International Symposium: Programs: Captions: Session M11C

ROUGH EDITED COPY

A multimedia Instructional Design Model for planning and delivering professional development for teachers of deaf and hard of hearing in Czech Republic

Gerald Berent

June 27, 2005

11:00 A.M.

CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC.

PO BOX 1924

LOMBARD, IL 60148

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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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>> good morning.

My first promise to you is that I'll speak slowly this morning and I'll encourage other people to speak slowly this morning to allow for better translation and sign language.

However, it may mean we only get through half of our slides but we'll see how we make out.

My name is Bill Clymer.

I met you earlier this morning. I'm here with Daniela Janakova we're going to talk about an exciting project that we did on the teaching of ESL to Czech teachers.

We're going to review with you how the project was developed and how we have posted it on the web for dissemination.

With that, I would like to have DanielA come up and say a few words about our work together.

>> and it's on, right?

>> it's on.

>> okay.

And you'll help me with the...

>> uh-huh.

>> okay.

All right. So I think a few of you have already met me.

I work at Charles University in Prague, arts and sciences.

Well, all of my lifetime I have been teaching English to hearing students except for last 7 years when I got involved in deaf studies.

But I have to say it was very difficult for me because all of a sudden I was asked to do it.

But I'm not specialized in specialty, I'm not a sign, so believe me when they appeared at my door telling me on top of everything I should teach English to the deaf and hard of hearing, I was just mad, but as there was no volunteer basically to teach them and these students have already been taken to Charles University and asked me at least to try that, I did.

But anyway, I'm not a signer and I have to work always during my English classes with a note taker and sign language interpreter and here it comes to be difficult one more time because our interpreters are not good enough yet.

Maybe they are perfect signers but they sometimes have no knowledge of English, or, you know, their knowledge of English is very limited and so I'm never sure how comes the message through.

Is there really interpret what I have just explained and if I want to be sure when it comes more first to difficult grammar items I first instruct my interpreters and only then I can carry on with my deaf students, so for future I would like to have instruct teachers who would be signers as well, it would be much easier.

But it's just for future.

Okay.

So first in the year 1998 there was no one to help, but as I was for many years there has been very productive cooperation the English University of Hampton, there are nice colleagues to get through and recommended me the best places to go to get some knowledge of what it's all about at the Gallaudet University and here at NTID.

That's how I learned that these places exist.

And then we have no grounds, because there was no special language teaching materials, no resources and no ground, and at the very end, well God sends me help as always, and, you know, wandered through the ground and got to Gallaudet for half an academic year and there I learned what it's all about and there I started and signed long-term agreements of cooperation and I had the chance for a (t) first time to visit the NTID, as well, and also here was signed agreement of cooperation because we started to be members of the project international and that is how we got also some grants and sponsorship to realize more plans which we like to be realized.

So but this is not all.

When I got back from the U.S. I had an idea that I must get somehow more Czech teachers involved in deaf studies so I set up first international seminar in the year 2000, then American colleagues from NTID also kindly took part and gave wonderful Powerpoint presentations and we instructed Czech secondary and international level teachers.

Second, is my colleagues will take over and speak in more details about the second seminar in Prague.

But I also do different projects with my deaf students.

I take them like small group I take always for English summer school so three times I took them to Gallaudet University and three times they have been to Bristol, so about 75 Czech University students were sent abroad and had a chance to study individually in these wonderful programs where they could learn also ASL and BSL, you know, got it start and I organized those of course British sign language at Charles University this academic year.

Well, since I start this cooperation with my American colleagues it's easier, anyway, because more people can get better results so we are a team now and it's getting better.

Okay.

Now I am the coordinator of English to deaf Ed Czech Republic and it concerns secondary levels of education.

However to my seminar come teachers from schools because they have no other places where to go.

Because as far as this is concerned, we are the only ones, the same as my students, since 2002, my English classes has been students from all colleges, they travel six hours, four hours, don't care, you know, to be present at my lessons because there isn't a lot of teachers specialized in teaching them writing and reading skills.

For, I mean, I mean academic English, not the basic course.

Of course there are a few basic courses, but no one teaches them academic English and they now realize they will need it because a lot of them would like them to go to Europe to conferences or even U.S., and, how, you can't, you have to present paper in a written form, at least a summary abstract so this is it.

Thank you for your attention.

[ APPLAUSE ]

>> okay.

Charles University is an affiliate of pan international.

They are a good and a long-term friend working with deaf students primarily focusing on helping the deaf students acquire English skills.

To that end, we have worked with DanielA and others first offering English as a second language at a workshop that occurred here at NTID in 2002 and then eventually the workshop that occurred last year in August, 2004.

If you go to our website where these -- where this poster -- where these Powerpoints are posted, those two links you see there are active and you can read a description of those two events.

The workshop goals that we established, and I should tell you the working relationship between the three of us.

DanielA and Gerry are the English teaching specialists.

We at pan international are the instructional design and workshop specialists so we formed a nice team working on the content and the delivery to have instruction.

As you can see from the list here, we wanted to work with DanielA's faculty in Prague and the Czech Republic on enhancing their ability to offer and teach English classes to both college level and school level children.

DanielA did a wonderful job bringing in approximately 60 teachers to attend to this session, to this workshop.

This model required the faculty to come to Charles University for one week to attain these goals.

The way we designed the materials was to depend on the worldwide web both for the development and the dissemination of the materials.

What that means is when Gerry and the faculty he was working with, both within the United States and in other countries, developed materials they would be reviewed by DanielA and Gerry and then we would post them on the worldwide web.

During the development process we were able to see and review each other's work.

We developed a simple website that we could use for all the partners to see the materials as they were developed.

Because a number or faculty in the Czech Republic could not access the web simply, we also put all the materials on a CD rom.

And we also archived all the materials on the web.

Eventually, what you will see is the Web page where you can download and access any of these materials that were developed by all the faculty.

So Gerry and DanielA identified the topics of instruction.

I worked with the development of these materials and we did all the communication via the web and the internet.

Now, what I would like to do is let Gerry describe the content of the workshops themselves.

>> thank you.

Okay.

Thanks, bill.

As bill indicated, this multimedia design model is unique in that we used the worldwide web at all stages of the planning, development, presentation, dissemination, and archiving of the conference experience, and that's what makes this multimedia design model unique.

As -- as presenters developed their manuscripts and their handouts, they could be posted for all the other people months in advance who were preparing their lectures and presentations to see how things were going.

So it was optimal accessibility at all levels.

Okay.

You already heard that it was a week-long seminar.

There were 12 presenters from four different countries.

66 participants.

And they represented five different countries.

So this was truly an international effort.

These are some of the titles of the lectures.

The organization of the conference was to have lectures, to have more hands-on workshops or seminars, as we call them, and then we had panel discussions on the last day of the conference, and many opportunities for interaction and presentation of -- of information.

These are -- you can read these titles at your leisure from the handout, but as you can see, we covered a wide array -- this is just some of the titles.

There are more on the next slide.

A wide array of general educational topics and topics specific to teaching English as a second or foreign language and then specifically with a focus on teacher English to deaf and hard of hearing students.

Some of the topics targeted basic skills of reading, writing, and grammar.

Others looked at educational skills such as classroom -- educational issues such as classroom management, deaf cultural issues and so on.

So it was a very broad -- we had very broad coverage of the most relevant educational and language teaching topics.

These were the workshop titles where there were more hands-on showing participants how to do things, demonstrating things, more opportunity force sharing and interaction.

>> more of the titles.

Some of these workshops were EXPERIENTIAL.

>> the vice-president of NTID and his wife talked about raising two children, one deaf, one hard of hearing in a language-rich environment and this was a very popular presentation.

People really enjoyed seeing that personal success story.

Okay.

Are you supposed to take over here, bill?

>>.

>> okay, what I would like to do now is show you some of the worldwide Web page that we developed, introduce it to you so you may access it yourself later if you have an interest in this.

This is the Web page.

It's on the pan international server and it contains the schedule.

Now, if you notice the schedule here, it's very much like the schedule that we set up for this symposium.

This is our standard format for planning events.

I would just like to show you how the web page is used for accessing and linking to the presentation materials and the resource materials that were used.

I will pick lecture four by Dr. Kathleen CRANDEL.

She is a senior member of our faculty and a specialist in English.

You should know that this Web page was developed using Microsoft word.

It is not a fancy Web page design.

I just did it with my word processor.

I, as developer of the Web page, was able to quickly add and change these documents and displays to reflect the changes that our authors requested.

That's not good.

Maybe we will finish on time today.

[LAUGHTER]

I don't know.

It's going to get these -- these are all PDF's, and they're not appearing.

Let me explain to you what is there and maybe we can have some success.

Essentially what I did is I produced a lesson plan or a schedule of learning outcomes and the resources that the instructors used for these presentations.

So a participant could go to the website, see the expected learning outcomes, read about what was prerequisite material so it would explain what you needed to know to get most benefit from the lecture, then actually see the Powerpoint or other presentation materials online, complete an evaluation form and also see the links to the other resources that related to the person's presentation.

What I found is that our faculty and the faculty of the other partner countries were very comfortable working within this format.

We could produce these materials in word.

I would quickly convert them to what is called an ADOBE PDF file.

We also found within the word document or PDF file I could have links to other resources.

We'll give this just one minute and then we will move on.

I think it's going to work.

I hope it's going to work.

What do you think?

>> but people won't know who I am.

I'll take it off.

Sorry.

One of the issues that we found in the Czech Republic is they were not as familiar with the ADOBE acrobat system for accessing files, so what we did is we produced a CD rom with the ADOBE acrobat reader on it, so the individuals not only got a CD with all the workshop materials they got the ADOBE acrobat file program and we provided them with a number of resources related to pan international and to NTID in deafness in general.

This CD is also available and we would be happy to share it with anyone who has an interest.

>>[INAUDIBLE]

>> right.

What Gerry was saying was the CD was included with the resources that we provided each participant so in the evening they could access it, read the materials before, during and after the conference.

So we found that this was a simple way for us to produce the materials an disseminate it widely and freely.

>> the international signup, I hope this works.

Hey, thank you very much.

Okay.

What he opened is a PDF document that we prepared for participants so that they could access and understand how the materials were organized.

We'll go back and see if Dr. CRANDEL's materials are there.

AH.

Okay.

A very simple word document that Dr. CRANDEL wrote in collaboration to us, you will notice that her e-mail address is an active link, so if a participant would want to communicate directly, they could click on that and it would send an e-mail.

A brief description of the workshop, all of these workshops were 3 hours in length.

Specific learning outcomes for each lecture.

A specific plan that the presenter would follow and it would help communicate to the participants the vents that will happen during the lecture.

And what I wanted to show you was how we were able to post the Powerpoint presentations and Kathleen's handouts.

Her entire Powerpoint is here for downloading or review on the web.

Whoops.

And as you can see, it's very fast access to all of these materials and resources.

One thing you may note on this slide is we always put the date that the Web page was most recently accessed so that if there is a bad connection or a link we can end up providing people with more current information if it becomes available.

Kathleen provided the participants with more in-depth participant about ESL training.

So with the website in place, we all travelled to Prague and we set up our workshops within a wonderful facility at Charles University.

It was a real highlight for us to visit such a beautiful city, to be right in the center of the city and be able to walk to the different university sites to participate in this.

DanielA's team did a wonderful job making all of these resources available for us.

You should know that she also video recorded every lecture and presentation and that material is available for your use as well.

So we felt quite at home, the same technologies that we have here were able to us in Prague.

With that, i'll return the microphone to Gerry who will talk about the evaluation results.

>> thank you.

Wait a minute.

Okay.

Sorry.

Bill said that each lecture was 3 hours in length.

It was one hour, right?

I mean there were -- there were concurrent sessions so there may be three lectures in a row and then breaks and nice refreshments and so on.

So there was plenty of time both for the professional activity and for collegial interaction and refreshments.

Anyway, we developed evaluation forms for each and every lecture and seminar and participants were sort of not allowed to leave the room without being pressured to complete the evaluation form, but we knew that this would provide us with valuable feedback to determine if this multimedia design model and other aspects of the conference were successful.

We also developed a final conference evaluation form which everyone completed or we tried to get everyone to complete on the last day of the conference.

There were also evaluation performs for the two panel discussions that we had at the end of the -- on the last day of the conference.

Okay.

We've taken a few of the graphs.

What we did was he gathered all of the data and we had a professional consultant do statistical analyses on the data and then we've developed some simple graphs just to show you how the participants responded to some of the questions on the final conference evaluation.

So to the question whether this week-long conference was a very positive professional development experience for me, as you can see, 60% of the participants strongly agreed with that statement and 40% agreed with that statement and there were no other selections, so we feel confident that indeed this conference experience was very -- a very positive professional development experience.

Now, interestingly, look at the pattern of the -- the bar patterns for this question.

Most of the lecture in seminar topics presented this week were relevant to my own needs as a teacher of deaf and hard of hearing students.

Now, the fact that we have a little bit different pattern, and knowing that respondents will often inflate their responses because they're so happy to be there and so on and so forth, it can be very useful just to look at a change in pattern.

The fact that there are more agree than strongly agree responses and that there are a fair number of no opinion, the middle of the scale, tells us something, and we interpret that to mean that even though the organizers with input from teachers developed the agenda and selected the specific topics that are critically important to educating deaf students, that at this point those topics may not fully match the specific needs of these educators at that point in time because they don't realize that those resources that are available and they really do need them to supplement and make their teaching environment better than it already is.

And so that's why -- that's how we interpret this figure 3.

Similarly, this was one of the other questions -- this was one of the other questions: Based on what I learn at this conference I plan to make my changes in my course planning an teaching.

We have a much higher bar at the agree than at the strongly grow and a few with no opinion.

And we just think that this, despite the fact that it's fairly positive, may reflect the fact that even when you're learning new -- new PEDAGOGY, new technologies, that there will still be some reluctance to change the long-standing pedagogical traditions of your community, of your nation, of your educational systems because people are familiar with their own teaching styles, and it takes time to -- to learn about and then endorse and try these new methods and that is how we interpret this graph.

Finally, for figure five, and all of this information will be available and fully elaborated in the manuscript version of this presentation which will be posted on the technology symposium website.

The last question that we're talking about here, because of this conference I feel a few commitment to address the critical educational and language teaching and learning issues that affect my students.

Well, here, as with the first figure, you see the cascading downward with most of the responses in the strongly-agree category, and so we interpret this to mean that people really were excited and enthused and did leave with a new commitment to make change and to incorporate some of what they learned at the week-long conference.

We ranked every presentation, every lecture and every workshop and we had a rather sophisticated way of getting feedback for which -- which sessions were most relevant, which ones they felt were best organized, and so on.

We had three different ratings of the list of presentations.

But here is just a sample of the highest, second, third and fourth, of the nine or ten lectures, very interestingly, professor Sid barefoot on the faculty here at NTID was a master at presenting issues pertaining to English classroom management because just as we deal with here in our country, in every setting you are trying to accommodate the communication and learning need of a diverse population.

Some deaf, some hard of hearing, some who know sign language, some who don't, some who are good lip readers, some who are not, and Sid's classroom management presentation was extremely relevant and extremely highly regarded at this week-long conference.

You can see that some of the other highly rated presentations dealt with your basic skills, writing and reading and grammar and so on and so forth.

So they remain, of course, the -- the meat of what you're trying to teach the students when they're learning English as a second or foreign language.

These are some of the things that the participants liked best about the conference.

You can read these yourself.

But notice that the discussion and the sharing ideas, that human interaction was very highly valued.

These, again, you can read on your own, but this is a -- this is the collective results that sort of reflect the very high level of participant satisfaction with the week-long conference.

And they pertain to the fact that it because very positive experience, that they were comfortable interacting and asking questions, that the topics were largely relevant to their needs, that they planned to make some changes based on what they learned, and that they were inspired now to address new critical educational and language teaching issues.

You want me to finish up?

Okay.

So bill explained how to access the website and there's a CD rom with all of the presentations.

But DanielA has edited a fantastic proceedings which the front cover is shown over here, the -- the red -- striking red cover doesn't come through as well on the Powerpoint.

But this is an excellent print resource of the full conference experience that is published through Euro LEX Bohemia.

It's a nice collection to have on your shelf.

It even contains the full transcripts of all -- of the audiotaped panel discussions, so it is really a comprehensive record in print of the week-long conference experience.

>>[INAUDIBLE]

>> okay.

These two links at the bottom of the slide will take you to the PDF versions of the first English language teaching conference in the Czech Republic that professor Janakova planned in the year 2000, and then last summer's August 2004 conference.

So in conclusion, we want to reemphasize that this multimedia design model was used at every phase of the planning, development, presentation, dissemination, and archiving of the Prague 2004 conference and we believe that that multimedia format, that model, is -- contributed to the great success of that conference, and that it can serve as a model for teacher training initiatives in general, because of its success.

And we received validation for the success of that model through the participants' very high ratings of the conference experience.

So we were very pleased with the experience and we believe that all of the presenters and participants were equally pleased.

Here are some more references on your handout to the various materials and resources that we have talked about this morning.

And does anyone want to add anything before we do questions and answers?

Okay.

So now we open it up, do you want -- bill, do you want to field the questions and answers.

>> repeat the questions.

>> yes, yes.

Okay.

Yes?

>>[INAUDIBLE] I apologize, I came in a little bit late.

[INAUDIBLE]

>> okay.

The question was for professor Janakova, what positive outcomes has she seen in the past year as a result of these teacher training initiatives?

>> well, I think the most positive one was that the teachers who took part in the seminar made new friends with Americans, Britain colleagues and even they had a chance to meet one another, because it's quite rare in the Czech Republic, they are overloaded with their teaching load and have no time to socialize, now they know them because they exchanged their e-mail contacts.

And also I was able to pass on my own website where they can find all the projects and I always do, because what I passed, or my colleague passed as the beginning, there was a little CD with my card and at the bottom of the card you will find website where you can in more details look at all the projects which I have realized so far.

So there are photo galleries (n) and summary of every activity which we take and teachers are extremely happy with this resource because they can use it in their teachings to make it like more lively because not all of them were able to take part in our seminar, so even those who were not able to come could make it because of the website.

They can use your website but they can use my website also.

So I think this network which I was able to create, and it was only because of how the Czech was provided from American colleagues and from my Bishop colleagues, so that we were all together so this way it's all connected and that's how it should be.

So I think this is the most important realization or output of the seminar.

Also, I made a DVD recording of the whole seminar an sent it for free to all schools which took part and even to those who were not presented at this seminar, and I kept the address list from the seminar in the year 2000 so I presented them with all seminar books, you know, both -- both these books which were presented here, and also with this recording of the whole seminar, so that's how we were -- I'm glad I'm receiving thank yous, like professor Janakova, because of you these colleagues came to visit and started cooperation and we exchange students so high school teachers are even much more grateful than University teachers because University colleagues are a bit stubborn I have to say.

That is sad.

They just keep to what they used to do for ages and they don't want to step a bit this way or the other way.

It's a little bit difficult.

And even to make them use -- start use new technology is a bit difficult either because imagine, computers didn't come so soon to Czech Republic like to America, so we are somewhere -- so what you can use easily like smart boards and all of this high Tech and just, you know, getting now to my -- to my languages center, but it's quite unique because other universities can't afford to get things such expensive stuff to their workplaces, you know, so it's double difficult, and so they come -- what they do, they come and I always have some -- a lot of like consultation hours, we call it, and they come if we need some advice or if they want me to tell them what they should obtain for their special class, you know, so I tried to do that, and I tried to instruct them what they should use in their -- because not everything is that costly.

There are certain things which will work anyway and the best device ever is the teacher himself.

If he is still relented, much more is needed.

High Tech can only work with a good teacher.

Not vice Versa.

High Tech will never save it.

I think that is it.

>> to add to the answer, because it's an excellent question.

One problem is that these teachers who are not at the University level, after they leave the conference, they go back to their schools. Now, what we need to do is to follow-up and try to measure the effect -- efficacy of what that conference experience was and to see what teachers are actually experimenting with or implementing in your -- in the classroom.

As you might expect.

This is a very difficult thing to do, but we should follow-up at least with survey research to see what people have implemented.