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.
For a While now I’ve been thinking of different ways that students can have asynchronous voice conversations outside the classroom. I’m convinced that this would help a lot of my adult learners to improve their English more quickly, as IMHO it’s the short, weekly exposure to a foreign language that they get in traditional 1.5 hour lessons that is holding them back. If they could get online a couple of times a week and take part in an asynchronous conversation, a bit like an oral blog, I’m sure that it would help them to recall more vocabulary, create interest in what they are learning and give them a focus for their studies.
I wrote a while back about a great called Evoca. But it is a bit labour intensive, requiring the Evoca account holder (the busy teacher) to manually embed the code for any replies they got to their voicemails if they wanted to share them with the rest of the class. This led to me not using Evoica that much after first discovering it.
“Get A Buz,” despite it’s silly name, provides bloggers, MySpace users, and in general anyone with a website to include a voicemail type of widget, that would allow a teacher, or one of the students, to start off a discussion. Other class members can then listen in their own time to the discussion and then add their comments. All of this happend automatically, with the teacher only having to upload the code to the blog once, and then they can simply follw the discussion and reply to their students wherever relevant.
Here’s an example of a “Get A Buz” plugin below. Click on the “Hear My Message” to listen to my recording, then please feel free to leave me a reply too:
The things I like about “Get A Buz” are:
It’s a great way to get students speaking L2 outside the classroom. This will be really valuable to them IMHO.
It’s pretty straightforward to use. As long as you know how to embed a bide of HTML in your blog page you can use it.
Once you have set it up, it “Just Works” there is no need to perform ongoing maintenance on it.
The things I don’t like are:
You only get 3, free “Buzzes” per account. This means that you can’t start new discussions over and over again without either paying, or re-registering.
With large classes the conversation threads could become a bit lost and it might be difficult to follow who is following who.
It’s not possible to get rid of one “pre installed” introductory voicemail which is essentially just an advert.
Most Importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of notification / RSS feed etc to let the teacher and students know when a new comment has been left. This could be a a bit of a pain if the teacher has to check the site for new messages.
All told, I think Get A Buz is a cool little tool to use, especially as it’s very straightforward to set up. If anyone uses this, or any tools like it, leave me a comment to let me know what you do with it. I’d love to exchange teaching tips!
Seth.
Update: Be aware! Get a Buz allows you to create up to three different personalised “greetings” for your voicemail, but each and every voicemail player will record and play the same messages.
In other words if you want to use Get A Buz with more than one class of students, make sure you get several accounts with Get A Buz and use a different account with each class. Otherwise all your messages from all your different classes will become mixed together as one (as has just happened to me!)
Actually he’s not, but Mike Mara, a Spanish teacher from Dublin Jerome High school is, and he’s AWESOME!
I thought I’d seen cool ways to teach a language but this guy is just way out there. If you can make your students laugh (like surely Mike’s did) when they are learning a language, well you’re doing something right.
Mike has made a couple of videos, based on Justin Timberlake pop songs, to remind his high school Spanish students how to conjugate present tense verbs. The thing is they are so funny! Every time I watch them I can’t help giggling like an idiot! My favourite one is the “Conjugation’s Back,” which you can watch below.
One of the reasons I posted so little (be honest Seth, you posted nothing) between January and April this year, is all the hard work that has been going on behind the scenes of the “Click*” project I’m involved in. Click* is the (newly chosen) name for a comprehensive teacher-training course, funded by the European Community’s Leonardo programme.
We have blended our different experiences and expertises together to produce a wide ranging set of course modules from the academic theory of how to teach languages online, through simple to follow, expertly written guides of how and why to use WebQuests, all the way to basic guides on blogging, podcasting wikis etc.
I’m really confident that the materials are of such high quality that the project will be a great success. If the demand for the courses is anything to go by (we were more than three times over-subscribed for our first round of piloting) I’m sure the project will go brilliantly!
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.”
