POWERPOINT AND TURNING POINT

Powerpoint presentations are available on the GOLOSA webpage for instructors, who can then edit them to their own liking, show them, and, if they wish, distribute to their students.

I must admit that for me, PowerPoint by itself is little more than a quick way of throwing writing up on the board for explanations of Russian grammar.

However, the real strength of PowerPoint is released in a third-party add-on called Turning Point, which The George Washington University introduced last year and heavily supports. I saw a Turning Point demonstration in March of 2008 and began using the system on a trial basis a week later.

With the Turning Point add-in, instructors can add polling to PowerPoint demonstrations. Here's how a sequence of slides works with Turning Point:

Slide 1: Verbs "to apply to school" and "to graduate from school."

Slide 2 (Turning Point enabled): Which of the following is correct?
    a. Sasha graduated in college.
    b. Sasha graduated to college.
    c. Sasha graduated from college.
    d. Sasha graduated by college.

The teacher pauses on Slide 2. Students use Turning Point remote control units to vote for the correct answer (just like on Who Wants to be a Millionaire).

The polling results determine what the teacher does next. If, say, 95 percent of the class got the right answer, the teacher can briefly explain why (c) was correct and move on. If only sixty percent picked the right answer, some review is in order.

Turning Point Demonstration using Russian verbs

Turning Point can has some Orwellian features that teachers can skip if they desire. Each remote control can be assigned a student name. So student answers can be tracked. I know some colleagues in the hard sciences who assign grades based on student answers in class. My use of Turning Point is anonymous — with one condition: students must vote.

Turning Point has created an entirely new dynamic in our first-year Russian classroom. That is partially due to our first-year set up, which is typical of many mid and large-size Russian programs across the country.

FIRST-YEAR SECTION STRUCTURE

First-year non-intensive Russian at GW meets four times a week for a total of 60 hours per semester or 120 hours in an academic year. The first-year course is part of a two-year basic sequence (240 hours) that ends with students expected to reach Intermediate Low in speaking.

Students meet for one hour a week in a unified section (usually about 40 students) for a master class (which I conduct) on grammar and lexicon. The other three hours are break-out sections with native instructors with 10-15 students per section.

We switched to this system in 2002 (following the example of schools such as Middlebury and Bryn Mawr) after we discovered that students in different sections had wildly different impressions about the facts of Russian structure, which is highly inflected for all parts of speech except adverbs.

Master classes would insure that all students would hear the same information in the same way. Or would they? Consider these typical mid-size class scenarios:

Scenario 1: So, can anyone tell me how we would say that Sasha got his diploma? A few hands go up. But what about the silent majority?

Scenario 2: So, Quinn, how would we say Sasha got a diploma? Quinn: Are we doing the verb “to graduate?” (Is Quinn's daydreaming indicative of the attention of many others in the class?)

Scenario 3: Zane, how would we say that Sasha got a diploma? Zane: Саша окончил университет. (Is everyone in the class as on the ball as Zane?)

Scenario 4: So as you probably have figured out, we would say that Sasha got his diploma by saying “Саша окончил университет.” (Let's hope they could have figured that out on their own!)

In short, in a class of forty, it's hard, without brutalizing interrogation, to find out if everyone is hearing the same thing. Calling on a variety of individual students often enough provides feedback but at a cost: students who get things wrong in such a public way are reticent to participate.

With Turning Point students participate eagerly. Sometimes, after putting up a slide, I have to say, “No, don't vote yet!”

Besides the temptation to cave into the system’s more totalitarian aspects (student IDs on every button-push), Turning Point has two disadvantages, one for teachers and one for students:

1. WORK. Teachers with pre-existing PowerPoint sets will have to modify them — to be effective on a large scale. And while Turning Point has a low learning curve — it took me a few minutes to figure out — the creation of individual slides requires the same time as any other kind of PowerPoint activity.
   
   Since I started using Turning Point at mid-semester in Spring 2008, I have been rewriting GOLOSA PowerPoints and posting them to the GOLOSA site. Units 8 through 10 are now available on the Instructors’ site alongside the traditional PowerPoint demos. By the end of next fall the Turning Point variants of the remaining units will be posted.
   
   
2. COST. The remote controls retail for around $40 each — the cost of a moderately priced textbook. This semester the GW Instructional Technology Laboratory lent me enough remote controls to cover my class. After the first session with Turning Point, I asked the class whether they thought the new way of doing things justified the cost. I got a lukewarm yes. But by the end of the semester, students were enthusiastic. Nearly all said that they would be willing to bear the cost if Turning point was used effectively.

EFFECTIVE USE OF TURNING POINT

When I first asked my students whether they liked Turning Point in the classroom enough to pay for the required remote controls, the response was (understandably) not enthusiastic. Then I learned that there were additional reasons for their doubts. Some students already were using Turning Point in physics courses. But in those classes the instructors packed lots of information into a series of Powerpoint slides, followed by a single graded multiple choice Turning Point quiz slide. Students in the first-year Russian class were relieved to see that my practice was to present a small dose of information followed by several Turning Point slides to see if students were following what was going on. The “check” slides called for ungraded anonymous responses. One student said, “In Russian we get a chance to eventually get it right.”