Class blogs and class websites

Blogs are very flexible platforms that can be used in a range of ways to support learning in general, and language learning in particular. Take a look at these blogs to get some idea of their potential (not all of these are currently active):

• http://blogs.bhs.cc/j2blogs/
• http://room9nelsoncentral.blogspot.com/
• http://en2251.edublogs.org

You might also like to check out the discussion of class blogs on Tom Barret's blog, or on Twitter (#classblogs).

As Ducate and Lomicka point out (articles here and here, but require library sign-in), reading blogs can be an important first step towards writing blogs. If you want to take their advice and spend some time locating appropriate blogs, then you (or your students) could make use of Google blog search or Technorati.

As we'll see, personalizing a blog can be a lot of fun, but you need to be wary of privacy concerns, and some people are reluctant to post a profile image to a public website. One obvious solution is to ask students to post a picture which has some personal significance for them, like a favourite place or animal. Another solution (which can be quite fun) is to have students create an avatar, using a tool like this one. You might also need some photo-cropping tool like Photoshop, or an online tool like this one.

When it comes to designing a class website, one possible platform is Google sites. Before you leap in, it's a good idea to think about the affordances that Google sites offers, and how you might use a class website to support language learning outcomes. You can get an initial idea by taking a look at a couple of Google sites templates for teachers, here and here, and reflecting on whether this kind of content would be useful in your context. The next step is to come up with a design that is tailored to your particular teaching and learning context.

Back to school

Well the campus is once again buzzing with life, as students and teachers alike return to the classroom and hit the books. It's good to be back, and I'm looking forward to exploring how we can best put new technologies to use in the service of language education.

With that in mind, I recently came across this back to school guide on using new media in education (by Edutopia), and thought I would share the link so that you can download it and see what you think of the ideas. The guide is full of up-to-date resources, websites and web tools that you can use with your students, and there are also suggestions about how you might use them. To download the guide you just need to provide your name and email address, and there is also an option to sign up for updates from Edutopia, which I highly recommend. Edutopia is a very rich site which has a lot of good content and provides a useful forum for educators who are interested in using technology in their classes.

[Flickr image by kyz]

Quiz authoring with Hot Potatoes

This week we tried our hands at some quiz authoring with Hot Potatoes, a freely available quiz editor which can create html web pages. The main goal was to get some quick hands-on experience in making a simple gap-fill quiz, and it seems that the technology was no problem at all. We were able to view the quiz on our own computers, but we have yet to learn how to upload it to the server and publish it (we are going to use the Bb content collection for this). I have to admit that we didn't pay a lot of attention to the content of the quiz, which was rather secondary to technical mastery to begin with, so we are going to have to focus on that aspect of things more in future.

Hot Potatoes may not be exactly as exciting as Second Life (see my previous post), but it is still good at what it does, which is authoring quizzes. It has a range of possible quizzes and you can set up multimedia as well (i.e. images and audio/video). The interface is still easy to use, the main technical problem comes when you want to customize and publish, which is nowhere near as easy as what we have come to expect, with all those web 2.0 tools that make customizing and publishing such a cinch.

What are your thoughts about quiz authoring with Hot Potatoes? Do you know of any other quiz authoring platforms? How do they compare?

Second Life in Language Education

Last night we spent about an hour exploring Second Life together and evaluating the possibilities for use in language education. The process was fairly unstructured, with most people starting off in Orientation Island and getting the hang of the controls, before moving on to select a destination of their own, or explore one of Renaissance Island, Mont St. Michel, or the International Space Flight Museum (as examples of the different kinds of environments that can be found in SL). Some of use chose and evaluated our own destination, based on searches and with the help of the b-places website.

We did encounter some problems, technology-wise, with some of the computers in the room unable to support the SL client, because of problems with the graphics card, and other computers simply being unbearably slow. The technology problems notwithstanding, it takes a while to get the hang of SL and work out the point of it, so a number of us arrived and got to wondering what to do next. This problem could be addressed with a more structured task (for example a scavenger hunt), but the lack of structure also added to the activity, in that we were able to play with a variety of environments and report back on some diverse experiences afterwards. It would also seem that if language educators are going to make use of SL in their delivery, then what is really required is some kind of ongoing project, which includes an initial period of orientation and play in the various environments that are available.

After diving into SL in this way, it was helpful to review the ways in which it could be used, and this video (via the ICT4LT site) is particularly useful for that:




What's your experience of Second Life?

Blogging in language education

Blogs are now used in a large variety of different contexts, from presidential campaigns to personal diaries. If we are interested in using blogs in language education, then it helps to think about what makes a good blog, and what makes a good blogging assignment.

On what makes a good blog, Will Richardson (author of Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts) suggests that real blogging involves deep reflection and personal growth over a period of time. Such 'complex blogs' involve 'extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on previous posts, links and comments'. Take a look at his evaluation blogging in education contexts, it's worth a read.

Ideally, a 'blogging assignment' should include more than just posting to a blog. Blogs are about participating in communities, and so it is important to think about relevant sources (e.g. web sites and other blogs), link to these from your posts, and provide others with feedback (e.g. in the form of comments). In their study of student blogging, Ducate and Lomicka (needs library login) divide the process into two stages: one of blog reading, the other of posting to blogs. This seems like a sound idea, as their students were able to gain some insight into blogging conventions before they began posting themselves.

If you're interested in learning about blogging conventions, then it will definitely help to read some blogs (you can start with the ones in this blog's blogroll). What conventions can you identify?

New Technologies: Getting acquainted

Last night we shared our accounts of technology use in language teaching and learning, and listening to these, I was struck by how a variety of technologies are now becoming more and more pervasive in language education. I was also struck by the variety in terms of engagement and level of confidence with technology: even though most of us use computers regularly, we do not all feel that we can take a basic familiarity with computers for granted, it seems to me. And the question of how best to use technology in the classroom is one that we clearly all need to explore (it's one of those questions that occupies some people for a very long time, so there is no surprise there!). A good starting point for resolving some of these issues is to delve into the various writing available on the internet, which describes experiences with technology in the language learning context. Both academic literature and practical accounts in educators' blogs can be helpful here.

Here is a list of online resources that I suggest you visit if you want to get a sense of the kind of things that are being done with technology in educational contexts (these are also linked in the blogroll of this blog):

• Nik Peachey's blogs (here and here) - good for practical evaluations of technological tools
• Larry Ferlazzo - lots of links to useful web sites
• Will Richardson's blog - especially good if you are interested in promoting new literacies
• Graham Stanley's blog - has a special interest in Second Life (also see Gavin Dudeney)
• Tom Barret - Educational technology in an English school
• Language Learning and Technology - an online, peer-refereed academic journal: lots of evaluations of technological applications here

[EDIT: the Innovate Journal of Online Education, is a good free source of academic articles (you have to register for free to gain access). Not restricted to language learning but includes a lot of cutting edge technology use, e.g. gaming, virtual worlds, and so on.]

A good way to digest the ideas that you encounter is to post your thoughts to your blog. When you come across an interesting reading, summarize it for the community and add your own thoughts. Might the approach work with your own students? What problems do you foresee, and how would you overcome them? Feedback and comments from others will be helpful to refine your ideas.

Last night, I mentioned an application of Flickr for vocabulary learning (described by Nik Peachey, here), and ideas for using Google Earth in class (collated by Tom Barrett, here).

A fresh start

The new year is getting underway now, and we've already finished our first lesson in New Technologies in Language Teaching. We've set up our blogs (which you can find listed in the sidebar, just scroll down a bit), rolled up our sleeves and are ready for the work to begin!


Image by James Jordan http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesjordan/ / CC BY-ND 2.0