Software in Education

I’ve been investigating different types of software that can enhance learning not only in second language learning, but also in any educational environment. Most of the reading that I’ve done about integrating software into a classroom has lead me to the conclusion of “use in moderation”. Like anything else in technology it’s easy to go crazy and buy all the software out there so it seems like we are doing something to benefit our students, when actually we could be distracting them from the educational components.

Does the software teach the student or the student teach the software?

Software in education can be a tricky business as we need to research the educational companies selling the products. Are the products designed to compliment the intended learning outcomes? Does the company have a valid reputation and perhaps produced other educational materials? As teachers, we want to refrain from the concept of “edutainment”. Are your students using the software as a means to engage and increase the learning potential or are they simply being entertained? Before choosing software for your students, think critically about the product and the activities involved. Like most aspects of technology, software should be used as a teaching tool and not as a lesson plan.

1. Will this task hinder the learning process or enhance it?
2. Are the activities involved similar to those I could do without a computer?
3. Am I using the computer as a tool or a lesson?

Some of my favorites

1. Inspiration/Kidspiration: Mind mapping software that can be used as an individual or group brainstorming activity. It can be used in all subject areas to help students analyze, organize and create meaningful connections. You can even try before you buy! http://cf.inspiration.com/freetrial/index.cfm?fuseaction=insp_qual_form

2. Microsoft Office: This software has a lot to offer in its various components. MS word has many features that can be used by both students and teachers as a word processor and advanced users get great benefits as you can use: grammar/spell check, html, graphics, code corrections, tables/charts and as well as inserting spreadsheets, pictures, and hyperlinks. MS PowerPoint is software used for presentations. Lectures, facilitators, students and teachers use this software to show slides which include sounds, and graphics (moving and still), internal/external hyperlinks. Advanced printing features include slides for viewers for note-taking and editing tools. MS Publisher is a forgotten area as some may believe it’s only for adverting and posters. It is in fact a great tool for educators to create professional looking WebPages (that requires no previous knowledge of websites). They have excellent templates to work with and you simply need to fill in the blanks! Microsoft also provides free downloads and add in from their website to compliment all of their tools.

Your Say!

Do you have any special software that you enjoy using with your class?
What has worked really well in your learning or the learning of your students?

Technology and Frustration

I had planned to write on my blog last Thursday when I was supposed to have conducted a professional development seminar for my coworkers about educational uses of blogs and wikis. Upon arrival at our language centre, we discovered that our network was temporarily down and I was therefore unable to go through with the presentation.

Technology like anything else has it's moments of glory and pain. It can be limitless in it's educational and personal uses and also unpredictable at the most inconvenient times. We often forget that it is in fact a machine and breaks down usually due to unforeseen circumstances. But, doesn't it always seem that it's only unreliable when you've planned a professional development session, have a major assignment due that needs to be electronically submitted, or stuck in a foreign country when your passport has just been stolen??

From these experiences we need to take our technology "with a grain of salt" and have a backup plan in case of emergencies. Our session has been delayed until this Thursday and I plan to write another entry this week detailing the outcomes and hopefully successes.

My posting today leads me to my question of, "What is your backup plan when technology fails to deliver?"

-Postpone the lesson?
-Do the lesson without technology (if possible)?

Looking forward to your thoughts,
Adrienne

Online Discussion Forums in Second Language Learning.

Why discussion forums?

I've chosen online discussion forums as my next adventure! Since I have recently begun to teach in the Direct Entry Program (DEP) at Griffith University's English Language Institute, our students are using online forums on a weekly basis. DEP is a 10 week university preparation course for English Language Learners that entails four courses. Research Preparation and Practice which includes time management skills, academic writing skills and requirements. Critical Thinking which includes debating strategies and critical analysis of various texts. Issues in Australian Society and Language in Use dealing with Australia news and intense use of grammar in English. As part of the Critical Thinking course that I am teaching, students must respond to a weekly question on the discussion forum and respond to at least one other student's comment.

First, what is an online forum and how do I use it?

Online forums take place on many university and higher education websites. At Griffith, we have learning@griffith and at USQ we have USQ Connect. Both of these areas on the websites require the users to sign in with a user name and password, then click on the appropriate area to make their contributions. Online forums usually have a title and that you can click on to access. Once you are in the forum area, you can view all the previous submissions by other group members and hit a "REPLY" button. This will give you a new window that looks like a word processor. You can type in your comments, do a spell check and then press "submit" and ta-da your submission is now visible to all the other participants. What about editiing? Well, every onlinne forum is different and some do not allow you to edit your work once it has been submitted, others may give you a 5 minute editing window to modify your entry.

Why are online forums beneficial in second language learning?

1. Developing communication skills in writing, discussion, expressing opinions and ideas via electronic medium

2. Developing critical analysis and of several topics.

3. Developing argument skills with supporting statements.

4. Developing accurate writing and grammar skills.

When have you used online forums in education?

I invite you to share your thoughts and comments about online discussion forums and their benefit in second language learning.

WIKIs in Second Language Learning

What is a WIKI and how do I use it?

Before reading any of the information below, I invite you to watch a short and entertaining 3 minute video that demonstrates how WIKIs are used. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

Wiki wiki comes from the Hawaiian term for "quick" or "super-fast. Wikis are collaborative web sites that allow multiple authors to create and edit information on the web site.

Tips for using a Wiki:

1. Anyone can change anything. Wikis are quick because the processes of reading and editing are combined.

2. Wikis use simplified hypertext markup: simplified webpage language, you do not need to know anything about webpage or web design to use a wiki.

3. WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether. Wiki page titles often eschew spaces to allow for quick page creation and automatic, markup-free links between pages within (and sometimes across) wiki systems.

4. Content is ego-less, time-less, and never finished. Anonymity is not required but is common. With open editing, a page can have multiple contributors, and notions of page "authorship" and "ownership" can be radically altered.

5. Wiki pages are rarely organized by chronology. They are most often organized by context, by links in and links out, and by whatever categories or concepts emerge in the authoring process.

Educational Uses for Wikis

Why are they important in education? Knowing how to learn and how to participate in creating new knowledge are increasingly essential life skills. Knowledge-building networks aim to engage groups in producing new knowledge, advancing the frontiers of knowledge of the group. Wikis establish a community of learning and allow students to use other people and learners as an important resource. Wikis may be the beginning of a way to offer a collaborative learning opportunity for online Technology Education students while incorporating the component of service learning. Online learning supports a collaborative learning model, which is comprised of the elements of presence, collaboration, reflective/transformative learning, technology, social constructivism, and interaction/communication that shape collaboration and a sense of community.

A few different ways Wikis have been used in educational environments:

1. Sketchpads and Brainstorming: create updated lists or collections of links as an informal bulletin board.

2. Meeting planning: a provisional agenda is drawn up and the URL for the wiki is sent to the participants, who are then free to comment or to add their own items. Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda serves as a note-taking template, and when the meeting is completed, the notes are instantly available online, allowing the participants or anybody else to review and annotate the proceedings.

3. Build reference lists and outlines: brainstorm instructional strategies and suggestions.

4. New Job Postings: store and organize content for a major new job posting and career development Web site that it is developing.

5. Planning a conference: collect supporting resources and to gather contributions from invited participants. Use wikis during the conference, live, with laptops and wireless access, to record group work. Following the conference, participants subsequently edit their collaborations.

6. Educational Research: Graduate courses employ wikis as a support for collaborative experiments in composition and as a prompt for reflection on the nature of online writing and reading.

7. Authors: upload manuscripts of their novels to incorporate the best edits and suggestions into the next draft of the book. Readers can also save alternative chapters and related pages.

8. Writing Instruction: At Teaching Wiki (http://teachingwiki.org), Joe Moxley, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, lists a number of the medium’s strengths for the teaching of writing skills: wikis invigorate writing ("fun" and "wiki" are often associated); wikis provide a low-cost but effective communication and collaboration tool (emphasizing text, not software); wikis promote the close reading, revision, and tracking of drafts; In addition to fostering the development of writing skills as they are already understood, wikis may prove to be invaluable for teaching the rhetoric of emergent technologies.

9. Network literacy: teaching students the meaning and how to write in a collaborative environment.

10. Constructivist teaching philosophy: To truly empower students within collaborative or co-constructed activities requires the teacher to relinquish some degree of control over those activities. The instructor’s role shifts to that of establishing contexts or setting up problems to engage students. In a wiki, the instructor sets the initial task and the students work as a collaborative group.

11. Academic Projects: students with common service projects can share ideas, relate the theories, concepts, and methodologies to the e-service, and assist one another in brainstorming and problem solving.

12. Case Study Research Methods: chosen for conducting the case study, and the following section analyzes the results.

Some of my favorite quotes

“Even confirmed technophobes have grasped and mastered the system quickly. The structure of wikis is shaped from within—not imposed from above. Users do not have to adapt their practice to the dictates of a system but can allow their practice to define the structure”(Lamb, 2004).

"SoftSecurity,"(Lamb, 2004) relies on the community, rather than technology, to enforce order.

“Characteristic of the wiki’s irreverent attitude, the front page announces that those who do not wish to "edit, erase, enhance, beautify, dullify, nullify, derange, arrange, or simply change" the wiki space should "then accept the fact that [they] will always be complacent, and easily controlled." Then, presumably, they should just go away” (Lamb, 2004).

Want to try out you WIKI skills? Here's the web address to my WIKI that I have started as a means of practice just for you!

http://technologysecondlanguagelearning.wikispaces.com/

Blogging and second language learning

Blogging and second language learning go hand in hand as they represent many forms of new literacies. They include written, visual, auditory (if there is sound) , media and critical literacies. They are considered a multimodal text as students, teachers and all users must use refined reading, scanning, predicting, analyzing and interfering skills to accurate absorb content from a technical form of communication.

Blogs can display pictures and video, include audio and Flash, and even store other files like PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets for linking.

There are many schools starting to experiment with the technology as a way to communicate with students and parents, archive and publish student work, and manage the knowledge that members of the school community create.

We can use a Weblog for many different classroom activities in all subject areas. Blogging can be a fun and creative way for students to express themselves in any educational context.

In the past they have been used to:

1. Carry on conversations about a book outside of class (the author has even joined in!) [http://weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/beesbook]. Parents have also taken part in their children's lives by reading the book for themselves and holding discussions parallel to the students.

2. Audioblogs help students work on reading and pronunciation skills. You can record and post the audio files on a Weblog and students play the files back at home when they want to hear how they sound. Great for the parents that don't speak French and wonder how to make all those little sounds!

3.Librarians use Weblogs as a resource by starting conversations about books and literacy.

4.Students use Weblogs as digital portfolios or just digital filing cabinets, where they store their work.

5.Teachers use blogs as classroom portals, where they archive handouts, post homework assignments, and field questions virtually from parents and students

How have Weblogs influenced your second language learning or teaching? How has blogging been useful or engaging for you, your child or your students? Do you have any tips for teachers that are new to blog technology?

I look forward to hearing your comments, suggestions and feedback.

References:

http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml

How can we make effective use of technology in second language learning?

I've created this blog as a means of communication among second language teachers around the world. The focus will be in English as a Second Language (ESL) and French as a Second Language (FSL) and French Immersion (FI). The goal of this blog is for you to learn easy and cost efficient ways to maximize learning potential when teaching and learning in a second language environment.

Each month will feature a specific teaching or learning strategy of Information Communication in Technology (ICT):
1. How it can be incorporated into a second language learning envirnoment
2. Benefits of using the technical method in the classroom
3. Comments, feedback and suggestions from students, parents and teachers involved in second language learning and ICT's.

It is my goal to have this blog as a means of bilingual (French and English) communication. Please feel free to post your comments, suggestions and feedback in French or English.