Week 4: Technology - the fast element in the slow drawn carriage of language acquisition. Take the Knowledge Street!

We’ve been learning about bits of technology use in classrooms every week. The first week was the creation of a blog and its possible application in the learning process. The second –saving the most useful links into a social bookmarking service such as Delicious. The third – the aural/oral skills improvement/development through the use of internet sources. This week it was the turn of reading, writing and vocabulary skill development. I've been exploring and saving so many useful sites. I find that there are scores of them and most of them are good. 

However what I learned while writing my technology enhanced lesson project was that you can't use everything you find just the way it is. That you can take bits and pieces from different sites to adjust to your classroom needs. 

Very often there are limitations to the use of technology in the classroom. Sometimes they come from the lack of equipment (computers in the classroom for example) other times the attempt to make the technology means, textbook contents and classroom realia meet fails.

It wasn’t very easy for me to write a technology based lesson plan because each time I’d have an idea it was hindered by the reality of “Wait, you can’t find enough computers for that”. While the WWW abounds in resources they can’t be used much at the lessons as long as the English classrooms are not equipped with computers or there is no access at the IT Lab in school for at least a monthly lesson with online resources. Most certainly the teacher can bring to the class and present a lot of things but in this case the students are passively “ingesting” the contents provided. Even in this form it is a great leap from writing on the board to presenting it in form of power point presentations, for instance, or from listening to a dialogue on the stereo and viewing and listening to a Video clip of it. 

With such limitless possibilities the technology offers it does feel sometimes like technology is the fast speed car harnessed to a slow moving carriage of teaching methods of language acquisition. If you speed too much up you risk on breaking the carriage.  

E-mail an easy way to motivate students write?

Students don't like much to write these days. But for language acquisition writing is indispensable. This week we've been given some ideas on how we can use technology to stimulate/motivate students to write. One of the simplest one was using e-mail in a pen pal exchange.

I am not new to pen pal idea of writing. I had this kind of experience with the 4^th grade 2 years ago, with the difference that we used actual paper letters and sent them through post. It was a correspondence between 4^th grade students from Rutland Elementary School, Vermont USA and 4^th grade students from George Calinescu Elementary School, Chisinau, Moldova. It was very successful and the children loved it! The only drawback was the fees for mailing and the time for the letters to get there and back. It lasted for 2 years and then it stopped. The USA students were hard to be kept track of once the class teacher changed.

Reading Chao-chih Liao’s article “E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners' Reading and Writing Abilities: Taiwan Experience” I understood that this could have been done through e-mail. But I couldn’t think of a way to give feed-back since it is hard for a teacher to interfere with personal e-mail. How could I correct mistakes, monitor their writing and keep it topic oriented. How to keep it under control? Well to all these questions I got an answer form the above article. The author used hard copies of student’s emails and corrected them. The author assigned week topics and they discussed them as a group. So e-mailing was taken out of the private context and was instruction oriented.

I also learned that there is a global educational network CPAW (Cyberspace Pals Across the World http://education.ucf.edu/international/cpaw1.cfm ) (founded by Dr. Malcolm Beazley an Australian educator) that links students/pen pals around the world. And I though that my students could possibly be a part of that project.  

Week 3: Learning the ABC of technology world. It’s a long way to go.

It’s frustrating when you read a post and you find yourself staring blankly at the content. It does not make any sense to you and you feel dumb. That is the first reaction. Then the second one comes – the one that comes out of your personal ambition – “I am not dumb! I can get this. I might not be the smartest person but there is Google with answers”. That is the part I like most. Because it stimulates me to look for the unknown, inquire and learn about it and make it known so that next time I can brag too “Oh, sure the RSS feeds! Easy enough!”.

 As you can guess this was the first word that made me feel uneasy in the Weekly discussion thread. And now even if I don’t know exactly how to use that yet or how put them on my blog, at least I know what it is. 

The second one was “synching”. Sounds sophisticated but I figured that out too. It is just file synchronization. Don’t you find sometimes these abbreviations confusing? They become words on their own and they “forget” about their long-pronounced/written sister words addressing them only when referring to their “origins”.

Or I also like these technology inspired made up words like Podcast (new to me as well). It was interesting to see how broadcasting on I-pod became podcasting. 

So here I am learning new things everyday. Not to mention the dozens of useful links I saved for later use in the classroom suggested by my colleagues/classmates. 

This week I also tried to make use of some things I learned. Yesterday I was happy because the Nicenet Online Classroom I opened for my 8th grade got a start. Some of the students registered and even did some of the tasks.  YAY!!! Even if I don't know how it will go or what will happen to it at least I gave it a start. And I think it is a great supplement to the classroom work. 

 

Week 3: Take a “bite” of Social Bookmarking. Isn’t it Delicious?

Before I learned about bookmarks/favourites in Browsers I used to write the URL-s down in a notebook. Then each time I needed a website link I would check my notebook. Now it is long forgotten, accumulating dust on the shelf as I don’t use it anymore – the bookmarking option in the browsers appeared.

 Furthermore the technology wheel keeps rolling and creating yet other even better options like Social Bookmarking. One of these and my first experience is del.icio.us

 What does it do? It saves your links just the same as I did in my notebook: under various categories (pages in my notebook) – different links. It allows you to follow not only your own links but the links your friends have been saving. This way you just “borrow” their links and use them as you please if you find them useful.

Storing the pictures on the internet – once seemed a miracle for me. I didn’t have to worry about always backing up my pictures in order not to lose them if my computer broke. Now I don’t have to worry about my bookmarks too. They are safe on Delicious or on any other Social Bookmarking Service. And this is amazing because I don’t have to start from a blank page each time my Windows collapses (now that I don’t write the URLs in my notebook). Is there a data storage anywhere on the web I wonder? That would make things perfect!

Week 2. Search Engines and ABCD Learning Objectives

It was quite a productive week. And I found myself reading and searching more than I did last week. I learned more too. I don't know whether is was more but it definitely was just different kind of knowledge and to be honest I had much more fun playing with designing a blog than with exploring the search engines.

However I ventured into this adventure with just as much enthusiasm as I did in the previous assignment. And after I read the technology tip kindly provided by Deborah Healey I’ve been playing around with Google search trying all the search tips given. I didn’t know that searching can be that complex and that there are so many options. 

I wasn’t aware that on what you write in the search box depends the result which may be different from what you expect if you don’t know much about it.

The tips really work! It is amazing! It was interesting to see how the hits depend on the symbol you put in front of the key words. For example: excluding, by means of placing a “–“in front of the word you want to exclude the search for, or finding synonymous/associated in meanings results when placing a “~” in front of the word, or even simply using the key words you want to search for in quotation marks “ “ will find results where the whole phrase is present and finally + in front of the key words will enable you to find the results which will have all the words that have the + in the search result.

I was also surprised to find out how one can search a certain site alone by simply placing the site name after the query. I didn't know any of that! So that I guess, I learned quite a lot.

Another thing that I have learned this week is to use the ABCD model of formulating Learning Objectives. I quite liked it and it got me started on practicing that. I think that I will start using the ABCD model as preferred to the model I used before where I sometimes neglected the degree to which students should achieve the aimed behavior and the context.  And ironically enough this was the “area” where I got stuck. :) It gave me some trouble. But I will try to find and read more information on this as I enjoyed the ABCD model greatly. And I think it is easy and very specific which excludes confusion.