Hello everyone,
The
link below was very helpful in providing me with brief summaries of many
emerging technologies.
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.
For students improving their knowledge of the English language your ideas of incorporating this technology will make learning fun and is something they can continue past the classroom. Making videos may also be a good concept this will allow students to actually hear themselves speak in real time. Students can work collaboratively to make a video on a particular weeks lesson.
ReplyDeleteLinda Ansley - Walden U classmate.