Week 8 Post: Three Technologies

Teachertube, at www.teachertube.com, is a video-sharing website, much like Youtube, and it was suggested by Gordon King.  Instead of songs, music videos, films, and so on, Teacher tube is dedicated to providing educational videos.  While videos with educational content can be found on sites like Youtube, Teachertube focuses more on videos that resemble what we might experience in a classroom environment.  In fact, some of the videos were taken during a particular classroom presentation.  Search for any topic that comes to mind, and you will get loads of videos that range from classroom lectures to PowerPoint presentations, and from animations to documentary excerpts.  As a language instructor, I searched for grammatical subjects and found many videos that my students would benefit from watching.  Sometimes, it is good to hear the same concept explained by different people, maybe something I explained in class is explained more clearly by a more experienced teacher in one of the videos on Teachertube.  Also, videos on this site can be referred to by students who missed a class or several classes.  I have weekly tutorial hours, of course, but in the event where I cannot fulfill such obligations, Teachertube is there to help.

            Teachertube is not all about catching up on missed lectures, however.  Videos can be uploaded, and I can imagine assigning a project where my students have to create a video of themselves in a group, explaining a grammar point, and, ultimately uploading this video onto Teachertube.  This is concurrent with the emerging trends in education as outlined in the 2014 NMC Horizon Report (Johnson, Adams Becker, Estrada, & Freeman), which state that the future of education will be characterized by students creating and producing more than they consume.

            Another website which was brought to my attention by our friend Gordon King is Flickr at www.flickr.com.  Again, this website is all about sharing.  Richardson (2010) writing about major shifts to come in the future of education, asks us to “Think of how much of student work today simply ends up in the recycling bin at the end of the year” (151).  Forget about end of the year, yesterday I photocopied homework assignments for my class and one student didn’t even bother to take hers home.  But maybe it’s not her fault.  Now that I think about it, the assignment was kind of dull and boring.  Maybe it’s not that students are lazy or anything like that, maybe there’s something wrong with the assignment.  Either way, sites like Flickr offer us many alternatives to get students more motivated to create work that “can have real purpose and real meaning for the audience that consumes” (Richardson, 2010, p. 151). If there’s anything today’s audience loves to consume, it is pictures.  Selfies or food shots, people are clicking away and talking pictures of, well, their lives basically.  So how can I use this educationally in a language learning context?

            Obviously, the most basic of classroom presentations can be much more fun to do when students know that they can include photos instead of just standing up there in front of the class mouthing away about something that we covered in class.  Basically, what I am trying to do here is add substance to an assignment.  I want to use pictures alongside language activities in order to give students something to talk or write about in class.  For example, think about a writing assignment where students are given a piece of paper with a question on it and they have to answer that question in 250 words in 50 minutes.  Sounds boring right?  It might be difficult to brainstorm ideas.  However, a nice montage of pictures, done by me or the students beforehand, can be very helpful in helping our students with their writer’s block.  Finally, for basic language practice, talking about what is in or what is happening in the pictures is classroom classic: it can help with practicing all sorts of tenses and vocabulary.

            Karen Kendall introduced me to Gameshow Pro, which can be found at http://www.learningware.com/gameshowpro/.  This website allows you to design game show content for whatever purpose you have in mind.  The games already exist and they are based on well-known TV game shows, teachers just have to make the questions.  Games in language learning contexts are especially helpful to boost energy levels when students get tired.  They are also helpful for vocabulary.  For example, the questions in the game can be definitions of words and students have to figure out what words are being referred to.  A game can also be designed where students are asked very easy general knowledge questions but can only get full points if they answer the questions in correct grammar and pronunciation.             

References

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

The New Media Consortium (n.d.). NMC Horizon Reports. Retrieved May 30, 2012, from http://www.nmc.org/publications

Week 6 Post: Distance and Open Learning Technologies in Adult Learning

Moodle (https://moodle.org/) and Desire2learn (http://www.desire2learn.com/) are asynchronous online learning technologies.  Of course, the big name in this act is Blackboard, which Walden uses, but since we are all familiar with that, I decided to have a look at some other names in the business.  

            On the first page of Moodle, I clicked on “Join Us” and was taken to another page where there were several links to various discussions.  Of course, the discussion topic I zeroed in on was entitled “Teaching with Moodle”.  This page was a kind of troubleshooting / suggestion grab-bag page, where teachers either wrote about glitches and other technical problems, or where they simply posted questions on anything from how to implement a particular learning objective to how to split a class of one hundred plus students into groups.  I went back to the main “Join Us” page and this time clicked on “Lounge”, which is where teachers share anything from articles and links of interest or teaching suggestions and lesson plans.

            I then decided to take a tour of the facilities and was impressed with the user-friendly interface and the customizable dashboard.  The interface is specifically designed to be compatible with mobile technologies, which is a significant advantage as learning becomes more and more mobile (Park, 2011).  Moodle contains many tools (such as wikis, forums, and chats) to promote, foster, and implement collaborative learning.  Basically, I got the impression that Moodle is teacher- and user-friendly, and as anyone who has ever taken an online course knows, that kind of friendliness is one of the most important factors to consider when incorporating learning management systems into courses.  At the end of the day, how pretty the page is and whether or not it is compatible with your mobile will not matter if, among other things, your students have problems accessing their pages, you cannot see their grades, or announcement do not get published in time.

            Neither Moodle nor Desire2learn appear to have such problems.  Desire2learn is not that different from Moodle.  Indeed, perhaps it is safe to assume, on a superficial level at least, that all LMSs are more or less variations on a similar theme.  The basic premise is this: Teachers get to put their courses online and manage them quite easily.  With distance learning becoming ever more prevalent (Bonk, 2009), LMSs are going to become more and more important in our lives.  Who knows, with learning becoming ongoing and lifelong, perhaps LMS and social networking will combine to form a symbiotic whole in which learning and networking are one and the same.

            Fantastical as that may sound, it probably will not provide learning in a formal capacity.  In fact, while I was reading class materials for the assignments this week I kept asking myself what the difference was between open learning and distance learning.  Of course, the differences became clear as I was reading and the main difference is that distance learning is formal and credited.  Therefore, the utopic and fantasy combination of social networking and LMS would be fine if we were talking about open learning.  Indeed, if you go to the MIT OpenCourseWare website, you can see links to their Facebook and Twitter pages.  However, when it comes to official and formal learning endeavors, it would perhaps be better to stick with LMS and network with classmates via the tools provided by the system.  

            There is no doubt that such technologies enhance adult learning.  I mean, that is what we are doing right now, is it not?  We are benefiting from an LMS and we are receiving a formal credited education through it.  In a language learning context and LMS can provide learners with valuable opportunities to practice online.  Mostly, the LMS is used for work on grammar or practicing reading skills.  The main thing to keep in mind is that along with the efficiency of the LMS, the meaningfulness of the tasks is equally important.  If we do not provide learners with learning tasks and objectives that are meaningful to them, then using LMS would be no different than any other kind of teaching-learning interaction.   

References

Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 

Park, Y. (2011). A pedagogical framework for mobile learning: Categorizing educational applications of mobile technologies into four types. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(2), 78–102.
Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

Week 5 Post: Games, Simulations, and Virtual Environments in Adult Learning

Conduct a Google search for online games, simulations, and virtual worlds, and you are bound to be met with a vast array of choices.  Where should one begin?  With so many choices available, it becomes increasingly difficult to select a particular game that can be interesting and lesson-friendly at the same time, and one that all the students in a class can enjoy and learn from.  However, while pondering this issue, I remembered two statements in Squire (2011) that resonated with me.  The first is related to mutual interest.  Squire (2011) recounts how he took an interest in a student’s hobby in order to reach out and connect with him.  Previously, the student had been reluctant to participate in activities and do his assignments.  Squire befriended the student through gaming, and researched the student’s hobby, in this case, a love of Great Pyrenees dogs, in order to engage him in conversation and reach out to him.  This show of interest forged a connection that enabled the once reluctant student to excel. 

            From this anecdote, I was reminded of the importance of teacher interest in students.  When planning to use games, we really need to keep our students in mind.  A game I found stimulating and fun may not evoke the same feelings in my students.  Furthermore, interest needs to exist at the outset.  If I do not like video games and have no interest in them, it would not make sense to try to employ them in class.  Firstly, I would probably have no idea what I was doing, and, secondly, it would be highly dismissive to tell the students to just play a game and do such-and-such activity; this kind of behavior does not foster an inclusive atmosphere in class.  In short, teachers need to be into gaming if they want to use games in class.

            The second item that struck me from Squire (2011) was his discussion of the Montessori system of education, specifically, its focus on the normal development of children and how creative problem solving is an essential, though not singular, component of this development.  Reflecting on creative problem solving, I thought about purpose in learning.  Solving a problem is an objective and teachers need to provide such an objective when incorporating games in their lessons.  Again, teachers cannot be dismissive and send students off to play games as if they are being sent away to recess; students need a purpose.  If students end up asking themselves what’s the point of all this? then something needs to be reworked.                

            It would seem, then, that a requisite for using games in class is teacher interest.  If teachers are not interested in games and gaming, this can also be used: Teachers can ask students to convince the teacher that gaming is interesting.  Such an activity can help students practice reasoning skills.  Also, an assignment can be designed around learners teaching teachers how to play games.  Again, such an assignment can be used to get students talking and participating in class.

            Therefore, in a language learning context, the opportunity to practice narration, instruction, and discourse become the focal points of teachers’s learning objectives.  If this seems like a simplistic approach to incorporating games into classroom curricula, then it probably is.  What we need to keep in mind is that to become a gamer, in other words, someone fluently capable with games of all sorts, requires years of familiarity with the gaming world.  If I were to compare myself to Squire, I am a novice.  True, I have played a number of games over the years, but my exposure to gaming pales in comparison to what Squire has in mind.  Therefore, if I were to choose a game, I would need to choose something that both learners and I can easily familiarize ourselves with.  Ideally, the students would already be familiar with the game, and I would need to catch up with them.

            In circumstances where I am not very familiar with a game, I would use my ignorance to create a teachable moment where students play the role of instructor and teach me how to play a game, but they must not, under any circumstances, take control over the game either by snatching the joystick from my hands or by asking me to scoot over so they can sit at the keyboard; they have to explain to me, orally, what it is that I need to do in the game.  If the students and I are both familiar with a game, then I would design a scenario in which I am stuck at a particular juncture in the game.  They have to provide me with a walkthrough to get through the part that I am stuck in.  This would work better if I told students that I was stuck on a particular level and they had to provide me with a walkthrough for that entire level.  The best thing about games these days is that there is more than one way to get through a level, so I can tap into some competitive spirit by challenging the students to come up with the best walkthrough.

            Bonk (2009) tells us that almost all teenagers play video games.  If as many learners are passionate about video games, then we have struck gold because “identifying students’ passions and using them as a vehicle for relating academic content,” (Squire, 2011, p. 46) can have a significant impact on students’s learning: “When passionate about a topic, students will willingly read and write texts that are far more complicated than texts about topics they are not passionate about” (Squire, 2011, p. 46).  However, we cannot assume that all students are passionate about games and gaming.  Therefore, we return to a common theme of the past several weeks: incorporating games into our classes does not necessarily mean that we exclude other forms of learning; just as incorporating technology in education does not mean we completely replace the old ways of doing things.

            Which games would I choose?  During the first week of classes, as we are building a healthy learning community, I would ask students to tell me which games are their favorites.  Then, I would prepare learning activities based on the feedback I get.  This way, I can be (almost) sure that the learning related to games would be both interest-driven and passionate.    

References

Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 

Squire, K. (2011). Video games and learning: Teaching and participatory culture in the digital age. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Week 4 Post: Mobile Learning Technologies in Adult Learning

Last summer I spent some time, as I am now, in front of my lap top typing away, or seated somewhere reasonably comfortable reading about how I can develop my teaching practices; we were doing the 6174 class at the time.  Although the fact that my friends and family were often down at the beach while I was attending to my school work irked me from time to time, I was nevertheless thankful for the technology that allowed me work just about anywhere there was electricity and (wireless) internet.  In this week’s discussion we talked about the benefits of using mobile technology in education.  Specifically, we focused on learning on-the-go.

            Certainly, portable technology allows students to take care of their studies in multiple locations.  At the same time, it allows teachers to come up with creative learning activities that allow students to apply what they have learned.  In fact, Park (2011) talks about how mobile learning (m-learning) can be used to design activities that incorporate PBL (problem based learning): The teacher sends “loosely structured instruction … [and the students] … work together in a group as they solve the given problem and try to achieve a common goal” (p. 93).  Here we have what looks to me like a very effective combination of m-learning and learning that incorporates problem solving.  Indeed, lauding the virtues of PBL, Nilson (2010) tells us that solving problems gets learners to practice several higher-order skills such as organizing, prioritizing discussing, recording, negotiating, decision making, and several others.  Therefore, when coming up with activities for learners, we need to create engaging activities that get students off of their butts and out there doing something.

            In addition to getting students to do more in order to learn, using mobile technology allows teachers to design tasks that are authentic.  Ginsberg and Wlodkowski (2009) tell us that an authentic task “directly meets the human need to use what has been learned for more effective daily living” (p. 279).  When students realize that a task is catered to help them learn something that is important for their lives, as opposed to something that they have to repeat on a test, they will be more motivated to perform well on it.  All the while, they would be using technological hardware that is more than familiar to them.  In fact, these days, it is reasonably safe to say that smartphones and tablets are extensions of our younger students.  As such, activities that incorporate these devices will no doubt attract students’ interests.  For example, the video about the school in Wolverhampton (Learning2Go, n.d.) seemed to indicate that the students were more engaged in and out of class due to the use of technology in almost every aspect of school life.

            As a language teacher, I am interested in getting my students to produce spoken and written language, and to be able to comprehend what they read, listen to, or watch in the target language; English, in this case.  In past discussions and blog posts, I mentioned applications such as stumbleupon.com, which exposes students to web pages, in English, that include content that the students are interested in.  These web pages usually contain articles, but occasionally, learners can stumble across sites with video or audio.  Either way, what if I want learners to produce language?  We know about blogs and how they allow students to share class work and ideas through writing.  Well, the ComicBook! app (see link below) is a tool that lets the user do anything with photographs.  This can make class presentations much more fun than the usual PowerPoint.  I would especially use this app with low level / beginner learners.  Too often, the applications and technologies I have been researching over the last four weeks catered more to higher level learners, but this app is perfect for simple presentations.  For example, describing people is a staple of any beginner language course.  Learners have to describe physical appearances and personalities.  Often, students are asked to bring photos of whomever they are describing, usually a family member.  With ComicBook! these presentations can be a lot more fun, as students creatively play around with the photographs they have chosen, turning the people in the pictures into heroes and villains.  

            Having said that, with the latest devices and ComicBook!, this activity can be a lot more fun.  First, students take photos of each other using their devices, then they manipulate these pictures, and finally, they use the funny pictures while describing the people in them.  The only down side about this app is that it is not free.  Also, it does not seem to work well with devices other than iPhones and iPads.

            Another app that is designed for users of Apple products is popplet, which can be found at www.popplet.com.  This app is useful for organizing ideas into mind maps.  Mind maps are especially helpful for language learners in terms of helping them to learn vocabulary.  With popplet, they can create word-webs, which are mind maps of words that are similar or synonymously identical.  Not only that, learners can also make mind maps of grammar tenses, either by focusing on how some tenses are similar, or how they are completely different.  Here, I am opting to use popplet as studying and reviewing tool.  We talk a lot about alternative methods of assessment, but for the time being, a lot of schools are sticking with traditional pen and paper testing.  Popplet can help learners organize their notes.  Also, students can use their mind maps to study vocabulary and tenses wherever they are.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/comicbook!/id436114747?mt=8

References

Ginsberg, M. B., & Wlodkowski, R. J. (2009). Diversity & motivation: Culturally responsive         teaching in college (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Learning2Go. (n.d.). Retrieved May 30, 2012, from https://www.wolverhampton-engage.net/sites/anonymous/Learning2Go/Pages/default.aspx 

Nilson, L. B. (2010). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Park, Y. (2011). A pedagogical framework for mobile learning: Categorizing educational applications of mobile technologies into four types. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(2), 78–102.
Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

Week 3 Post: Social Networking and Adult Learning

A quick search for a list of social networking sites led me to a Wikipedia page with almost a hundred (I did not really count) items.  Of course, I had absolutely no idea there were that many out there.  What is even more impressive is that most of the networks focus on a particular lifestyle or interest.  For example, you have crunchyroll.com, a social network devoted to East Asian anime, manga, drama, and much more.  Then there is elftown.com, a web community for the Fantasy and Science-Fiction lover.  But it is not all fun and games.  For example, disaboom.com is designed to be of use to people with disabilities, and writeaprisoner.com helps inmates keep in touch with family and friends.  

            One social networking site that piqued my interest was www.italki.com.  Despite the inauspicious name, italki promises to help language learners develop their speaking skills.  You can search for teachers on the website’s database and choose one based on their profile, or you can make a selection based on recommendations from other users.  Once you have chosen a teacher, you can view her schedule to make an appointment.  How frequently you can take you lessons depends on you.  Students connect with teachers via Skype and the length of each lesson, or session, is determined by mutual agreement between learner and teacher.

            This is a very helpful website because it gives learners in monocultural societies a chance to practice speaking with native speakers of the language that they are learning.  In Turkey, if learners of English want to practice their speaking skills with a native speaker they usually go to their teacher, who may not always be available.  Other than that, they make do with pre-planned speaking lessons, or itinerant speaking activities throughout the school week, month, term, and so on.  If learners are lucky enough to have friends from abroad, that can helpful also.  In addition, it is not difficult for learners to hire a private tutor and simply ask for speaking practice.  However, if time is an issue and if students prefer not to suffer through Istanbul’s infamous traffic going to the lesson from work and then to their homes, Italki.com gives them a chance to control when and how they have their speaking lessons.

            While Italki.com is good for giving students practice in their speaking skills (they also say they can give writing feedback and grammar lessons) I think that having a social network site that can keep a class connected if also important.  To that end I would choose www.edmodo.com.  This social network is the Facebook and Twitter of education.  Richardson (2010) suggests we use it when sites like Twitter “are too Wild West,” (p. 88), and because it “does much of what Twitter does and more” (p.88).  With edmodo.com you can create classes, make announcements to them, send and receive homework, post links, and become an active part of your learners’s learning community.  Edmodo.com can be very helpful with adult learners because it extends the class atmosphere to the virtual environment, making it accessible at all time.  Think about a student with a question in mind.  She can log onto edmodo.com and access class notes or post a question to the teacher or the entire class.  Also, you might not get excuses such as “I did not get the assignment” because the assignment is right there in the virtual classroom for all to see and access.      

            I would use italki.com for speaking practice and edmodo.com for community building and active learning.  For speaking practice I would ask students to sign up with italki.com and find a teacher based on their preferences.  Once they have found a teacher, their assignment would be to have a conversation and report on that conversation the following day using visual aids.  For example, they can show us the teacher’s profile page.  This activity gives students a lot of chance to practice their speaking; first with their tutors, then during their oral reports.  What I really had in mind though, was for the students to record the conversation they have with their online tutors, with the latter’s consent, of course.  The recording can be audio only or video, whichever the student is more comfortable with.  The recording can then be submitted to the teacher, or played back to the entire class.  The latter is the preferred alternative because it allows the learner to get peer feedback from the class.  In fact, uploading the recording to the class Edmodo site is another good way to get peer feedback.  In this way I can cover a lot of ground simultaneously.  The online tutoring sessions give students speaking (and listening) practice, and giving feedback via Edmodo allows students to practice their writing skills in a friendly, comfortable, and informal way.     

References

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Week 2 Post: Using Applications and Multimedia with Adult Learners

Will Richardson’s (2010) description of modern students’s technological tendencies really brought home the requirement for modern teaching to cater more to their predilections, especially when he states that these students are “using a wide variety of technologies that they are told they can’t use when they come to school” (p. 6).  Indeed, it has been a long and arduous, and dare I say futile, endeavor to get students to let go of technology and embrace our way, the old way of doing things.  Teachers always complain about students playing with their smartphones when they ought to be focusing on a fascinating account of the Present Perfect Continuous.  Who can blame them for opting to have another go at beating their own score at Subway Surfer, or trying to get three stars on all levels of Angry Birds?  Thankfully, in the timeless tradition of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them, teachers today are slowly starting to embrace technology more and more, even to adopt a more smartphone inclusive attitude towards their teaching.      

            I have no qualms concerning smartphone use in class.  Sometimes, learners may need a little down time, they may have a lot on their minds, they may need to check correspondence regularly because of some emergency, or whatever; either way, teachers need to be more understanding of the reality of constant and unceasing access that comes with modern technology.  As long as students promise to catch up on anything they miss due to smartphone use in class, I am okay with it.  They are, after all, adults.  Also, if students insist on using a smartphone, and if I am also in the mood for some insisting, then I can always ask them to access www.khanacademy.com.  This website is a lot like Edmodo, but it has videos, progress checks, all sorts of activities, and a more user-friendly interface.

            The best thing about khanacademy, however, is the range of content.  There are articles and videos on subjects such as math, world history, economics, and much more; plenty to choose from for students with diverse subjects of interest.  The language in which the articles are written are not too difficult, making khanacademy an ideal site for English language instructors.  Furthermore, some articles and videos allow registered users to make comments or ask questions.

            I would first use khanacademy to get students to practice their listening skills outside school hours.  Websites such as ted.com are also useful for the same objectives, but the talks on ted can be challenging for some learners, while the videos on khanacademy are more student-friendly.  Either way, the activity I have in mind involves students watching videos or listening to audio in their own time and taking notes—this has the added advantage of getting the students to practice their note-taking skills. The video or audio will be something I have previously decided on.  At school the next day, students compare notes, paying particular attention to what each thought was important enough to note down.  After that, the class does a worksheet prepared by me about the video or audio.

            The second activity I have in mind is a potpourri variation of the above exercise.  This time, the learners choose to read, watch, or listen to what ever lesson they want.  The following day in class, the students get into groups and discuss what they have learned from their videos, articles, and so on.  The aim of these discussions is speaking practice.  Although students have opportunities to speak in class in English, this activity is designed to be more informal, with the added advantage of relating to things the learners are interested in.  I will also provide the groups with a discussion guide to help them get their group discussions started.

            In our previous class (6176) we learned about collaborative learning.  A classic collaborative exercise is a creative writing activity in which a group has to write a story.  One student begins the story, and then each student adds a paragraph to the story; a simple activity that can easily be achieved with the help of Googledocs, which you get when you download and install Googledrive.  Googledocs allows users to share and edit each other’s documents, an ideal application for the creative writing activity I have in mind.  Once you have a group set up, it is relatively easy to write, share, edit, share again, and so on.  But this particular activity is not just a group having fun with absurd additions to other people’s work.  Cohesion is a vital writing skill and this activity can help students hone that skill.  To keep the initial stages of this activity simple and fair, I will provide the opening paragraph of each story.  An alternative is to have all the students in the class write an opening paragraph as a solo activity, and then randomly selecting as many opening paragraphs as required per group.  Because there would inevitably be more paragraphs than groups, I would announce that the remaining paragraphs will be used the next time this activity is done.

            When each group has an opening paragraph, they will take turns adding a paragraph to the story outside school hours using Googledocs.  The turns will be based on alphabetical order of the students’s names.  The trick in this activity is not to play around and turn it into a farce.  Students have to carefully read what the student before them has written.  Then, without consulting anyone in the group and asking their opinion, the student whose turn it is has to make a contribution that logically adheres to the preceding paragraph.  This is very similar to the Circular Response discussion activity (Brookfield, 2006) in which participants in a group discussion must listen to and directly address what their counterpart says.  In other words, they cannot just state their own opinions and go off on some personal tangent; they must show that they listened to and considered their classmate’s spoken contribution.  So, with this activity, each paragraph writer must show that she has read and considered what her classmate has written, and must add to it logically.  Of course, creativity is encouraged but within limits as the emphasis of this activity is cohesion. 

Owing to the simple nature of using Googledocs, groups can easily get peer feedback from other groups by sharing their final product, the final stage of this activity.  I am even tempted to allow groups to evaluate each other, since “peers have a firsthand view of what is going on during collaborative activities” (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2005, p. 92).  The main criterion which would guide the evaluation process would of course be cohesion and how well it was maintained throughout the activity.

  

References

Barkley, E. F., Cross, K. P., & Major, C. H. (2005). Collaborative learning techniques. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield, S. D. (2006). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Week 1 Post - Emerging Technologies

Hello everyone,

The link below was very helpful in providing me with brief summaries of many emerging technologies.

https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/technology_paper_2010.pdf

I was drawn to three particular emerging technologies, each of which would no doubt enhance the learning experience in my current educational setting.  I work in the preparatory department of a private university in Istanbul, Turkey.  The school is called Istanbul Bilgi University (http://www.bilgi.edu.tr/en/) and the department is often referred to as Bilgi Prep.  Our job is to make sure that our students’s level of English is at a standard that can allow them to experience a rich and fulfilling academic career in an English medium university.

Some of our students start with absolutely no English whatsoever, some start at an intermediate level, and other possess a reasonably good command of the English language—but their skills still need to be tweaked a little.  Either way, technology, while already a part of our curriculum, needs to be further implemented in order to make sure that our learners can “fully participate in a rapidly evolving information society” (Warschauer & Liaw, 2010, p. 2).  The technology already in use at Bilgi Prep is basically an online version of the coursebooks we use in class, thus making it beneficial in a drilling capacity; students practice what they learned that day or do extra exercises.  This reminds me of Reiser’s (2001) complaint that some of the attempts at implementing computer use in classes in the mid-1990s ended up being disappointing and lacking in innovation.  Indeed, many of our students complain that the technology currently in use is boring and repetitive.

Therefore, I believe that using multimodal communication and collaborative writing can all help alleviate the boredom.  I have not yet decided which one I will focus on for the Major Assessment, but for now I am leaning more towards the collaborative writing.

Multimodal communication is communication through various media, visual, audial, linguistic, and so on (Warschauer & Liaw, 2010).  Though such communication is nothing new, “new types of applications and sites … make it feasible for large numbers of learners without specialized training to produce and share their work” (Warschauer & Liaw, 2010, p. 3).  Implementing multimodal communication into a curriculum for young adult learners will be very useful because it engages them.  They are not just repeating, regurgitating, and drilling.  With many formats to work with (video, PowerPoint, audio recordings) these learners can feel that they are actually doing something of value.  Furthermore, using various media for self-expression is authentic as more and more businesses require potential applicants to possess technology skills.  It is also authentic because language skills, in real life, are not manifested through fill-in-the-blanks exercises, multiple choice questions, and sentence completions.  Using multimodal communication, learners can practice expressing themselves in various ways.

As far as specific activities I can use in class are concerned, the sky is the limit.  At a Beginner level, students can use their PowerPoint skills to do presentations on grammar rules or vocabulary learned in class.  Students in higher levels do quite a bit of writing.  It can be quite hard to get students to write as it is, so, using different media, I can offer students an occasional break from the monotony by allowing them to choose from various formats of expression.

The monotony can also be broken by using collaborative writing technology.  If turning in a PowerPoint presentation instead of an essay or composition is not an option, perhaps using blogs or wikis can help us make students’s experience more authentic an engaging.  Blog and wikis have the added advantage of being ubiquitous.  One of the problems we, and many other language institutions in Turkey, face is that we live in a monocultural society.  This means that once the students exit the school, indeed, once the go out of the classroom, they have no reason or obligation to converse or partake in an activity that requires the use of the English language.  Blogs and wikis can be a fun and informal way for students to continue using English outside the school, and they also have the added advantage of giving the teacher a glimpse into her learners’s progress.

One of the things I learned this week is that no matter what kind of technology is available, how the teacher uses it in class often determines whether it has been helpful as a learning tool.  Thus, in order to make blogs and wikis work as learning tools, I may need to assign some portion of the students’s final grade to their blogs and wikis.  However, I can spice things up a bit by telling the students that they will not only be graded on their own posts, but also on the presentation and design of their own pages, as well as their replies to others’s blogs.  Design and presentation is not every student’s forte, however.  If faced with such a predicament, I can always ask students to seek assistance from their classmates, thus opening the doors to collaborative work between peers.

Ultimately, collaborative writing allows interaction on many levels, from the virtual, as students communicate with each other and share ideas via blogs and wikis, to the more personal level, as students collaborate with each other in real life to create and design blogs and wikis.  What will learners blog and wiki about?  Again, the sky is the limit. For a grammar class, I can ask students specific questions designed to elicit the grammar we have just learned.  For reading classes, I can ask learners to comment on a question related to what we had read that day or week in class.  As an ongoing writing assignment, I can ask learners to use their blogs as a journal and to make entries every couple of days.

Throughout the Reiser (2001) article, I kept getting the impression that we should never get ahead of ourselves when discussing technology and learning.  Technology is meant to supplement classwork, not supplant it.  In this case, the technology I am interested in will not replace what we currently have as far as books and other classroom materials are concerned, but will aid in making the learning of those materials more fulfilling and satisfactory.      

References

National Institute for Literacy, Emerging technologies in adult literacy and language education, Washington, DC 2006

Reiser, R. A. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part I: A history of instructional media. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 49(1), 53–64.