in front of me right now.

Brent Warner
I like to think of myself more as Dumbledore than Okay, so mine is an audio book that’s on Kickstarter right now. It’s called attack surface, by Cory Doctorow. And Cory Doctorow is one of the founders of Boing Boing. I don’t If you’re if you’ve been on that site, but yeah, lots of amazing stuff that they kind of just share. But I really like this product, not because I have followed this trilogy, this is the third book in the trilogy, I actually ended up buying the whole trilogy on on this Kickstarter, but because of what he’s trying to do to disrupt the audiobook industry with this, which is that, essentially all audio books, basically are on Audible, right. And so what he’s trying to say is, Hey, there is a market out there for people who do not want digitally right digital right management on their books that they buy for themselves. Because when you buy something on, on Audible, it has in the past, like, Hey, you do not have that book anymore, or from you know, Kindle to you don’t have that book anymore, which is not what buying things is right. And so his whole thing here, his book is still being traditionally published, but what he’s doing what the audiobook is, he’s making it completely DRM free. And he is publishing the audiobook version himself. And what he’s trying to do is hopefully show the world out there, that there’s a different way to interact with, with audiobooks, and with some of these technologies when we buy digital technologies, that we should have the rights to them forever. And I really, I wanted to buy it just to support the idea. And his goal is pretty amazing. It’s worth going and seeing what he has to sale, I’ll put a couple links to some of his articles that he wrote. But basically, His goal is to show the audiobook industry that people don’t really want everything DRM down that they want to have access to what they’re they’re paying for. So anyways, it’s on Kickstarter. It’s called attack surface, the big brother series or something like that a little brother series, I think. And if you want to support something that’s a little bit pushing against the big tech, that would be a good way to do it.

All right, you guys, thank you so much. That is the show for today. So you shall just want to say one more time. Great to have you physically, here. Yeah, not just not just looking at each other through the screen. And so everybody, thank you so much for listening to the show. Please go check it out. There’s more information, show notes. Everything is available at DIESOL.org. And also this particular episode, you can put DIESOL d i e s o l.org, slash 26, the number 26. And of course, you can listen to us on voices.ca. You can find us on Twitter. You can find the show at @DIESOLpod. And you can find me at Brent g Warner.

Ixchell Reyes
You can find me shell at Ixy_Pixy that’s I x y underscore p i x y and Turkish Thank you is to check her other team to check her team for tuning in to the diesel podcast.

Brent Warner
All right, thanks, everybody. And thank you for dealing with all those background noises.