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.