First Hangout with workgroup

Just completed a very nice Hangout time! We went ahead and met ---- just two of us this time as we did not hear back from our other two group members.

Hopefully the other two will be able to get their gmail connected and working this coming weekend. I think that many people found the daily expectations for the class, not what they were anticipating. I think that may felt the work would all be concentrated on the weekend. So maybe our two participants could not cope with a middle of the week call.

Before the Hangout time I wondered if I was doing all of the set-up correctly for the call. But we did succeed in connecting! For some reason neither of us were able to get the video to work. For the most part we could hear each other very clearly but there were times for both of us that the audio would break up meaning that we lost a phrase of the other person’s thought.

One thing that I learned from my colleague is that each culture also has a teaching culture of expectations and parameters set by the culture, the language institution, the course demands, etc. So the instructor will need to work with all of that to still make learning fun and relevant. There are ways to provide a “work around” for the needs of language learners if the the teacher thinks creatively about the goal and what is available to work with in the present learning environment.

We noted that even a person who is passionate about teaching and good instruction needs some camaraderie to keep up the enthusiasm as there will be classes which do not respond eagerly and can severely dampen the instructor’s motivation.