[music]

Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Barry Bakin: OK. So Hi, everybody. Good afternoon. My name is Barry Bakin, and I'm an Instructional Technology Teacher Advisor for the Division of Adult and Career Education of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is a really nice position to have if you're interested in technology, and I'm very grateful that the Division created this position.

But basically it's an out of classroom position, working with teachers, and administrators, and all staff basically at our site, to help introduce and integrate technology into instruction. So I'm very grateful to have that position.

And I'm also a subject matter expert for OTAN, which means that I get to do these presentations online and also in person when that's going to resume again, hopefully, sometime by the end of 2021 or perhaps the beginning of 2022, no telling how that's going to go. But in any case, this presentation is called Easy Office Projects Part 1, focusing on Word and PowerPoint projects.

So let me go ahead and talk a little bit about what we're going to be covering today. This is the standard slide about what OTAN does, but hopefully, by the end of this webinar, you as participants will be able to demonstrate to your ESL, ABE and academic students several separate projects using Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. And so hopefully your students will also be able to practice vocabulary, grammar or demonstrate mastery of content by so doing.

I will say that when I first started doing this series, I was heavily focused on using the Office applications, but pretty much everything that I'll demonstrate can also be done using Google Docs or slides with minimal adaptation. So perhaps next year when I revise this, I will get into-- I'll just change the name as well. But in any case, let me continue.

So I started these projects many, many years ago in the completely face to face environment. In short, I had a five day a week four hours a day class in a computer lab. It was an ESL class in a computer lab. And as much as I had experience and interest in using websites and other software applications like Rosetta Stone or the Oxford Picture Dictionary online, things like that, I couldn't maintain student interest for that much time only on the computer.

And that's when I started thinking, well, maybe let me get them involved with doing some projects and the projects would be using the applications that were on every computer, and I felt that by so doing, I could not only maintain interest, but doing the projects would serve a dual purpose for ESL students of not only practicing language, but also learning some of the needed very, very basic techniques about using the Office productivity app.

So the very first one was, I just used to call About Me and very simply, I would take photos of students, so as they came in the room, came in the classroom at the beginning of the semester, and then I would use those photos as the basis for this little very simple project where the students were to tell me a little bit about themselves.

So this serves several purposes that I found useful, not just in the moment, but over the long run, because I would save everything for every semester. And what I began to collect was quite an archive of former student writings. And so that was helpful in the moment.

Many times students would come into class and I couldn't quite remember their name at the moment, but so I could casually like, at the computer, scroll through that semester's photos and documents and remember the name as a little crutch.

And then that's also served the purpose years or semesters later when I would see those same students again. And many of them I was able to share their very first written document from ESL 1 with them many, many years later when they told me that they were now in their GED program and getting their diploma. So that was always very, very nice.

So and of course, it serves the purpose of you find out some information about the students, you also get a sense of their writing level, and if you were actually face to face with them in the classroom, I could get a sense of how they were functioning in front of a computer.

And also if you save successive copies, even if you start with pencil and paper copies of the writing, you introduce students to the idea of writing a draft and revising and revision, and that was also handy when it came time for accreditation because I was able to demonstrate improvement.

So in any case, that was the very first project in terms of the actual techniques for the application, very, very basic keyboarding skills and introduction to saving documents. Back in the day it was floppy disks, some of you may remember those, and every other technique for saving documents in the meantime.

How much you let the student do or I let the student do was dependent on the students, and you can make that decision for yourself, whether you provide a template like this and all they have to do is click on it and delete certain parts of it, and then replace it with their own information or whether they're going to do everything from scratch.

So anyway that was the very first project. We're not going to go over how to do it, but certainly if there are questions about it, later, I can certainly give you some more ideas. So as recently, for many, many teachers as the beginning of last year, things went online in a hurry for everybody very, very rapidly. And teachers who may not have been accustomed to using a learning management system, all of a sudden were faced with transferring face to face projects into an online environment.

So obviously, even if you're using a learning management system, you could have students create the entire document on Word or on Google Docs for that matter as well and email it to you. That's certainly a possibility. But with the new learning management systems that you may be using, there may be other ways to adapt this project.

So the learning management system that we use at Los Angeles Unified School District is Schoology, this may appear familiar to some of you. But you may consider adapting the entire project to something that fits your learning management style or a system. And so the whole thing could be done as a profile.

So in Schoology, you have an opportunity to post a pic and then write a short biography of yourself and that can be this project. And so what you would want to do is, and obviously there are so many systems out there that I can't just talk about them all from personal knowledge.

But you could see what you have and decide for yourself, let's do this project, but maybe instead of doing it as a Word document, maybe we can do it as a bio, or maybe we'll do it as part of a discussion where the teacher would post as a discussion topic, post a picture of yourself and write a few words, or write a few sentences, or write a paragraph about yourself, and then other students could comment on what you've posted.

Also for those of you using a Google Drive or other application like that, you could do it as a shared document, assign everybody a different page and have this project done that way. So as in the physical classroom, you also have to consider how are you going to present the instructions to your students and a sample.

And so if you're using like a Zoom meetings with your students, would that be the way that you show them the instructions and show them the project or some other stuff, some other way, send it to them using Remind or making it as an assignment in your system. And again, these are things that every instructor has to decide based on what tools are available to them.

So actually, before we get into the first question, let's see. Does anybody have a particular question about this whole aspect of deciding how to present the project and whether or not to use it, and what way to present it with your own students. And remember that you would do that in the question and answer as opposed to in the chat OK. So Melinda I'm not seeing anything in the question and answer, are you?

Melinda Holt: I'm not either. No, I think we are good.

Barry Bakin: Lets go ahead. So we'll move right along. And this was often the next project that I would introduce in class. I called it speech balloon conversations. And basically it's a great way for students to practice some vocabulary, grammar, or content that you're covering in class. And for that reason, it's very, very adaptable to all levels.

If you're doing your very beginning level class, then what you're expecting from them is minimal short sentences, higher levels, you can make the requirements for the content that much more complicated or complex.

So if you're studying like a present perfect, then just say you know what? In two of the speech balloons, I want to see some examples of present perfect, or I want to see an example of some type of tag question, whatever it is that you're working on.

And then in addition to the idea of working with photos, now you're inserting what both Microsoft, and also documents, and slides refer to as callouts. So a callout is basically a text box with an arrow pointing to what we understand to be the speaker who is saying that particular comment.

So let me just show you a few student samples, actual student samples. So these are just a few that are called over the years where you can see the students grasping the idea that there's a difference between what we call a speech callout or a speech balloon, and a thought callout or a thought balloon.

And I haven't actually found out whether or not this idea that in cartoons of this type, if the thought cloud which represents somebody speaking is actually internationally understood as a thought instead of as a speech or perhaps some of you who've been in other countries or have long time exposure to other cultures can let us know if that's universal or if that's something that you also need to teach, I would certainly mention it.

But the concept that people say things that are different than what they are thinking is very, very powerful, and you can see from these next few examples that students really get that. So again, another example of a student demonstrating that what people think is different than what they say.

Every time I see this one, I think this must have come from that particular students, somewhere in their personal history, the fact that the partner is not being truthful about what it is that or the reason why he wants to go play tennis.

So I'm going to play one. As always, students often have better ideas or ways to improve a project than originally presented by the teacher. And so for many years, I did this project simply as a one-shot deal, one slide or one document with one slide. And in this particular case, the student came back with four slides.

And what they had done was they had narrated the different speech balloons. I thought it was really nice. So hopefully you'll be able to hear this. The sound as originally recorded was quite low, so you may not get all of it, I hope that you can hear it. And I will say that the third slide does not have any audio.

Speaker 1: Having this baby was our dream.

Speaker 2: I love you and the baby so much, dear. I wonder if it's my baby.

Barry Bakin: So there's the kicker, "I wonder if it's my baby." As an instructor-- let me just go back one on that. As an instructor, also this would be a great time to work with that particular student with the pronunciation or the intonation of that particular phrase. But again, this was a student improvement of my original project, but certainly something that you could consider.

So what I'd like to do now, though, is even though I'm sure most of you are very, very familiar with inserting images and inserting text, you may not be as familiar with inserting or working with the speech balloons or call outs. So I thought I would interrupt the presentation at this point and just do that live. So let's see if we can do that. And hopefully, let me get the-- I will start a new presentation.

On the left here, you see basically the same project as a Google slide, but for a PowerPoint, we'll do that here on the right. You are just selecting a new blank presentation, and then this is where you may either use, sometimes I just have the students start from scratch and just delete the pre-formatted sections.

And the first step is inserting a picture, and of course, you have an option of going to something online or not. What I like to do is have some set up pictures already. Let me get to the right folder. That's TDLS, we don't want to be there, that was last week. There we go pictures for projects.

And so you may want to discuss with students the idea that for this particular project, pictures with a lot of students or a lot of individuals or a lot of animals are really helpful for this. I did try to tell students, typically, if you position your photo in the lower part of the page, then you have room at the top and the sides for adding the speech balloons. But in PowerPoint, you find them, Insert a shape, and right down at the bottom, they have callouts.

OK. And then you have a few types. When you do that you draw in your screen and the default callout has this blue coloring. But what's nice about these are they're already text boxes. OK, so you all the student has to do is simply type in the text box to get it to work.

You can show them about resizing, you can show them about changing the size of the font, and then the other part is using the yellow button to direct it to the person who's speaking. So let me just show that again, it's Insert a shape, and then this time, I'm going to select the cloud one.

OK. And changing the color of the shape is also something that you want to show the students, changing the font, et cetera or all sorts of things that you can do, of course, with the callouts. And so over here, again, if you're doing this in with slides, it's really the same thing. It's also the same command, insert a shape and then a callout, and then you have your choices.

So not a very difficult project for most students. And again easily adaptable, introduces some very basic techniques for working with either Word, or slides, or PowerPoint, or Docs because you can also do this as a single page inward as well. OK, so any questions about that before we continue? And you're welcome to-- I hope some of you on your own device went ahead and tried to recreate that and at least get one picture in a PowerPoint or in a slide and then created at least one callout.

Melinda Holt: Barry, we don't have any questions yet.

Barry Bakin: OK, thank you OK, well, hopefully, we'll get some questions during the course of the presentation, and we can always go back. So the next one, let me go back and continue with the presentation. So the next one, I called Photo "Grammar."

Again, adaptable to all levels, again, can be done as an individual document using Word or Docs, could also be done as a PowerPoint or slide. But basically, the idea is building on a picture is worth a thousand words. We've heard that forever, but pictures can be used for student demonstration of understanding or mastery.

This particular project that I'm showing you, we were working with simple compound complex sentences, and also adverbs of frequency. So again, you can tell the students what it is that you want to see a demonstration of. So in this particular one, I wanted to see if students could create different types of sentences.

So the first sentence had to be a simple sentence, second sentence had to be a compound sentence, third sentence had to be a complex sentence, and somewhere in there in any of those sentences, the students had to include an adverb of frequency. And so grading depended on them having all of those different elements.

And again, how you present this. In the face to face classroom, I used to plaster, the bulletin board or every wall space with examples of student projects that they had completed. In the today's world, you could display those as media projects or as discussions in your learning management system.

And again, perhaps they're learning, you could choose to introduce a new technique, either in this particular case perhaps either making a table, or columns, or whatever it is that you feel would make this presentation. In this particular way, or this particular project, it was picture on the left, and sentences on the right. But it could also be picture on top and sentences underneath, whatever is appropriate for your students.

I'm not going to go into how to do this, it's pretty self-explanatory. But again, the key point is it's the adaptability that you do something like this with pretty much all of your students. Now the next project that I felt was very, very successful had to do with using clusters to diagram the topic sentence and subtopics of a paragraph.

Now the genesis for this project came out of actually some of our PLC work where it was decided upon by the entire ESL staff that at every level, we would try to build students up to get ready for writing in the highest levels.

And so this was just an intermediate low class, but the decision was made to try to introduce even intermediate ESL students to that concept of diagramming and prewriting. And so this was used in the idea of clustering topics and facts or supporting details before writing.

And so obviously, many teachers would do this on pencil and paper, and I felt of course, that this would make a great project having students do these diagrams before writing. So let's go through a few student samples as well. And again, so this is an intermediate low, and here's the writing that went with that.

So the basic topic how you can get good computer skills and then you can see the three main subtopics; at work, at home and at school and supporting details, and then you have the actual finished writing. Obviously, not the first draft or the second draft, but again, you can certainly see that it follows the outline.

But then take a look at this next one. OK. And again, these projects develop over time, how to learn English, the four major sub-groupings. OK. And then I don't know , at some point I said, you know what? Well, as the writing got longer, I said to myself, we have this great tool, a computer where we can change the coloring of the text.

So I suggested to students that they should use the colors of their subtopics and sub-grouping to show where they use, where that appears in the actual writing, and I thought that improves the project significantly. And again, our students have a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of information that they want to and are able to share because of their work or their own personal experience.

But again, this is an intermediate level student with a really, really nice example of the topic people with type 2 diabetes, and then a very beautiful essay written based on that. So I hope this has given you some ideas. I do want to do a little bit of practical, walk through some tips to make this project work well.

So let me go back to the live presentation, and there we go. We use this one. And again, this also works well in slides as well. But if you notice, one of the things that-- well, I did notice when students were-- actually let me go back and share one of those documents for just a moment. Let's go back to the presentation and we'll go backwards a little bit.

So I noticed that students are really having difficulty with putting the lines in, and I could tell that they really wanted to get the lines to match. So they really like-- this obviously looks really, really good, and some of the other ones not as good. And it occurred to me that, and even for myself that I was spending too much time trying to get them to line up.

So here's one of the little tips that you could use. It doesn't really matter where the line is in relationship to the circles, if you make use of the order feature. So when you click on the line itself, you have these menu items under Arrange or Order, Bring to Front, Send to Back, Bring Forward.

So if the line is highlighted or is selected, and you send it to the back, you get a perfect alignment of the line. Same thing in a Google Slides, same thing under Arrange and Order, but first you have to highlight something. So under Arrange, Order, and you have the same commands, Bring to Front.

So you can just show the students, OK, it doesn't really matter you know where it is in your oval's, you don't have to really try to get it to the edge. You can just be a little bit sloppy and just overrun it and then just select Arrange, Order, and Send to Back, and you have a perfect line every time.

The other the idea that I would show students is once they've created their main topic, instead of doing the same Insert a shape and picking a shape again, it was pretty easy just to copy, so they could copy and paste all of their clusters right away. And that became a little bit more efficient.

So again, this project was really, really nice for helping students focus on their writings. OK, so the next project that I came up with for my students really dates back to the idea of grammar and sentence tense transformations, and students demonstrating that they could formulate correct sentences in different tenses.

So basically, what you have here is a particular image demonstrating or describing what's in the picture and then students would label the sentence that they created about that picture in subsequent slides. OK.

And so again, it's easily adaptable to different levels of class, ESL beginning high, we were doing present continuous and simple past, but obviously higher levels could have more. So depending on how many levels they're comparing, they'd have that number of slides in the sequence.

So if they're only comparing present continuous, in this case, to simple past, each image would have a pair. So the first would be present continuous, some two sentences, or three sentences, or only one sentence about the picture in present continuous, and then the next slide would change those same sentences to the different tense. And of course, you could change the declaration to a question, all sorts of ways that you could have students transform the sentences.

And then depending on the level of your students or their familiarity with the applications, or that could be what you want to teach as part of the application, changing the text to a different color. So there is talking, then you want to demonstrate that it's in simple past, then that becomes talked. And so this was quite a nice little project for students to demonstrate their awareness of tense transformations.

And here too again, you have the option of adding a voice-over, so students could record their voice, which could be real. Especially in this particular example simple past, making sure that they're really getting the past tense pronunciation or that pronunciation of the past tense ending ed, and making sure that they're really enunciating that clearly.

One of the things though, that I did want to mention in terms of doing that is that, well, let me just get a new slide. OK. So when you insert a picture, and then in the next, and then maybe you insert your text box, and then you try to insert another text box for the sentence.

So what would often happen is when you go to make the second one, and you have a new slide, and then you try to do the same thing again, insert a picture again, see and then you've got to try to see if you can make it match the other one. I found students were doing that quite a bit. And then of course when you play your slide show, and go to the next one, so the picture and the words would always jump around.

So finally, I said OK, I think let's work with the students and instead of trying to manually duplicate, we'll teach them a command. OK. So when you're doing the new slide, you duplicate that particular slide. So that way, if we make the first one, we'll make the first one present continuous tense, and OK.

So now when you do your slideshow, because you've duplicated the picture, it's a much Cleaner and more attractive presentation because things don't jump around. So that was the extra new technique that I would demonstrate to students when doing this and it made for much nicer presentations.

So again some of these projects as you develop them, you improve them as you work with students. OK, so that was the PowerPoint grammar project. Again, lots of opportunities for English language practice when working with your students in PowerPoint or in Google Slides.

So this project, I called The Making Coffee project, but really what it is sequences. And so the idea here is making a series of very clear photos of all steps of a particular sequence, and then having the students place them in the correct order.

And so this can involve speaking practice because if you're doing this live in a session, in a Zoom meeting, they can tell you, they can shout out their options, we can't do that in this particular webinar, but you could this at this time put your suggestions into the chat.

So what I'm going to do is, again, I'm going to switch to the actual presentation. And let me just enlarge it, so it's a nice big picture. And one of the things that maybe you are not aware of, but in the typical presentation, most people create their projects in Normal view, but this project is really meant to be done in Slide Sorter view.

So watch what happens when I click on Slide Sorter. OK, I'm going to decrease the slide a little bit so you can see all of the slides in one shot. So what people may not know is that these slides then are draggable, so you can drag them into the correct, into any order you want. OK.

And then what I do to help the students identify the slides is I put little labels here, letter labels. Except you may notice that even though it's A, B, C alphabetical order, the actual slides are not in correct sequential order. So what I'd like to try to do is like to see if I can do this with you through either the Q&A or the chat, perhaps we can, go ahead.

Melinda Holt: I knew it was coming, so I asked the question in the chat. So everyone go ahead and use the chat, which letter should come first.

Barry Bakin: And I will preface this by saying we've had spirited discussions in past workshops and webinars as to the actual order, and those were all valid. And again, that gives an opportunity for students to express themselves about the way they think things should be.

So you do have a go ahead, take a look at the pictures and in the chat suggest what do you think would be the first slide. And all you have to do is actually type the letter of the slide. So this is your opportunity to participate and give us a letter in the chat, which side do you think should go first .

Melinda Holt: We have five Hs.

Barry Bakin: Oh, and the other thing is, when you type, it may be helpful. Remember, you can type to all the panelists or the panelists and the attendees, because if you're typing only to the panelists, other people don't see what you're typing, so that could be fine as well. I cannot see that. So Melinda, you're saying that H?

Melinda Holt: A bunch of Hs .

Barry Bakin: A bunch of Hs. OK, should be first. So I'm going to move this up to the front position. OK. So Kim is saying, I could use some coffee. I think that was similar to my intention, but we don't have a final order yet. Let me if I can increase the size here just a little bit. See what happens when I do it that way, we lose the bottom part of the picture. So it's got to be a little bit smaller. Let's see if I can do that.

Melinda Holt: Folks, you also have the option up in View options, you could make it instead of Fit to Window, you could make it 100%. That makes it a little harder because you need to scroll or make your window bigger, but it is an option

Barry Bakin: OK, Melinda, do we have a consensus on this what should be the second slide yet?

Melinda Holt: You didn't ask. So no, we're still the first.

[laughter]

Barry Bakin: My apologies. OK, let's go ahead and type in what you think could be a second preferred image.

Melinda Holt: OK, answers are coming in. We've got C.

Barry Bakin: OK, any variations on that anybody, thinks something different? OK, not hearing anything, we'll put C. So it looks like we have somebody is thinking about having some coffee and then going to the cabinet to get some ingredients. There we go. That's the word I'm looking for. OK. Let's at least do one more.

Melinda Holt: So the third slide, it looks like, we actually have one A and then Gs. So an overwhelming majority say G, but we also have an A and an F.

Barry Bakin: OK, so since you said overwhelming majority, we'll go with G. But again, I could very easily see how some people may pour the water in first and then put the coffee in. So that's definitely a legitimate disagreement. OK. But anyway you get the idea that you can do this and finish the project. Obviously, I think perhaps the drinking coffee might be at the end. I think I pretty much has to come before A though because once everything is ready, you turn it on, and then you get your coffee made.

Let's see what's there. I think F obviously, has to come some time before, D looks like maybe probably should come before drinking, you have to pour it into the cup, turn it on, and some of these here, this little section here, what are you going to do E? Are you going to do that before? So these are all nice little-- obviously, you can't put the sweetener or the creamer into the coffee until it's in the cup, if that's what your photo is.

So again, then you can go ahead with the students play the final version that everybody's accepted. So this is in itself is a good conversation tool working with the students and introducing the idea of sequences and vocabulary in all the vocabulary words that you might use to describe sequencing. But like with so many of these projects, it's really just the first step.

So the next step would be to let the students loose with this idea and give them some instruction, and say, you know what? Now you go ahead and you make a project. So let me just get back over here to the students on their own.

And so again, now they have a little project to do. You take pictures if you want, you describe what's happening in each one. And so this is an actual student project about steps for painting your nails. And then again, this has implications beyond just ESL and academic classrooms.

If any of you are in CTE classrooms, actually, taking pictures of you doing something, or having the student take pictures of the student doing something is actually pretty critical since they can't demonstrate it in front of you in the classroom anymore, they could take a video or they could do this type of presentation at home, and in fact, that's what many CTE teachers are doing in real life. So this one here, let me just run it through.

Violeta Plascencia: Steps for painting your nails, Violeta Plascencia, Mr. Bakin, December 2011. First gather your nail painting products. Second, decide which color you want to use. Third, put the polish remover on a cotton ball. Next, remove the old paint of your nails. Then file the tips of your nails. After that paint.

Barry Bakin: So in any case, I'm not going to go through the whole project. But you can see it was quite extensive and a lot of speaking practice to do this project. And so I had really some incredible projects turned in to do this. It's really quite-- and you learn a lot about what skills your students have. Some of your students have some interesting hobbies that they're very happy to demonstrate.

So anyway, that's the sequencing project. There we go. And again, a very, very flexible, very adaptable. Students learn some great ways to use some of the, not only the very basic word but also they move into PowerPoint or Docs and slides.

So if you recall at the beginning, I said that participants will be able to demonstrate to their ESL, ABE, and academic students several separate projects using Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, so their students can practice vocabulary, grammar, or demonstrate mastery of content. So that brings me to the end of today's presentation.