Nelba Quintana, a professor of English and a fellow Webhead has started off a really interesting discussion at the moment and one that is dear to my heart: in her blog, she is discussing the pros and cons of introducing language students to tools like “Technorati.”
Personally speaking I passionately believe that technology should be the medium and not the message when we are teaching languages. By that I mean that our students should be introduced to web tools and activities by their language teachers only if they have a direct relevance to language learning. It could always be argued that there will be lots of incidental learning going on when our students use tools like Technorati, but I don’t think this is good enough. I believe in the “C” (communication) part of I.C.T., not the “T” (technology) part so much.
IMHO we language teachers should be encouraging our students to use all this wonderful technology that allows them additional opportunities to communicate such as, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and so on. In general what my students in Italy lack is the chance for real, authentic practice of the language they are trying to learn. Anything that can give them another opportunity to do this is a real bonus if you ask me. Anything that doesn’t, well it doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of time, but I don’t think it should be our job to be introducing our students to these sorts of tools.
I will be really interested to see know what you guys think about this. Should we as language-teacher-techno “gurus” introduce our students to all ICT tools? Leave us a comment to let us know your opinions.
All the best,
Seth.
Dear Seth,
I totally agree with you that we should be focusing on communication, meaningful interactions, contextualizing with our learners. And I’ve always tried to use technology with them with this perspective in mind.
However, I’m teaching now an online listening course for adult students, and in some ways, yes, I’m talking about technology. In two different occasions, I’ve led them to the plain technological world, but showing them how they could profit from the tools I introduced them to. In one case, I introduced them to the concept of bookmarking and showed its importance in their learning process. Even if they were not ready to use all the resources in our delicious account, at least they knew where to go to further their studies once our course was over. The second main occasion was podcasting, and this is the feedback I got from one student
http://elearningctj.bloxi.jp/week-5/
Here it was more than communication, it was enabling them to pursue their own learning towards mastery of the language. Different learners will profit from it in different ways, but I felt that if I could make a difference for even a few, it was worth it! Also, we talked about the concept of podcasting, but the main goal of the week was for them to listen to news podcasts and share, discuss their news with their classmates. So, still I didn’t miss the C in the ICT!
Oh, and as for the idea behind tagging, technorati search and the writingmatrix project in which Nelba is involved, I’m a fan though I had the same questioning you had in your post in the beginning! Then, I realized it was not about the T, but how to connect.
Dear Carla,
You know today I had an interesting moment. I have been reading Jonathan Lecun’s account of using Animoto and this morning Jonathan has posted another student video, with no text, no comment or anything to go with it (admittedly Jonathan is running the video challenge as a competition, not as a learning aim in itself)
“Right,” I thought though, “I’m gonna have to ask Jonathan exactly what benefit the students get from using a tool like Animoto (it produces lovely animated slideshows, but apart from that has no real educational content.) Then I watched the video that Jonathan’s student had produced:
And I had to stop and think: Jonathan’s student’s home-produced video would be a wonderful lead-in to a discussion / debate lesson, especially seeing as it has been wriiten by the student herself.”
Maybe there are two points to consider here:
Is the student using the technology because they want to, not because they’ve been obliged to? In Jonathan’s case, absolutely yes. The students are all ICT competent already, they are studying online with Jonathan, and the videos they are producing are all for a competition. So surely creating tehse materials for lessons online also makes sense? In your case and Jonathan’s case you are not asking your students to do anything that they can’t currently do, after all, they are all fairly ICT competent seeing as they are online students!
In my case, where I usually have traditional f2f lessons, once or at the very most twice a week, I’m not sure that it would be worth the student’s effort. I guess the thing to consider is the student audience for your tasks. For me, I want to use tools that increase my students’ chances to communicate in English outside the classroom.
Secondly, are there opportunities for incidental learning, will the activities lead in nicely to a following lesson or (as in the case with Technorati) will the technology be so useful to the student that it simply shouldn’t be ignored.
In the video produced by Jonathan’s student, the thought provoking qualities of the material is surely going to lead her classmates towards opportunities for deeper learning? Gosia Kurek discusses these processes in her IATEFL Article which is a real point of reference for me ( Gosia is a fantastic teacher trainer from Poland.)
My one doubt would be: when the students actually watch the video, are they going to be reacting to it mentally in L1 or L2? Very likely L1, wouldn’t you think?
So, some conclusions:
We as teachers obviously should be aware of ICT abilities when we set tasks like these. We also need to take into account the context of our teaching. My 18 year old to 87 year old students have very different ICT abilities and language needs. The type of online tasks we set must reflect these needs.
In Jonathans blog, I commented that perhaps to ensure deeper learning takes place, we should maybe specifically ask our students to “Think in English” or in other words L2, when watching the video for a class activity. I would then go on to do some interesting discussion and language tasks, where undoubtedly my students would remember whatever they were taught in the lesson pretty well.
Also, when you mention podcasting (and big congratulations by the way on Luiz’s feedback, what a wonderful feeling that must have been) these are exactly the sorts of tools I think we should be using with our students. They increase their exposure to authentic English when listening to podcasts and when students record their own podcasts it gives them excellent controlled practice of speaking skills.
As for Technorati, well I’m still not 100% convinced. It does look like the work Nelba is coordinating is so structured and with so much thought going into it that her students are bound to benefit. I think her students are surely at that level of ICT competence already and their language learning needs and timetables are different too, don’t you?
Love to know your thoughts!
Seth.
Hey Seth,
this is a very interesting post. Since I began using blogs and wikis with students (not long ago, a couple of years) I have always thought about the role technology plays, and I totally agree with you. I believe that, especially in EFL environments (which is our case, I teach in Brazil), class time is too precious to be spent teaching the tool rather than using the tool to teach language.
Last year I had class blogs with some intermediate teenage students where they had to post their writings (http://my3b.blogspot.com and http://355north.blogspot.com). I got them involved in the writing matrix project using technorati but without teaching all the technology. Since we had one blog for each class and all students were co-authors, I claimed the blog at technorati, told them nothing about it, and just told them to tag their posts “writingmatrix” because they would get more comments because of a project. The result was that their posts still receive comments from students all around the world, but don’t even know what to ping a blog is. The sad part is that they only interacted with the students who found their blogs and left some link for them, that is, they didn’t find new blogs under “writingmatrix” at technorati like the people who wrote to them did. Kind of selfish, I agree, but I couldn’t afford to spend more time teaching them how to explore technorati….
About animoto, I was excited when they offered codes for free all-access accounts for educators to use animoto in their classes and even wrote a post about it (http://ihopeitworks.blogspot.com/2008/04/animoto-education-program.html), but then, when planning my animoto class, I found myself also questioning the use of this tool, which has no explicit verbal language, in a language classroom. What I did then was to suggest to my students to create videos there about some special moment in their lives and write a text explaining the event and justifying the song they chose to accompany the video. The text would be the language practice then, and in a very personalized manner, for students would be writing about an authentic and meaningful situation in their real lives. They are still doing it, but some have already published their videos in their 21classes blogs (http://finally5b.21classes.com). So far I have noticed that most of them wrote short texts, but a few have done a more careful job, like Nathália: http://finally5b.21classes.com/nathy/archive/2008/05/25/animoto-video.htm
I’ll try to encourage them to write longer texts and let you know of the outcome later.
Kindest regards from Brazil!
Ronaldo
Dear Ronaldo,
I really like the theme of your students’ blog posts. I love the reflective nature of them and the way that your students use the blog to examine their university / college colleagues. It seems that through this activity they also look again at themselves. This is a really great activity and shows some really nice task design. I must try that out with some of my students as I love reflective lessons.
What you say about tagging with “Writingmatrix” is a great point you know too Ronaldo. Looking at the later, more reflective posts your students have written, I noticed almost none of them have received any comments from readers, whereas the first posts about dream holidays had several comments on each post. Seeing as comments are such a wonderful, interactive part of blogging, I’d definitely agree that you were right to tell your students to add tags for the benefit of Technorati. It seems to have worked for your students, even if they didn’t know (and maybe even didn’t need to know?) why they were tagging their posts.
Nathàlia’s video is great as well. I love the fact that it is a nice personal reminder for her of a trip that obviously seemed to mean a lot to her. I still wonder though if this is only really a springboard for further discussion. What would be great now would be to see her classroom colleagues posting a few questions to her about her video as comments to the blog post. There’s such a good opportunity for communication just waiting to be grabbed! Do let me know if you have any success Ronaldo. I’d love to know how things progress!
Thanks for dropping by. Take care and all the best,
Seth
Dear Seth,
You said “In your case and Jonathan’s case you are not asking your students to do anything that they can’t currently do, after all, they are all fairly ICT competent seeing as they are online students!”
It’s quite the opposite! They are generally first-time explorers of e-learning, so they have very basic ICT skills. In fact, that’s exactly my point, I concentrate on communication within the group and in the outer world of walled LMS. However, tech tools have proven to have great value in their learning process, mainly when our time together is over. For example, I created a ning group for the ones who wanted to keep practicing their English and sharing their findings. Some of them have been great contributors and keep exploring possibilities. No, I didn’t teach them any tech thing there. I just let them discover by themselves how to use Ning and they ask me stuff when they don’t know. The C is still the focus.
As you mentioned the Animoto video should be a springboard for exploration in the L2. There are so many possibilities there…The video just for the sake of it doesn’t have any relevance for us. However, if it’s explored through a pedagogical sound approach, it can impact on learning. I think we agree here that it all depends on our pedagogical purposes and students’ needs and interests.
My setting is EFL, so I know what you mean by the constraints we face. In my case, there are two big ones, time and syllabus. That’s why I guess blogging and podcasting hold so many possibilities as we can use them complementing what is being explored in the classroom and expanding communication to an international audience. And, no, when I’m in my EFL context, I don’t waste precious time teaching technology. I spend it using the tools for connection. That’s why even loving to have individual blogs for my students, most of my blogs are class blogs to make students’ lives easier and to profit the most out of our language learning experience. And, if you consider, for example, an educator with many classes, there’s no way he could manage to keep track of tons of individual blogs. It’s a matter of being effective and productive in your teaching practices. There needs to be room for flexibility and adaptation.
As for the writingmatrix, I love its concept and have been applying it in other areas of my own learning and connecting with others. I think it’s strong in terms of finding others to connect, though we still need to work on ways to keep the conversations flowing through comments. A challenge!
I definitely agree that the more technology you can incorporate into classrooms the more the students will learn. They not only need to learn subjects out of books but they need to learn how to use technology for the future. The future is only becoming more technology oriented and they will be lost in the real world if they do not start at a younger age. I am so happy to know that you are eager to use technology in your classroom, and that is certainly going to be used in mine.