Blog #14 CALL Summary

I feel like it's hard for me to choose right now, which CALL tools I will use in the future, but I do appreciate having an idea of the different tools that are out there. I think I'll have to get into my next classroom and take in both the subject of the course as well as my students' personalities in order to decide which tools, if any, to use. I do feel like we received a great variety of tools and an abundant amount of them. At the time it was frustrating for me, but now I really appreciate that I am familiar with these tools and feel more apt to explore others.

All in all I think one should only use CALL tools if the activity cannot be done without them or if it will be more beneficial to the students to use them. Although I think in an academic setting, they should be used, not only for their language acquisition benefits, but also to learn computer skills. It's important for students planning to enter a university to feel very comfortable using the computer, especially for research. I think CALL tools can be very useful, but each class needs to be evaluated first. If CALL tools are something that one's class can benefit from and if the students are interested in using them, then I think they should definitely be incorporated into the curriculum.

Blog #13 Second Life

I think of Second Life in the same way that I think about online chat. If you're teaching an EFL class, then it's a great way to get your students to interact with native English speakers. But, if you're in an ESL setting, then I think efforts are better spent getting the studnets to have real face to face interactions with native speakers, not computer interactions. Plus, I think it would be hard to monitor. It's my experience with Second Life that much time is spent walking around looking for others. This could be quite a waste of time for students. Even if they know where some native speaker are, what would prevent them from slacking off and going exploring. There is so much to look at in Second Life, students may easily be distracted. Overall, I think it would be fun to do one day just to give the students something different to work with. I wouldn't make it a regular part of my class though.

As far as the article we read on English video gaming. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I can see how it could help young students learn English because it would be using a medium they particularly enjoy. I'm not really comfortable with the idea of encouraging video gaming though. Plus, even if it helped them learn vocabulary and some syntacs structures, it really wouldn't help them with their communicative competency. It places them behind a barier of any true interaction. There would have to be a lot of research proving this to be very beneficial before I would ever jump on board.

Blog #12 Video Conferencing

I have always been a fan of Skype and ichat, but I had never used any of these web based programs. I don't like any of them as much as Skype or ichat, but I do see the benefit of not having to use a mac or download a program. I liked both tokbok and meebo. They seem the same to me. I really didn't like Zoho. I just felt like there were so many features I didn't know where to begin and was a bit overwhelmed. Mebeam on the other hand had the opposite affect. It was almost too easy with no features at all. Also, I was confused when it asked me to type in the name of the room I wanted to chat in. Do we make this up or should we know some names somehow? Oh, and I never received my confirmation e-mail from palbee, which I see happened to other people as well.

I'm not sure when I would use this tool. If I was teaching an EFL class I would definitely be interested in it because it would be a really nice way to match students up with native speakers and they could actually see their facial expressions and everything while they spoke. If it was an ESL class though, I would rather the interaction be face to face. Speaking to a native speaker is nerve racking enough for ESL students, let alone having to do it in the unnatural way of looking at the computer screen and having to deal with the technology as well as their nerves. It could be useful for international business people to use this technology though because video conferencing is not uncommon in the international business world and it's a good skill for them to learn and be comfortable with.

Blog #11 E-Journaling

In the article, the researchers had the students record some of their language learning experience through e-journaling. The students were to focus on the strategies that they used in order to complete their assigned speech acts. I think it could be very beneficial for students to think about the different strategies they use when learning, but I don't think it was more beneficial for them to e-journal that information instead of just writing it down. It is nice in a way though that both the researchers and the students have an online resource they can go back and reference. Sometimes paper copies get misplaced or thrown away.

Another way e-journaling could be fun and helpful for EFL students in particular is to give them pen-pals from the states that they can e-mail back and forth. I know they could just do this on paper as well, but e-mailing would save on a lot of postage, the conversations would be quicker so they would have time to write more, and they would always have a saved document of their entire conversation. They could use this to see the progress in their own writing as well as reference things that were mentioned in past conversations.

Blog #10 Wiki Projects

These articles presented two different ways of using Wiki. One was a collaborative project and the other was peer editing. While I see the benefits of using Wiki for a collaborative project, especially when the learners are in different locations, there are some negatives. First of all, when students are in the same area working collaboratively they can bounce their ideas off one another before actually making the change. If you're by yourself, it may be intimidating to add something to a document and even more nerve wracking to change something someone else has written. Plus, if it is mandatory to edit, a student might end up changing something that would have been better left alone.

For peer editing, which was focused on in the third article, I'm not sure what the difference between this and e-mail is. I realize that students would have the opportunity to read everyone's story in the same area, but most likely they will only read one or two or however many they have to comment on. Still, I do find this beneficial because you won't have twenty stories coming through your e-mail.

I think Wiki is something I would like to try with a class and get their feedback. Whether or not the students enjoy this would probably change with every class. I would just read the class and use it accordingly.

Project Proposal

The CALL tool we will be using is Photo Story 3. The purpose is to give students an outlet to be creative with their language skills. They will be using the program to create a digital story. The program allows students to post pictures in a strip and each one can be accompanied with text and audio. The students will have to find the photos online. This will give the added benefit of practicing their web browsing skills. This tool could potentially be used at any level because they are producing the dialogue. For advanced students, the stories would be very complex, but students at that level may be looking for more academic or real world learning experiences. For beginners, the stories would be simple, but they would still benefit from the activity. For the purpose of this lesson proposal, we are going to focus on younger EFL intermediate students. They have enough knowledge of the language to really play around and be creative with it, but they can still learn a lot from their peers while creating a fictional story.

The students will begin by working in pairs or groups of three. This will give them a chance to collaborate with others and hopefully learn new vocabulary from their peers. They will create a fictional story about five pages in length. They will then have to find pictures to accompany their pages. It will be Ok if they cannot find pictures that directly correspond. They will, however, have to explain why they chose the picture they did. After they have posted their pictures into the program and included the text, they will record themselves reading the pages and the voice link will be embedded into the online book. The students will present their stories to the class when they are finished. I think this tool will enhance the students’ investment into the project and improve their computer skills at the same time. Many of us have probably produced a fictional story at some point where we drew the pictures and wrote the text. The difference with this tool is that the students’ photo books will be blown up on the projector for everyone to see. Plus, they will have to use English to search for their pictures online. Additionally, they will record their reading instead of reading it out loud to the class. This will give them the chance to listen to their recording and hear their own pronunciation problems. They can redo the recordings as many times as they want. This will lower their affect because they will not have the pressure of pronouncing everything on the spot in front of the class.

There is no online site link because we are using a program, which will need to be downloaded onto the computers. It is a free program. The students will use the Internet to search for their photos but obviously they would use many different sites for that. One helpful site link is Google Image listed below.

http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi

Blog #9 Google Tools

This week, in addition to the readings, I also read an online article, which highlighted many educational uses of google. I decided to write my blog on this article instead of the reading this week because I found it particularly beneficial for me. One thing that was mentioned was the fact that google will allow you to do a custom search. I was unaware of this before, but it definitely could have helped me in the past. I used to let my kids look up our vocabulary words for the week online. I would look up the words myself before hand and try to make sure there wasn't any sexual innuendo that could possible be associated with the words before I would give them to them. Still, every once in awhile, one of them would show me a risque picture they found. It would have been really nice to customize their searches and not have to worry about that anymore.

Another tool mentioned was Google Groups. This was explained like an online chat room for a class. This is just another way they could collaborate and share their thoughts. It's also a place where they could post questions for the rest of their classmates and get help if needed. Google Buzz was also mentioned. This is similar to Google Groups except students can also post and share photos and videos. The students can comment on each other's posts. So, one student could post a picture and another student could comment and hopefully the students would get involved in a running dialogue online. The fact that it's online will give them a chance to plan out their responses, which would hopefully lead to more accuracy and fluency.