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]

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.

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!

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

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?