Yesterday I had my second experience in Second Life. It was a meeting between students from one of the online courses I am doing. We sat next to a fire and we started chatting about text …. Fascinating? I do not know yet. Different. A new way of communicating that perhaps will have more to do with our students – our digital natives -; if it is fascinating for them, we should think about that and try ti use it in as part of the classroom procedures. So, I will give it a try in my classrooms to see how it works and if it works PERFECT, another tool to MOTIVATE my students in acquiring English and most important, in using English to communicate with online native speakers / friends of the language. Meanwhile, why not to meet for a coffeee in SL:
I have not used wikis a lot but I can show you two examples from my classes. The first time I used a wiki was at the end of a course where students were supposed to create their own blog. I wanted them to share their blogs with the others and what I did is to create a wiki where they could write down the URL of their blog:
The second time was as a discussion board where students had to share their thoughts on a video and an article related with ICT in education:
Within the educational perspective, blogs can be used as personal reflections or as an exchange of information among teachers. It can also be used as a way of organizing different information; what we did with the blogrolls is a good example of how to organize information from different blogs into one place. This is what Murray and Hourigan refer to as a kind of blog that “offers refuge … from the chaotic world of the web” (2008:83). These two functionalities of blogs are really worth our attention but what I am really interested in is on how blogs can open the door of the classrooms to other students and how they can participate in online collaborative projects through the use of blogs, changing our students’ roles from consumers to creators (ibid:83). I am a coordinator in Spain of an association called iEARN (www.iearn.cat, http://www.iearn.net/) which is in charge of organizing online international projects. A good example of how we use blogs to help students to contribute to the development of their speaking and listening skills is the youngcast project (http://youngcast.blogspot.com/) where students have to record audio podcasts in order to talk about different things. This is not just an ‘expressivist’ blog (ibid:87) but it is spotted on the cognitivist framework as in the process of creating this final product (the podcast) “a collaborative framework” (ibid:87) is expanded where other students are included, offering a potential for dealing with differentiation among learners as they can help each other on the creation of the project. The fact that they can work using IT and that they see English as something they do not have to study but as a tool that they have to use in order to communicate with a real audience can motivate them in the use of English.
I think that we can link this project to some of the SLA theories we have been studying but I am going to do it in the form of questions so that my peers will be able to discover the answers:
Is there a final output (Swain) in the project that students have to achieve?
Do you think this final output will become comprehensible input (Krashen) by other learners?
Cam we see the project as following the structure of a task-based activity as stated by Willis?
Are they working collaboratively on the creation of the podcast?
Which is the role of the teacher?
I could add more things here but I prefer to read your contribution to all this. Looking forward to hearing from you.
This blog is part of the subject “Online Language Learning” from the Master in TESOL (University of Edinburgh). I would like to use it to post new ideas on this subject that I hope to discover during this course. Meanwhile, I will comment on two old blogs I have been using on the first part of this master:
the VIDEO:
and the ARTICLE:
