 Hi, everybody. This is Barry Bakeen. And I hope that this provides some useful and practical information for you and teachers that you work with as we move into this rather abrupt transition to online education. So these projects, Easy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint projects for language practice, this workshop is something that I've traditionally done in-person settings for people, or I've also done the workshop in online settings. But it has traditionally been intended for people who are doing the projects with a classroom full of students in a lab or on laptop. So this whole idea of converting them into projects that can be done online is new, and hopefully we'll be able to work with that and get some great ideas and suggestions for doing that. In any case, I am what's called a instructional technology teacher advisor for the Division of Adult and Career Education of Los Angeles Unified School District, just so you know a little bit about me. And we're fortunate that we do have this position in our division, in which one at every one of our major schools, and our position is to assist teachers in our schools with introducing and integrating technology into instruction. So we are actually meant to go into classrooms with teachers and help them implement using technology. So I feel real fortunate that we have that position available. And I'm also a subject matter expert for OTAN. And some of you may or may not have participated in some of my online workshops or sessions at TDLS in the past. And presumably because you're here, you already know a lot about OTAN. But I would like to encourage you anyway to find out something new about OTAN and make use to their services. So hopefully for today, by the end of this webinar, you will be able to demonstrate and use to pretty much ESL, AB, and academic students several separate projects using Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. At least I had mentioned Excel, but I think because of time, we'll just stick to the Word and PowerPoint projects. And the idea is that by doing these projects, your students can practice vocabulary, grammar, or demonstrate mastery of content. But additionally, perhaps pick up a few skills in actually using those programs themselves. So typically, the first project that I do with the students or I suggest that teachers do is just something called the About Me Project. And basically, this was typically done in Word. And the idea was to introduce yourself, students, and the students to you. But it also served as a sort of a sly way of getting a sense of where the students were at their writing level. Because we all know that even if you're in a Level 1 class or a Level 2 class, you have some students who are way ahead or way behind everybody else. So it didn't really matter. This worked in all the levels. And it would give me a good sense of where the students are. You can see by looking at the example, basically, it's just a very simple paragraph. For lower levels, it can be much longer and more complex for upper levels or academic students. But as you can see, I note that there are a few extra benefits. And one of those benefits is if I got in the habit of saving all of these by semester and by year, and because I would save their projects with their names, it provided an archive for me of my former students. And so years after a student was in my class, if I would bump into them or at school or out in the community, if I got the name, I could always search for the student and find some of their work from years before. And that was also quite nice, like bumping into a student in an academic high school classroom and they were in my beginning high class. I could let them know that I remembered them. And the students in the class let them know how they had progressed over the years. The other benefit of this project is that it does introduce students to the idea of writing successive drafts. And so when I would save their drafts, I would always save the different versions with a number. So you can create a little bit of a chain of progress for them as well as for yourself. So at this level, my only intention was to introduce students to Word. And of course, if you're not using Word, you're using another program, that program. Start to introduce ideas about using a keyboard and saving documents. And in every class, some people were advanced typists already and other people were using two fingers and some people were using one finger. But that's how you get to know what some of your students abilities are in regard to using the computers. And of course, there were many who had never used a computer in any way, shape, or form. And in terms of how much you'd do for them, you have the option. What I used to do for this very first project was to create a template. And all they had to do at this stage, especially in the lowest levels, is just get the text onto a computer and save it. And I would do the rest in terms of formatting and the way it appeared. Because what I would do with these is I would print them one copy, the finished samples. One copy would go to the student and one copy would go up on the wall. And I just liked the way it looked if everything was in the same font and everything was the same layout. And I'm wondering about the photos. It was my practice in the classroom to take the student photos pretty much as a group. I just line them all up along the wall and put them in front of the whiteboard and take a picture. And then I would have the pictures and I would, at this point, I would be doing the inserting of the images and the cropping to make it all look nice. And that worked especially the first time you try implementing a project like this in the classroom. So nowadays, you may not actually have a chance to do this in a classroom for another many months. So the idea would be how can we take this to an online platform. And so many of you may have an LMS that you're working with in LAUSD, we use Schoology. So this is just a sample I copied out of Schoology. Most of them, I think, have some sort of profile option. So if you don't, you know, one alternative instead of doing this as a Word document, maybe just to have this be their profile. So in this case, obviously, you would have to add some extra instruction. You know, how do they get a picture of themselves into the profile? And then if you notice, in this particular LMS, there's an opportunity to write a short bio and add activities and interests. And so you may find that to be an option. Perhaps, you know, turn it into a discussion, you know, where they would post their picture and write the text, you know, using it as a shared Google document. The main purpose of, you know, today's webinar is more to show the projects and not necessarily to look at all many, many ways that you can actually deliver this type of instruction online. But these are some of the things that I thought about. So then the next part of that would be, how would you present the instructions for doing this while you're online? And so, again, you all have different contexts, you all have different LMSs, you all have, you know, different tools that you're disposal as instructors or as part of an institution. Some of the things that came to me might be, you know, you present it as a Zoom training for as many students that you have available so that you can use Zoom or any of the other platforms out there to, you know, actually demonstrate. You can email out instructions, you can place the instructions on your LMS as an assignment. Some of you, you know, may be quite familiar with using Remind, you can send them out. You could also email the template. And again, you know, depending on your students' capabilities, just have students replace different parts with their own information. You could share via Google or another cloud-based option. So, at this point, and I'm gonna ask the help of the panelists because I'm not exactly sure how this will work out, but what I'd like to do is perhaps just take a few moments before we go into the projects to see if any of you have some suggestions or ideas about how it may work with you in your case. And again, panelists, can you advise the participants what would be the best way for them to do that through the Q&A? One of you, feel free to jump in. How about the chat? So how about the chat, folks? If you can think of a way that, like, taking the About Me project, how would you get that to your students? And we've got some questions. Get that to your students. And we've got some answers coming up. Google Classroom, that is an LMS or more of a blended learning management system. Anybody else? Google Docs. So we've got a couple of Googles coming. Well, Linda, if you don't mind for a minute, okay, now, for me to see the chat, please remind me. The three little dots. Okay, okay, click on chat. Then we've got Canvas, Zoom, WhatsApp. This was our first PowerPoint slideshow. Three slides all about me. Google Classroom, Zoom. I've been finding they respond better to text than email. We don't have Google Classroom set up yet. Remind, send template from Microsoft to remind. Remind Google Slides, Facebook Messenger. So those are some of those. A lot of Googles, WhatsApp, Remind. I'm scrolling up here, Canvas. Okay, well, I think you all get the idea. Again, the main purpose of this webinar, and thank you, Melinda, the main purpose of this webinar is more to present the projects as opposed to demonstrating ways to students. And again, because we're all working with so many different contexts, what we'll do is just forge on ahead and get right to the projects, okay? Okay, so another project that I found always to be not only instructional, but just amusing and a lot of fun as well for both the teacher and the students is what I call speech balloon conversations. So this is just a sample. Basically, the idea is to use the speech balloon feature of a word and an image that the student finds on the internet or on their computer or that they take by themselves of a lot of people and then use the vocabulary, grammar or content that they're practicing as part of the conversations that they create. So again, this is adaptable to all levels. If you're studying a more complex grammatical structure then you just say, you know what? In at least one of those speech balloons, make sure that you use an example or a phrase that includes that grammatical structure. And if they're just in a very low level, that's all it is, just a simple present tense question would work or a declaration. So this is very easily adaptable. Here to also finish projects, make an interesting classroom display or website presentation. And so once everybody's finished their project you can post them to your website or to the images of your learning management system. However, whatever method there is available to you as the teacher, you could make a PowerPoint presentation, combine them all into a presentation and send that out or display it. And again, at this point, and see if you've already done the first project now maybe they've learned a few more useful document techniques. So- We've got a couple of questions. I'm sorry to interrupt. That's okay. People are asking, wow, you can do this in Word. Are you gonna be showing them how to do this bubble? That was part of the plan. And so yes, I'll show you a few student samples so you get an idea of what actual ESL students did. And then I was gonna go to a live Word document and show you how to do this. So, but thanks for that question. Don't worry about interrupting me. We're gonna make this work. Okay. So again, the next slide shows an actual student project and which also, oops, it was playing by itself. I'm not sure if I did that or somebody else did that. In any case, and again, the other thing is students quickly realize you don't have to use people. You can use other things as well and that's okay. And what's nice is you do get a little bit of a cultural component by introducing the idea of the difference between what somebody says as the speech balloon and then what somebody thinks as the thought balloon. And I don't know if this is universal across all cultures, but thoughts appear as clouds and things that you say appear with the arrow pointing to the person speaking. So that's just an actual student project. And again, you can see it doesn't have to be complex. Beginning level students can do this as well. Here's one. You can read through them. Oops, let me go back. And see, but again, the nice thing about this, if you explain to your students that you can display what somebody says and then display what somebody is thinking, you get a lot of really interesting things about the difference between what people say and what people think. And then that becomes room for discussion, okay? And some of these are just the pictures either most likely just taken after an internet search. I do advise students that when they're looking for pictures, they think of things that have a group of people in them. So because that's a little bit more interesting. Okay, so if you take a look at this one, this was a really great example of that idea about what people say and what people are thinking. And then typically when I do projects like this, somebody always comes up with like an improvement. So I had been doing this as the single page. And one of my students brought me this and said, oh, look what I made in PowerPoint. And so what they did was they actually made several slides. And then the person speaking, you can see on the left side, rotated on each different slide. You probably cannot see the original, but the next slide, slide number two says, I love you and the baby so much dear. And the third slide, the baby thinking my parents are looking at me, I'm wondering why. And then the fourth slide has the father going, I wonder if it's my baby. Really cutting edge cultural things that people are thinking about. And then as you can also see, this student took the extra step of using PowerPoint to record each of those slides. And so again, I learned almost every project I ever did, one of my students came up with some way to improve it. Okay, so let's do a walk through the steps for those of you who haven't worked with speech balloons. This is me with a group of my students, what's really nice about a picture like this is that there's lots of opportunities to say something or to have conversations. And that's me right there in the center at our school East Valley Skill Center, which is in Arlita, California. And so the first step is to get the picture into the document. And if you notice, what I did try to do is locate the picture down near the bottom. And I find the best way to do that is once the picture, you insert the picture wherever you got it from, from a file on your computer, or if they pasted it from, you know, like something they found on the internet, the little layout options menu. And so I like to pick the one that says float on the page, instead of insert inline or insert with the text, I just make it float so you can move it anywhere you want to. And typically like I have students put it down near the bottom because you have a lot more, you know, you can, you have all the space up on top for the speech balloon. So, you know, the big thing that may be new for a lot of people is where do you find the speech balloon? So speech balloons are under insert. And again, this is for word, you may be using a different product, insert and shapes. Okay, so by going at the shapes, you get a huge menu. Now I've used a lot of shapes already and I've used the speech balloon. So the recently used shapes are, is right there. But for your students, they may have to go all the way down to call outs. So these are called call outs. I call them speech balloons. And basically these first four are the ones that are most used. You can have a rectangular call out and more oval one or the thought call out. So if you just click on one of them and go to your document and you can draw the call out. Okay, so and for some reason this is the default color, the dark blue. And if you just start typing, you start to see that whatever you're typing appears in the text box. But it comes in pretty small. So what you wanna do is show your students how right away you can highlight that text and increase the size, expand it, okay. Then you can also, you might wanna show them how to change the shape by grabbing the little arrows. Notice that the yellow one controls your who's talking. Okay, so you can move it into the location that you want and sort of direct the, oops, that was awkward to the person who's talking. Okay, and of course you can also change the color of the text, but really that's the main idea. And you may wanna, if it's like a conversation, you may wanna just suggest perhaps if it's the first person talking, maybe put their speech balloon a little bit higher. Let me just do it again with a different one. So you get the idea. Again, just manipulating the speech balloon, typing something, okay, changing the text, maybe changing the color of the balloon, the shape fill changes the color, change the size of the text and move it into a good location. And that's pretty much all there is to it. Again, it's insert a shape, call out and in this case we'll do a thought. So you can describe to students or demonstrate to students moving the shapes around so you get the whole conversation in. And Barry, we have a question. How did you make the picture float? Okay, so if you click on the picture, in my version right away to the right, you see layout options. If you click on that, you get different types. So in line with text, all the different ones square, tight through, you can end with these, but I just found that where it just floats in front of the text, almost always works better for me. So if that's not clear enough, I can repeat that. But basically that's how this icon is also up at the top under the format, the format tab right here, wrap text. So it's also available there. Thank you, very clear. All right, so basically that's the speech balloon project. I always, and typically I would always remind students is that somewhere on the bottom, remind them to put their name, put a date, and that's just by inserting a text box. And I'd have them, I liked it when it was down at the bottom, it doesn't have to be down at the bottom, but I always had them put student name, a date, and maybe the class, so the intermediate or beginning. And then I wasn't shy, I always told them to put my name too, so that they would remember where they learned this. Okay, so if there aren't any further questions through the chat, I'll go back to the original presentation and we'll move on to the next project. Okay, so the next project is called Photogrammer. And what's nice about this one is there really aren't very many new skills that the students have to learn. In the last one, they learned a little bit about inserting a photo, maybe also inserting a text box when they had to put their name down at the bottom. And there's really, so there's really not much more to explain about this for students, they don't have to really learn anything new, other than this is really focused on using imagery and sentences to practice a particular or more than one grammar point that you're working on in class. This one, obviously I was working with simple compound and complex sentences, and then on top of that, we were also working with adverbs of frequency. So basically for each photo that they insert, they had to write one simple sentence, one compound sentence, and then a complex sentence. And then I asked them somewhere to put in an adverb of frequently, they didn't have to do that in every sentence, but I did ask them to highlight the adverb of frequently. Frequency, sorry. And so again, very, very flexible in so many ways. This one is a Word document, but students could also do it as a PowerPoint presentation with every slide being a different image and whatever sentences that you want. And here too, again, completed projects would go up on the wall, or you could present them with whatever online method you have available. And again, it's just more practice with the documents, saving things, obviously to do this, a student may have to save it on their own computer and email it to you or upload it to the LMS or work as part of a shared Google document. And so again, you're just reinforcing techniques that they may find helpful when they move out of ESL and into academic classes. So there was a big effort in our division and also in particular at our school to use the ESL classes as a way to start to prepare students for academic classes. And so even in the intermediate levels of class, we made a conscientious effort to introduce techniques of diagramming and charts and other types of practices for organizing thoughts in preparation for writing. So this one I used to call cluster diagrams because I think that's what they're called. And basically the idea was before students write, have the students create a simple diagram with their topic sentence and subtopics and have them start from there to organize their thoughts before they actually put any words on paper. So the technique is basically the same as doing the speech balloon. You're inserting an image and then what's new are the lines connecting the circles, the cluster. But again, let me show you a few action projects. This was an ESL intermediate low class. I forgot why my PowerPoints keep advancing these days but you'll have to bear with me. So there you go, you see the main topic. You see several subtopics and each subtopic has a color coded set of ideas of supporting ideas. And when I first started doing this, this is how you can get good computer skills. And so this is the actual student writing that resulted from this particular cluster. So you see that at work, at school and at home. And then there are three things you should do to get good computer skills and you see the three things. So that was the first, that's what I first started to request to the students and then of course as I said before, students think of their own improvements. So this is a different one, how to learn English. And what I think I did is I copied these possibly from a PowerPoint presentation that would automatically advance and maybe I forgot to turn that off. But in any case, how to learn English, you have four major topic areas and the students came up with this on their own, they started to color code the sentences. So I said, oh, well, that's really smart, because now it's very, very easy for both the teacher and for other students to see where the clusters turn into actual sentences. And I thought, oh, that's a great idea. So here's another one and again, what happens with a lot of projects. So there you see the work, how easily adaptable it is to different levels. And this is an ESL student, not an academic student, but the idea would be, they bring in their own experiences. These are things that she works with, that particular student either as, I forget if she was a nurse or a nurse's assistant, but she obviously had a lot of knowledge about this and it was very personal for her. So let's do a walkthrough with some of these ideas because there are some tips for making it a little bit easier to do. So I'm going to get out of the PowerPoint and go to my second Word document. The first thing you may notice is that it may be easier at this point to teach your students about layout and that a landscape orientation may be more suitable for this than a portrait because it allows for better placement of the topics and subtopics on a page. So that may be something that you would consider. But inserting the shapes is exactly the same as the other project. It's insert a shape, but this time instead of the call out, you don't need the call out, it's just basic shapes. Okay, so when you insert, you draw it on the page. And again, the default is that blue with the white and you may want to change that. But in terms of some ideas, it occurred to me after I was doing this for a while, instead of having students every single time create the shape, it occurred to me that it was a lot easier. Once you had your main topic, and let's say your subtopic, right? So, and the subtopic of course is words, the topics. But it occurred to me that if I wanted all of them to be the same color, so I started to teach students about copy and paste because if you copy and paste, then each new balloon already has the same color and looks similar. And I said, oh, that's really easy. So, we'll do one more. So, and then it just became an easy matter to show the students how to change the color. So, you just change your color and you get a slightly better color. So, and again, that's another new skill, copying and pasting. Now, you may also be wondering, how is it that I got the line to so nicely meet the edge of the ovals? So, if you recall from the first one, there was an example. Let me see if I can find the example. Oops, too far back. I think it was this one. I used to get a list where the lines didn't always match up or the lines just look a little strange. And that was okay. But I did say, you know what? It really looks a lot better like this and students also appreciate it. And so the simple trick for that is when they, well, I'll do the reverse. You see, you make your first line anywhere. You just make a line. And also that's also an insert, a shape. And this time you just pick a line and you draw your line. And then you can change the color and change the width. You can make it wider or change the color. You know, so there's a lot of variations. But you just put the line anywhere. And then if you right click on the line, you can send it to the back. And boom, it's a beautiful line. Let me do that again. Right click on the line, send it to the back. And your students will really like that because if you don't do that, you can spend a lot of time trying to get the line to match up in the right place. But this way, if it's behind, it doesn't matter where it goes. And then again here too. So all of these skills build on the previous skills plus add maybe something new. So now they've learned maybe copy and paste. They've learned about, you know, moving things forward and moving things backward. Don't forget to have them inserted a text box with their name. So that's the cluster balloon project. Let's move back to the main PowerPoint. Another project is the PowerPoint Grammar Project. So again, if you haven't done any PowerPoint yet in class, this is a nice one to get started. I'm not really going to go into explaining that, you know, step by step on this, just the basic idea. If you're the type of teacher who feels that doing tense transformation is a value to your students, this is a really nice project for that. In this case, what I used to do was take pictures of my students doing things and use those to make it relevant. And that was my classroom, but you could also find ready-made images for them as well. But basically the idea was to change something from one tense to another and then do it as part of a PowerPoint progression of slides. So slide number two, for example, is just present continuous. And then slide number three, everything automatically changes to a simple past. But notice that I did have them change the color of the font for everything that made it different in simple past. And again, you know, very flexible, depending on the level of your students, some students could record their voices and record the present, you know, and dictate or, you know, say the changes as they were going through the slides, you know, some students could manage four or five slides, some students could manage pairs of slides, you know, 10 or more pairs of slides. So it had a lot of value. And of course, if you hadn't used PowerPoint at all, now they're learning a little bit about putting text boxes and pictures into PowerPoint and doing a presentation. This I call the Making Coffee Project. It's an introduction to sequences and see now that they've had a little bit of practice from the previous project with PowerPoint, then they were much more able to do this one. So what I would do with this is first, I would demonstrate obviously what they needed to do, but then I would provide each one with this PowerPoint project saved already on their computer or on a flash drive or even a floppy disk back in the day. And as you notice, the slides are not in the correct order. So what their task was is to put those scrambled sequences of images in order. And we'll get to this. Let me take you to the actual PowerPoint that I would use. So you may already know that there's more than one way to view the PowerPoint slides. Typically the way we work with a PowerPoint slide or presentation is normal. So you see the slides in some sort of order on the left and then you see a large version of the slide. So the task here is to put the steps of this sequence into an order. Okay, now the way it was when I first opened the presentation, it was under slide sorter. So in slide sorter, you see all of the images at once. And then what you can do, it's very easy to drag and drop them into any order that you want. See, now to do this as a class participation project, you can work with this one with the letters, okay? And call out or have students suggest the letters which would go first, okay? So look at this as a sequence of steps for somebody to prepare a cup of coffee and perhaps we can call upon our presenter panel to assist perhaps some people either through the chat or probably through the chat, just give a shout out as to which of these nine images do you think should go first and then our presenter will pass the suggestion on to me and I will move the slide by letter into the correct order or into the order that's dictated by your questions. They're already answering. The C seems to be it, but we have an H as well. Okay, well, let's go with C since that was the first one and then people can furiously debate that in the chat box, which I can't... They are, they're debating now. You can give me a play by play, Melinda. Then we got the C. I think they might be deciding what's coming next. So now we have F, nope, H. She's thinking of having a cup of coffee. Okay, so you want that after C? Yeah, they're going H first now. H first? Is that the prevailing view? Okay. It seems to be. H needs coffee. Okay, so we're at H. All right, folks, what's next? H and then C seems to be good. Okay. Yep, looks like we're getting a bunch of C's. H, C, G, someone just put in. So we've got an overachiever. So we want the G? I think we want the, it looks like it. F or G, someone's saying. Okay, and be legitimate disagreements. There may not be only one correct answer. There you go. So yeah, we've got people going. They're waffling. That's part of the discussion. FG or GF. Okay, well, yeah, again, with your students, you can go through that argument and say, why G may be before F or F? Okay, where are we now? I, F then I. As you can see, we are doing this in an online fashion where we're not in the same room. So this may actually be what you may be doing with your students. Someone's already answering that B is gonna be last. Then we have A, E, D, B. Oh, you want B last, okay. I think we are slowing down. I think you've got them in the order that they want them. All right. Well, it makes sense to me. She's thinking about it. Presto, we are done. She goes to get the materials. Thank you, Melinda. She goes to get the ingredients. She put some coffee into the coffee maker. She put some water. Again, very legitimate to change the order. She turns on the coffee maker. You see some results, pours the coffee into the cup, then pours the creamer into the coffee. And I know there are some people who may do that other ways, but the coffee is already in the cup. So I think legitimately D has to go before E. And then she finally gets her cup of coffee. But as you can see, the letters on top are really helpful for this discussion. When you share it out, the original file with your students, it may not, those may not be necessary. But when you do this presentation and discussion, they may want to do that. And so again, that's one type of practice that you could do where you have them discuss the sequence. The next step of this project is now that you've shown them how to do a sequence of events. I'm sorry, Barry, we have a question. How did you get the letters on there? Okay, so yeah, let me just, let me go back to normal. So this is just an inserted photo and the letter is just a text box. See, so I try to make it large and bold. So it was easy to view because I knew I would be presenting it online, but that's all it is, okay? So to continue, the next step then is students have already inserted photos now into Word, they've inserted photos into PowerPoint. All this is just the photo, that's very, very large. And they could have the words instead of the letters, okay? They could actually type what's happening here. And so the project was for them to create their own sequence of events. And so they would take pictures, they would describe the sequence, they would put them in order. And then some of them, again, depending on time and their own skills and the skill level of the class can narrate that because it is a PowerPoint. And so that was a really nice, nice project. So I call that the coffee steps scrambled. Because this one is in scrambled form when I gave it to them. Hopefully, after viewing the webinar, you had a lot of ideas about using Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as projects for your students that perform the dual purpose of practicing vocabulary, grammar, and content, as well as introducing needed techniques using some of these common programs. We do have time for some questions, I think, if you, if Melinda can continue to do what she's been doing in regards to make me aware of the questions. I will say, and perhaps I may be getting out ahead of myself, but I will make the PowerPoint file, the making coffee steps scrambled file available to OTAN as a file. So everything will be posted on the OTAN website. Thank you. Thank you all.