EdTechTESOL

I gave a presentation at JALT-CALL this past weekend, entitled “Blogging in Two Languages: An International Peer Assistance Exchange”, and I just made a quick VoiceThread version to share online. The project involved the interaction between both native speakers and language learners of English and Japanese in language courses at two universities. Japanese language students from the University of New Hampshire and English language students from the University of Yamanashi collaborated in a blog exchange, where they all created content in their target language while serving as native language consumers and peer-teachers to the other group.

The goals were to provide the students with broader access to native input in the target language, create a social learning network to extend the learning beyond the classroom, and help students to start developing a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) to provide a framework for more autonomous language learning.

Just in case you skipped over the presentation, here is a link to the Ning site that I set up to facilitate creating such blog exhchanges for your Japanese or English language learners: L1 L2 Blog Exchange.
Questions and/or comments greatly appreciated!

I just came across an interesting site with a “Happiness Map” of the world, and it seems that most of the English speaking countries rank highest. It also seems that both Africa and the old U.S.S.R region have some rather depressing languages…

Certainly, I do not think that the language we use defines our mental health, but I wonder to what degree different languages lean towards positive or negative feelings… I have often heard Japanese people say that it is easier for them to express themselves in English, as they find the language less restrictive socially, but I wonder if any studies have been done on this.

Visit the map in context here.

I just came across a link to a Blog Readability Test, and decided to test this blog out. While I was there, I decided to test the blog of my English class here at the university. This blog is the work of 12 sophomores and juniors at a Japanese university. They are all Japanese, so English is their second language. Here are the scores that we received…

Can you guess which one is for this blog?

Well, it seems that I should ask my students to tone it down a bit to make their blog more readable… According to this test, they write at a higher level than I do. I guess I could just take the credit for that ;-), but I think something else is going on here. So I fired up MS Word and decided to test out the readability stats of both blogs using the tools there. Word will test your document for Flesch Reading Ease, and give it a Flesch-Kincaid Grade level.

Stats for EdtechTESOL blog.

Stats for Student blog.

These two screenshots of the statistics from each blog’s front pages tells a different story. According to Word, this blog ranks at about the eighth grade reading level, which is consistent with the previous test, but the student blog ranks at about the sixth grade level. Could the smattering of Japanese words, both in kanji and anglicized versions confused the web tool version? Either way, it is an interesting tool for checking the readability of your blog, but mileage may very…

Via: Thinking Stick

As I sit here writing a paper about augmenting textbook-based courses using Moodle, I took a quick break to sift through Google Reader and came across this graphic.

It fit right in with what I was writing about, and I couldn’t have said it better.

Source: Indexed (Take the time to peruse this site. There are some great index card graphics there. They remind me of the reason I carry such cards in my pocket all the time. I just wish I did it as well as Jessica does…)

Via:Dangerously Irrelevant

One of the great failures of blogging in the classroom is that the blogs rarely extend beyond the semester. Why is this?

I think that most teachers underestimate the blogging process and simply think that students will just do it without proper scaffolding and guidance. This is a great failure, as what this turns into is a simple journal activity done online, which completely ignores the greater possibilities of a learning blog. Why not introduce students to the full blogging cycle of reading -> commenting -> posting -> discussing?

Students need to be made aware of the benefits of reaching out and reading other blogs as resources of information, sources of discussion and ideas. They must learn to comment to start discussions with other authors before posting on their own. They should know what is out there before adding to the discussion in their own blogs, so that they know where to start. Teachers need to provide the required scaffolding to walk the students through this process before allowing them to jump in too quickly. Too often new tools fall by the wayside simply because we are not shown how to use them properly… With proper guidance, students will be able to create their own social networks around their blogs, benefit from collaboration and discussion with other, and take more control over their own learning environment…

I have come across two great resources this week about how to set up blogging in the classroom, and I highly recommend checking them out if you are looking to kickstart your students’ learning blogs. It could make the difference between your students blogging because “they have to” and blogging because “they want to”…

First, check out the post “Blogging: It Isn’t About Writing” over at The Four Eyed Technologist. This is a great post about the cycle of blogging and gives some great tips on how to properly scaffold the process in your classroom. Next, take a click over to the presentation page for “Sustained Blogging in the Classroom” by Jeff Utecht. He also has a wiki page set up on the topic. Jeff gives a 23 minute presentation on blogging in the classroom that will really help you set up your classroom for blogging success. The video download is a bit heavy at 291MB, but well worth it.

Image credits: Rosino on Flickr

I just came across a great link to a wiki page about 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. This is a great resource for teachers looking to find a way for students to create their own stories or presentations online. The wiki page gives a link to 50 demonstrations of the same story using different Web 2.0 tools. The author, Alan Levine, gives brief summaries of each tool and links to examples of each. Out of the 50 he demonstrated, I have at least nine that I want to follow up on…

Check out his wiki. There seem to be a lot of other great pages there as well…

Via: Alvin’s Educational Technology Blog

Educators worldwide seem to have latched on to social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Furl and others, but why not take it a step further? Personally, I like to take a look through the links of others in my network, but sometimes the plain links don’t tell the whole story. Why did they save that link? What is special about it? What do they think about it? These questions all pass through my mind as I view these links, and it makes me wish that these services offered “discuss this” links. Sure, I could simply email my comments and/or questions, but why not have that built in? Wouldn’t that put a little more ’social’ in social bookmarking?

So this is why my interest was peaked when I saw that my hosting service added a new “one-click install” to the Goodies section. The new software is Pligg, and it is an open source Digg clone. I couldn’t resist, so I decided to install the program to see how hard it is to set up and get running. As I write this now, I am still waiting for the “one-click install” to complete. Any moment now…

Before deciding to give Pligg a try, I did to a quick search for social bookmarking sites specifically for educators, but I did not find much. One interesting site is Edtags.org, which seems to be the work of a doctoral student at Harvard. It is interesting, but seems to be for the use of Harvard students and staff only. Perhaps this is only while they work out the system? I was surprised though as their seems to be little “social” activity on the site currently. They claim over 500 users, but the articles with the highest “votes” only seem to have around three! I was also unable, in my brief search, to find an article that had been commented on. The site seems to be a work in progress, and you can get more details from their blog. I will probably keep an eye on this one, as it would be interesting if they opened it up beyond the Harvard community.

In the meantime, I guess I will just be playing with Pligg, as I would love to see a fully functioning Digg-type site specifically for educators…

Do you think that educators would use such a tool? The Edtags site does seem to lack in the actual social interaction aspect. They have the communication tools built-in and available, and they are certainly sharing links, but are they discussing them? Are they interacting in any real way? After all, without the communication aspect, why not just share a del.icio.us account? Don’t get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for their work, I am just curious why so little discussion seems to evolve from the sharing…

In an interesting article on The Journal site, Linda L. Briggs writes about the use of game software in math classes in Georgia. It seems that they are using a game called Dimenxian from Tabula Digita. The game itself seems to have received some good reviews, and the image at the right is from (and links to) a brief review of the product.

Personally, I really like the idea of such products, as they allow students the pleasure of learning from self-discovery. The students in this program seemed to be highly focused on the task, and the teacher even went as far as to refer to the classroom as “the most manageable class ever.” She also noticed a greater amount of cooperation in the classroom:

“Another way the software has surprised Hall: the amount of teamwork it inspires… ‘The teamwork seems to evolve by itself’, Hall said. ‘It might be students that you’ve never think of working together.’ Other skills the software teaches, she said, include thinking quickly, working together, and making decisions with consequences.” Source: Serious Gaming: ‘Learn Math or Die Trying’ : September 2007 : THE Journal

This reminds me of the balance of knowledge/power in the classroom, and how it can effect social dynamics. I wrote about this a bit in a paper for my MA course, and I find the topic very interesting. The teamwork in these situations can occur as “student experts” emerge in the group and start sharing information. This can lead to higher self confidence and mutual respect in the classroom, which may be why Hall noticed odd pairings in her classroom. Suddenly students who existed on the fringe of the social classroom gain attention and respect as their peers see them in a new light. Educational gaming at the great equalizer?

I wish that my kids were a bit older so I could put this program in front of them. Somehow, I think that pre-algebra is a bit too much for six and four year olds…

Are there any similar games for language learning?

Via: Educational Technology

The Wired Campus has a short post about a story on KQED in California about the use of Second Life in distance learning. The interview is with a faculty member at the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science about how they are suing Second Life for distance courses. The video itself is well worth the jump…

I tried out Second Life (SL) a while back to see what the buzz was about, but the lack of voice chat at the time turned me off. As a language teacher, the lack of synchronous voice was a deal breaker for me. That, and the fear of trying to get through the Second Life learning curve in a second language within a 20 hour course… The video does show live audio being used in SL, which does peak my interest a bit, but I am still left wondering if it is all worth it. With great synchronous tools such as Skype (for free^[1] voice chat) or Instant Messaging tools for text chat, is the full virtual environment of SL really necessary?

For myself, I am happy to work withing the limitations of asynchronous discussion augmented with the occasional voice chats to keep things real in my MA studies. The call of the virtual environment is appealing, but until it becomes more commonplace it may just be an added distraction…

Via: The Distant Librarian by way of Educational Technology and Life

The folks at LiveMocha, who have set their sites on creating “the world’s largest community of language learners”^[1] went live with their social network for language learning. I must say that this site is an interesting concept, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I was a bit surprised at first when I noticed that none of the main people behind this seem to have any background in language education^[2] , but they seem to want to stress the social aspect of language learning, so maybe they are not as concerned with SLA theory as much. They actually side-step this point rather nicely in their latest blog post when they say “People want to communicate with and integrate into cultures; they don’t want to be linguists.”^[3] This is a good point, and specifically for the type of users that they are looking for. As more web savvy learners seek to create their own PLE for self-directed learning, I am sure that LiveMocha will be getting some of their attention.

As to the site itself, it provides users with three main sections for Learning, Practicing, and Sharing. The Learning sections is focused around courses with online lessons, the Practice section involves scripted speaking activities, both individual and with a partner, and directed writings. These activities can be reviewed by native speaker members in the Share section. Currently, they only have lessons available in six languages, but perhaps they have more on the way. Users can still use the social aspect in many languages even if they are not yet supported by Courses on the site. The landing page for members lists other members who are native speakers of languages you are studying, and members who are studying the same languages as you. These are listed under the heading of “Make Friends Now!” This may lead to making international connections with fellow students or native speakers of languages in your profile. The opportunity for authentic communication is great, and I know that my English students here in Japan have few such chances. Maybe this new tool will put a dent in some of the “practice English with me” calls I used to get so often on Skype…
Bottom line, I like it. It may need some work, but the site is at least a great concept. I am not ready to send my students in headfirst, but I will keeping my eye on this one…

Via Lifehacker