Workshop follow-up

I've just finished a workshop about using blogs and wikis in the language classroom with some very motivated English language teachers. There were some excellent ideas from the group, and some important issues got raised as well. This was a very interesting group with a pretty good understanding of how the web works, and I hope that they will be able to go on and use blogs/wikis in their teaching.

UPDATE: One of the teachers has already got his blog started - have a look at Mr. Maxwell's lessons...

Some interesting issues raised:
1. Students are already enthusiastically blogging: can we harness that for our own purposes?

I would hope that some of the enthusiasm that they feel for their own blogging would spill over into the blogging that they do for their class. I can't stress enough the importance of setting out some ground rules, as this teacher has done, so that students understand the purpose of their blogging, and understand related privacy and ethical issues.

2. If you create a wiki, does that mean that anyone in the class can edit anything?

It basically does. But my experience is that people tend to need encouraging to edit, not the other way around. Once again, setting out ground rules for how you expect students to go about editing, addressing ethical issues and so on, are essential. You can see an example of this here, and covering related issues here. Of course, you would need to think about your own context and negotiate a policy with your students.

3. How can we create and use multimedia in blogs?

Once students get past a certain level, they will be able to teach you this (which might seem a bit scary if you like being in charge). Blogger has an add video function, and it is also very easy to add video that you have uploaded to Googlevideo, Youtube or Teachertube. There are lots of different ways to create multimedia, ranging from simple slideshows with audio to edited movies. Here are some useful links:

Online video for learning: A comprehensive list of online tools that you can use to edit and share video online
Jumpcut: Online video editor
Voicethread: Audio narrated slideshows with audio comments from listeners

Windows Movie Maker and Apple's iMovie can also be used to create movies. Because so many people and institutions use Windows, I guess you will want to use that (sorry Mac users, but you probably already know how to use iMovie don't you?). Feel free to browse the animations below to get some idea of how Moviemaker works:

How to import media into a Windows Movie Maker project
How to add a title frame to a Windows Movie Maker project
How to clip a movie in Windows Movie Maker
How to add a transition in Windows Movie Maker
How to export a project from Windows Movie Maker

A nice idea for a project:
One teacher suggested that students could work in groups to create travel brochures for different countries around the world, each group adding the work to a different section of a wiki. A project like that would allow students opportunities for peer and self correction (as well as teacher feedback) using the discussion function of the wiki.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to respond below.

Blogs and wikis workshop

I'm with a group of teachers, figuring out how to use blogs to support English language teaching in schools. If there is anyone out there that wants to contribute, please feel free to add to the comments section below.

I've collected some links to some class blogs and I would like to discuss those with you. Before you have a look at the links, it might be a good idea to think about what blogging actually is.

When you look at the links you will probably notice that there are different things you can do with a class blog:

1. Post administrative information
   
2. Post learning tips for your students
   
3. Have students share work with a real audience
   
4. Facilitate collaborative project learning
5. And much much more...
   

Another important point to bear in mind is that blogging is supposed to be motivational for students. Looking at these blogs, how have the teachers made the learning experience motivational for students?

Blogging is also extremely flexible. Looking at these blogs, what range of learning opportunities do you see for students?

Here are the links:

Sister project showcase
Room 9 Nelson central’s blog
Mr. C’s class blog
English 131 blog
CALL Lessons 2005-2007

Which of these blogs do you like the best? What do you think might work for you? Let me know what you think.

Getting started with blogs

So you want to set up a blog? Nothing could be easier. There's a very good step by step guide for setting up a blog in Blogger available from the Ohio State University.

If you're going to be reading student blogs then you should probably get familiar with RSS, and set up a Reader. RSS is a simple way of streaming web content to your computer, by subscribing to websites that frequently update. For example, you could subscribe to a news site and then be alerted every time a new article is published (careful, it gets overwhelming fast!).

More about RSS here.

Where to from here?

The course is almost over and many of you must be wondering what to do with the blogs that you have been diligently updating over the last few months. Well, that is of course entirely up to you!

A starting point
You won't have to read a 20 page article and comment on it every week any more, and I'm sure that you are already feeling relieved about that! On the other hand, one way of keeping your professional development going in the area of New Technologies in Language Teaching is to subscribe to a few blogs focused on educational technology. You can see a few of the blogs that I subscribe to in the 'blogroll' on the left. That way, as new resources, teaching tools and ways of exploiting these are described you can take advantage of them as they come out. You'll also be able to share your own ideas by commenting on other people's blogs or writing posts of your own. You can get an idea of how this might work for you if you read this post by Passionately Curious. The writer describes how a variety of social networking tools, including blogs, have helped them to create a 'personal learning network' for professional development.

A process
As far as blogging for professional development goes, I've found the following process to be helpful:

1. Identify blogs and journals that I am interested in and subscribe using RSS
2. Get into the habit of reading (more or less regularly)
   
3. Post links to useful resources, blogs and write comments that relate the posts to my context

I realize that time is a huge constraint, but now that you are coming to the end of the course, perhaps you will find you have more than you thought!

Johnny Lee, interactive whiteboards and the Wiimote

Here's a really interesting TED talk by Johnny Lee from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He demonstrates how you can use the Wii remote, an infrared pen, and some software that he has created and made available, to create an interactive whiteboard on basically any surface. He comments that the quality won't be quite as good as the commercial products, but at less than 1/40 the cost the mind boggles at the possiblilities here. Well worth watching.

More information, including a step by step demonstration of this with video, on Johnny Lee's website (navigate to the section headed 'Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote').

Teacher roles in learner autonomy

I've just been reading Shirley's blog post on Learner autonomy and tandem learning. I really like this comment:

Although learner autonomy means that learners should take control over their learning process, I think it does not mean that the role of teachers is no longer important.

Peter Voller wrote an article in 1999, entitled 'Does the teacher have a role in autonomous language learning?' (in this book) and concluded that teachers have a very clear role to play, but a much different one to what they were used to. Voller describes two distinct roles for the teacher: facilitator and counselor. 'Facilitating' includes both psycho-social elements (like motivating learners) and technical elements (like assisting them in planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning process).

If you have any insights into how you might adopt these roles, especially using technological affordances, I would love to hear them. Feel free to post a comment.

Lesson plans for integrating New Tech in language teaching

We now have a very nice set of lesson plans and ideas for implementing new technology in language teaching on our wiki. You can access these at this index page and then click through to see the various plans. Enjoy!

Image editing challenge

I am hoping that tonight's image editing challenge will generate a lot of questions that you yourselves can answer. If in the course of doing the challenge you have a question which you would like answered by an expert (me or someone else in class) post it to this blog. We'll get back to you sometime soon, with the best answer that we can manage, and maybe reference some of the many resources out there on the web, that could help you complete the task...

Feel free to post the solution here too!

Delivering presentations online with web2.0

When teachers in Hong Kong upskilled by doing Basic, Intermediate or Advanced IT certificates, a lot of attention was paid to the kinds of tools that they could use to deliver lessons and administer classes. That included the MS Office suite and basic web design applications like Dreamweaver. Consequently teachers seem to be fairly comfortable using powerpoint in their English language lessons, and according to it-fiona, it is probably being overused:

When PowerPoint was first used into the classroom, students were facinated by the animation and pictures put in the PowerPoint. Now, as most teachers is using this software in the lessons and morning assembly, the students in my school are fed up with it and seems that teachers has to look for something more interesting.

The problem is less in the technology and more in the way it is being used, and much has been said about the Death by Powerpoint syndrome. (I have to admit that my own use of Powerpoint could use some work). Powerpoint slideshows have a place in presentations, the question is really whether they are used effectively. The next question is how they can be incorporated into web pages, because that seems to be what a lot of teachers want to do, once they get working on a web project or blog.

There are a range of web2.0 tools that will allow you to upload powerpoint slides, convert them to flash video and embed that video in your web page or blog. There are lots of advantages to doing things this way. For example:

• Your slides can be directly accessed from within the browser and there is no need to download them
• The browsing experience for your viewers is enhanced
• You can often create slidecasts by linking the slides with audio
  
• There is often comment functionality, allowing your viewers to leave comments about your slides

Some examples of tools that you can use to share your slides online are:

Slideshare
Voicethread
Googledocs

Check these out if you want to share slideshows online and let me know what you think!

| View | Upload your own

Project-based learning online

In the very week that we are about to discuss learner autonomy, Larry Ferlazzo describes a similar project in his blog. This is a little different to the kind of tandem learning projects that we have reviewed, where learners of complementary L1-L2 combinations are paired. Instead, it is a kind of project-based learning online:

ESL/EFL teachers from seven countries (Kuwait, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Sudan, Hungary, and Romania) have brought our classes together online to correspond and to develop joint projects. You can see some of the first efforts by our students in their introductory slideshows, VoiceThreads, animated movies and videos at our Student Showcase. Feel free to leave audio or written comments on the VoiceThreads, and written comments on the blog itself.

I recommend having a look at the student showcase, as suggested, as it gives you some idea of what students can achieve by narrating a set of photos that are personally meaningful to them. It would be very interesting to know how the various teachers are encouraging their students to take part in the exchange, above and beyond the creation of the digital stories that you can see online. As well as the creation of these initial artifacts, which is an achievement in itself, students will need some kind of drive to communicate and reflect on their learning partnership. Students will also need some support in evaluating their learning progress, and the language and content that they are producing.

This looks like a very interesting project to watch, or if you are interested and think your students would enjoy the experience, to get involved in.

Success!

The work that you've been doing in your blogs has attracted international attention. That's great news! Have a look at the comments in this post and this post. Keep watching this space.

While we're on the topic of broadening communities, if you have a blog post that you would like to submit to Larry's EFL/ESL carnival, the deadline for that is Monday, March 31. By taking part you could broaden your readership and create links with a global audience.

Keep up the good work!

How do you keep track of your classmates' blogs?

You may remember me suggesting at the beginning of term that you familiarize yourself with RSS and subscribe to a service like Google Reader or Bloglines to make it easier to read your classmates' blogs. Well, I'm curious to know how you are getting on. How have you been keeping track of your classmates' blogs? Please give me some feedback by filling in the poll in the sidebar. Or you can leave your comments here.

Update
Thanks for taking part in the survey to those who did. The results are in now and for the record, here they are:

Votes: 15
I use a feed reader like Google reader: 3
I click on the links in the Blackboard course: 3
I click on the links in Christoph's blog: 2
I click on the links in my own blog: 7

What makes a good blog?

I've enjoyed the process of watching you come to grips with blogging over the last 8 weeks or so, and get your thoughts online. Some of the posts have been very interesting to read, and it has always been good to go into class with your perspectives on the set reading at the front of my mind: that has certainly made the teaching process a lot easier for me.

I'm curious to know what you think makes a good blog. (Do any of you read any of the teaching blogs out there?) Based on your experience of reading your classmates blogs, what are the things that most grab your attention? Is it writing style, content, the interactions and commenting on the site, presentation or a mixture of all of the above?

One way that you can try to measure the 'impact' of your blog is by searching it on Technorati. Technorati is a web-based service that indexes blogs, and currently has over 100 million blogs indexed world wide. Technorati can tell you how many blogs are linking to your blog, and records this as the 'authority' of your blog. According to Will Richardson (in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts) a blog that has an authority of 100 or more can be generally regarded as well-accepted by its community of readers. But that's not to say that a blog with an authority of less than 100 can't be a good blog.

So getting back to the original question, what do you think makes a good blog post? You might like to have a look at some of the blogs that I read, for ideas. I'll put them in a blog roll, in the links column.

Getting connected

I often see posts to email discussion lists asking for information about how to make contact with classes that would be willing to engage in a cultural exchange for language learning purposes. Where I have heard successful stories of collaboration over the internet, they have often come about through the personal connections that teachers forge at international conferences. Of course, these connections can be made entirely online too.

One site that was originally set up entirely to support information exchange between teachers and learners in different cultures is ePals, reviewed recently in the New York Times (mostly this article reviews the business model but there are some interesting quotes about the pedagogical approach adopted as well). Not that I have tried this service, but it has been around for a while now, and looks like it might be worth checking out.

According to the article the idea of exchanging information over the internet with students from other cultures is inherently motivating to a lot of the students participating. One teacher comments:

If they were just writing for me, they wouldn’t be as careful. But they’re writing for a student in another country. It’s not drudgery for them. They buy in and they enjoy it.

Teachers are using the site to send their students on virtual field trips, where they can learn about the family life and political systems of up to 120 different participating countries (that's a lot!). The site now has 13 million registered participants so it is getting to the point where it could have an impact.

I know that teachers in Hong Kong are always looking for ways to engage their students, and give them opportunities. I'm not aware of many exchanges of this nature though. I wonder how well this kind of collaboration could work in the local scene, or what kind of work would be necessary to make it a success.

The machine is Us/ing Us

An intriguing look at the way that literacy has evolved with technology. And how modes of representation have evolved with technology and new media. And the impact this might have on our ways of understanding.





Any thoughts?

Online resources and tools for Language Teaching

Excellent, critical reviews of online language teaching and learning resources from this class are available below:

Internet resources for English Language Teaching
Internet tools for English Language Teaching

[Update: I've reorganized the wiki so that these are now all available from an entry page called Reviews and projects]

Let us know what you think...

Evaluating online resources

Last night we had a very productive session evaluating online resources in ELT. I was pleased with the obvious effort that you had put in. Here (again) are my general comments on that session and I would be very happy if you would give me your impressions of the session by responding here:

On the whole the presentations were well done. As a general comment (with notable exceptions), you evaluated the functional aspects of the web sites very well and were able to point out their strengths and weaknesses in design. I would have liked to see a clearer awareness of the underlying pedagogical assumptions and how these matched with your own contexts. If we are going to use computers in classrooms we should be clear about why we are doing that, and what difference technology can make to the learning process, as opposed to say, using a book or a whiteboard. One obvious possibility of technology in language teaching these days is to bring communities together across the internet, and provide opportunities for students to engage in authentic communication (as with integrative CALL). Obviously there are many many ways to use computers in classrooms, but a key challenge to language teachers now is to understand how technology can be used in a less transmissive way, and allow students to take control of the learning process.

What did you think about the session? Do you have any thoughts about how teachers might use technology in a less instructivist, more constructionist way? Or perhaps there are limitations that I can't see?

ESL/EFL Carnival

After I linked to his lists, we received the following comment from Larry Ferlazzo:

Glad you like the lists!

Please consider submitting a post from your blog to the next ESL/EFL Carnival, hosted at my blog.

Larry

I have chased down the link to this carnival at his blog, and you might be interested in submitting a post there yourselves, in case you want to discuss CALL and language teaching with a wider audience.

Some examples of link and resource sharing

Here are a couple of link-sharing and resource sharing sites, which might give you some ideas about how you would like to share your own evaluations of educational websites. The first of these, by Larry Ferlazzo, provides long lists of links and gives basic descriptions of what each website affords. The second, by Nik Peachey, goes into greater depth and less breadth, usually focusing on how a single web resource could be used by teachers and learners for language learning purposes. I hope you find these useful: if you know of any other blogs or resources like these that you would like to share, let us know!

CMC and institutional factors

At the moment, I am reading a book called Online Communication in Language Learning and Teaching, by Lamy and Hampel. I've come across an interesting quote about institutional support for the use of CMC in language learning:

Institutions may be more or less supportive of CMCL [Computer mediated communication for language learning] users... Among the institutional factors liable to inhibit the creativity that we have said is necessary from teachers are the managerial and the cultural.

First, decisions based on economics and security may determine that an institution will restrict online activity to one platform and will prohibit the use of some software....

Second, cultural factors play a role. Warschauer observes that in written CMCL, 'the decentered, multimedia character of new electronic media facilitates reading and writing processs that are more democratic, learner-centered, holistic and natural' ... Yet many institutions still follow a teacher-led agenda and countless students are more familiar with hierarchical and instructivist learning contexts...

I'd like to know if you think that this is true here in techno-savvy Hong Kong. Has the introduction of technology been sufficient to promote a paradigm shift in pedagogy?

Cell phone users create a new literary genre

Cell phone users in Japan have been successful in creating a new literary genre, called the cell phone novel. According to this article, last year five out of ten of Japan's best-selling novels were originally cell phone novels republished in hard copy form. The novels are composed on cell phones, then uploaded to a web site as a work in progress, where readers can access and comment on the regular instalments. A number of factors seem to be contributing to the success of these novels:

1. A high penetration rate of cell phones, combined with unlimited data plans since 2004
2. A reading culture (for the younger generation that is) that prefers simple stories like those in the Japanese manga comic books
3. A number of urbanized areas where long commutes (for example 2 hours one way) are fairly common

If the novels are compared with more traditional forms of literature then, predictably, they incorporate a lot of the features of instant messaging/chat:

[The writers] used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.

According to their critics they also seem to draw on the features of the comic book genre:

In cellphone novels, characters tend to be undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist of dialogue.

No doubt these textual features are in part due to the peculiarities of writing on a cell phone (small screen size, limited space to convey the message) and in part due to the fact that most of the writers tend to be young women (familiar with chat conventions). I particularly liked the question raised at the end of this article: is it possible to write a cell phone novel on a computer? Established cell phone novelists have now turned to the keyboard, and some claim to be able to discern the results:

“Since she’s switched to a computer,” he added, “her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.”

For me, the story provides some interesting evidence of how genres can emerge given the right blend of technology, social and cultural factors. It also invites some questions about language standards, and language use in different contexts. Let me know if you see anything else like this out there.

RSS in plain English

RSS (really simple syndication) is a technology which allows you to keep track of web content that you are interested in using a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader. Instead of visiting your favourite sites and retrieving the information yourself, you can subscribe to the content and be alerted whenever content is updated. That way, the web comes to you, not the other way around.

This video does a really nice job of explaining what RSS is all about, and how it should make keeping up to date a whole lot easier...

A brief reflection on blogging

At Weblogg-ed 'real' blogging is described as writing that has “Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked [to] and written [about] with potential audience response in mind.” In other words, blogging is about reading or researching, referencing, reflecting, synthesizing and recording for future reference, with some potential audience in mind. Some educational uses of blogs therefore come closer to this ideal use of blogs than others, as summarized in an earlier post in the same blog.

At one end of this scale is 'Posting assignments' which is not considered to be blogging. At the other end of the scale is 'Extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on previous posts, links and comments' which is considered to be complex blogging. My feeling is that the read and response task that we are doing at present offers some potential for more 'complex blogging', but that to some degree you need to think about what that is before you can engage in it. As we keep doing this activity over the course of the semester, it would be interesting to think about how you could motivate your own students to engage in this kind of blogging, as Venus asks. Let me know your thoughts.

Edunation in Second Life

Last week, there was some interest in how CALL might develop in virtual environments or as a form of 'virtual reality CALL' as one person put it. Gavin Dudeney (http://blog-efl.blogspot.com/) is currently advertising a 'series of educational talks, visits and other events to be held at the island of Edunation III in Second Life'. You can find details about these events here, if you are interested. Second Life is a kind of Mulit-user virtual environment (MUVE), similar to a lot of the online games our students play, but it's less of a game and more of a virtual world, with it's own economy and social life. The Edunation project seems to focus on providing students with a virtual self-access centre. I haven't tried it out, and I'm not a gamer, so if any of you do visit, leave a comment and let me know what you think of it.