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.