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.