LD SIG Kansai Get Together #6 May 14th, 2016 10:30 – 12:30
In attendance: Rie Nakai, Shuji Narita, Richard Silver, Jennifer Teeter, Katherine Thornton, and Agi Patko
Absentees: Anita Aden, Gretchen Clark, Bjorn Fuisting, and Hiroyo Nakagawa
LD SIG Kansai Get Together 2016 Schedule
When: NEW DAY = Saturday mornings, from 10:30 am for approximately 2 hours.
Upcoming dates: June 11th, July 9th, (No August meeting), September 24th, October 8th, November 12th, December 10th
Where: Hito Machi Koryukan Community Centre (Kyoto)
〒600-8127 京都市下京区西木屋町通上ノ口上る梅湊町83-1
Dates are subject to change, but we hope this will help people to plan ahead & come!
Homework for next month’s Get Together: : issues and successes. It is going to be about mid-term in June, still in time to make changes to our courses. Share any issues, concerns or problems that you are facing or tell us about what has been successful, enjoyable or effective in your classes so far during the semester.
Discussion highlights:
Student conferences
We started off the discussions by taking a look at the conference that Matthew Porter had called our attention to in response to our previous report (http://acestudentconference.weebly.com/). We found out that the two-day event provides workshops and group problem solving tasks before students are asked to present about their solutions to these questions. We thought that it would be difficult to contribute to this confer-ence, yet it would be interesting to go and see it ourselves or recommend it to our students. This lead us to come back to our original idea of organizing a student conference in Kansai.
Proposed topics:
- the transition from high school to university
- (the ideal self-access centre)
- 2017 year of culture (Kyoto)
- JSL/ JFL (Japanese as a second or foreign language) to integrate foreign exchange students and Japanese languages teachers
- intercultural communication
- out-of-class learning
Proposed forms of presentation:
- posters
- presentations
- workshops
- free discussion (on a theme)
In addition, some sort of a social event, such as a dinner or sightseeing might increase interac-tion between students of different universities.
In terms of the venue we thought that one of our universities could be a good choice. The date of the event could be in October/ November this year.
Discussions to be continued in June.
Evaluation
We shared ways and methods of evaluation with each other. It was great to have a variety of these. Narita sensei presented us a carefully detailed point system, with which he can accu-rately follow each individuals participation throughout the semester. Richard showed us ex-amples of evaluation through Manaba +R, where students can follow their grades and see where they are compared to the rest of the class. Richard also showed us guidelines that his university gives to teachers to help evaluating writing. Jennifer demonstrated how she trains and prepares her students to give peer-feedback to each other. Katherine introduced us a self-assessment method that she uses with her students at the end of each self-directed learning cycle.
Last but not least, we thought that creating a Kansai Ld email address would be useful. Here`s the address ldkansaigettogethers@gmail.com please send any comments or questions about the get-togethers here.
Handouts to be uploaded to GoogleDrive soon.