Webinar

I attended a webinar which was on a learning session made with Elluminate. Some students were from Chinese universities (Sichuan, Liaoning and Henan universities) and some others were from Australia (Victoria University). I found it quite interesting.

The presenter was Carolyn Woodley. She explains how the project went on. Students were attending to Elluminate sessions. She tells us that students had four times one-hour Global English Corner sessions. They discussed about many subjects such as food and culture. Food was their favourite topic. Moreover, Chinese students had to get involved into a blog project. This was the following of the weekly conversation they had with Australian students. I liked the idea of holding this blog. With it, students can share what they learned during their talking session with Australian students. They can comment their friends’ posts and add things related to their experience.

A survey was conducted at the end of this project and students seem to be pleased with what they’ve done. Their level of English improved a lot (listening and speaking skills) and they made friends abroad. Furthermore, they learned a lot of things about a new culture. For a lot of them, working with this type of technology and sharing with someone coming from another country was new.

I think that this was a good project. As a future English teacher, I would like to try to make one like this with my students. What makes me hesitated to try it is that, even though students learn a lot from it and enjoy it, technology is not always a 100% reliable. In the webinar that Carolyn Woodley did, she said that some problems encountered were linked to technology. The Internet connection was very slow for Chinese students; it was too slow to be able to use videos. Furthermore, setting up audio was difficult for students. Moreover, having students from two different countries to communicate together at the same time was difficult because of the time difference. To avoid this, I would probably try to put my students in touch with English students from a close country (e.g. Ontario). I would also make sure that I can have a good Internet connection to be able to have students make a video conversation with their correspondent.

This project is fun to do and kids learn a lot from all, all you need is patience and a lot of planning and testing to make sure that everything will work properly.

This is where I found the webinar https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2011-08-11.1535.M.24C65BB208C5945D22D62D8826C430.vcr&sid=45 

POST #4: "Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts"

Today, we watched a video about how technology can be beneficial for students. In the video, Vicki Davis says that working only with the old paper and pencil working method is not very effective because only a certain type of students will be able to succeed with it. As a solution, she brings out the idea of doing classes by showing students how some software are working and then, students become comfortable with it and they begin to learn by themselves when it comes to do projects such as an Avatar. Vicki Davis use digital medias to help kids to “learn how to learn” by , first, giving them an overview of what a software is capable of, and then letting them work on their projects and discover the software’s functions deeper. By doing this, students are developing strategies to learn how to learn faster with new software. When she lets them work alone on it, students begin to help each other to find out how things are working and that’s what she calls empowerment. Empower can be done in many ways: in schools, it is teamwork and , at home,  it can be done by peer-feedback when students send their work to each other or even ask questions on a forum to know how a specific software works.

Personally, I think that having kids collaborating with other students across the world can be a good thing because it can bring them to discover new things and to improve their written/speaking skills in an authentic context. They can learn useful things about new cultures. Furthermore, they can share their vision on a specific subject, which may differ a lot depending on where they come from. Moreover, students can see that they are not the only ones to talk/do research about a specific subject.  On the other hand, having this type of communication has its disadvantages: having a response might take some weeks/months, so you cannot have a fix work schedule. As a future ESL teacher, I think that I can use something like the tandem network to help my students to improve their level of English by putting them into an authentic situation with native speakers. Therefore, a schedule of sending/answering mails should be established to make communication flows easier (not losing a month for waiting for an answer). I also liked the idea that Vicki Davis brings us in her video:  having a blog with students all around the world posting their research on the same subject. I think that it could be motivating for a lot of students to compare their findings with others from all around the world.

Here is the link to Vicki Davis' video: http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-teachers-vicki-davis-video

POST #3 : "Big Thinkers: Henry Jenkins on New Media and Implications for Learning and Teaching"

Today, we watched a video about the digital age and how technology can be useful in schools when it is not limited. Jenkins tells us about how having a controlled access to internet (parental control to go on safe websites) can stop students in their researches. He gave us the example of doing a research on Moby Dick. Kids can hardly find information about that subject simply because there is the word “dick” in the expression and that it is on the school’s black list. Jenkins also says that kids value learning in games and a lot of educational games can be made with technology. He also says that some kids, who are poorer, are limited to schools and libraries to have access to technologies like cameras, audio recording or computers. Teachers do not use as much electronic tools as they should to give more opportunity to students to explore them. Henry Jenkins also mentions that teachers are scared of losing control of their classes while using technology, but they should use it to bring students to become autonomous learners. Furthermore, teachers can build an online community to help each other to deal with that.

Like Jenkins says, I do believe that the web security settings that schools impose put limits to students’ researches. I perfectly understand that those settings are there to protect children from going on some nasty websites or playing games while a class goes on, but I think that we should give more freedom to our classes and trust them. If a teacher notices something strange going on, students should receive a consequence. I know that there are still some families who cannot afford to buy a computer so, I also believe that teachers should try to incorporate as much ICTs as they can in their class, but only if they are relevant for a task. It will give more opportunities to poorer students to have access to technology. To create shared learning opportunities across generations, teachers should base their projects about passions or subjects that everyone can have a stand on. The level of implication of students will be higher and it gives them the opportunity to share and discuss.  Finally, copyrights and authorship seems to be subjects that a lot of people care about. To be able to fix that problem with your students while using ICTs, some online activities can be done to make them explore all the issues about those subjects. Those activities can be done as games.

Here is the link to the video we watched in class:http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-henry-jenkins-media-video

POST #2 "How Teachers Collaborate Online and in School"

Here is the link to the video that we watched in class today:

http://www.edutopia.org/stw-differentiated-instruction-budget-resource-collaboration-video

The video that we watched today was about how we can use wiki in a school context, but not as students, but as teachers. This tool can be very useful to share some lesson plans, ideas and different ways to teach something. The Vail School District created a wiki called Beyond Textbooks which is used to post ideas and lesson plans. A lot of schools joined this wiki and, with the schools’ union, new information coming from outside a district can be provided into a particular one. Teachers can be aware faster of what is going on regarding education in many other schools. It is also a good last minute resources for teachers.

I think that the use of wikis is relevant when you are a teacher because you can share information such as lesson plans, ideas and important data. Furthermore, in Sze’s article, it says that, by using wikis, students can do brainstorming, blogs, collaborative writing, planning events, book reports, etc. All those things can also be done by teachers. They can put their lesson plans on it and they can be modified by other teachers to add suggestions to it (collaborative aspect). Furthermore, if a teacher is stuck and don’t know what to do with his/her classes, he/she can use lesson plans available on the wiki or do a brainstorm and ask help from other teachers. This tool can also be used as a planning tool (the teachers’ team of a specific year can easily be aware of where they have to be at a particular time of the year). If we take a look at Kovacic et al. text, it says that wikis “enabled online collaboration and peer-to-peer learning, facilitated [students’] critical thinking and inspired creativity”. Again, all that can be applied to teachers. I think that the use of wikis is a good thing for teachers because it brings them to always improve their teaching and be aware of what is going on in the teachers’ world.

POST #1 "Big Thinkers: Howard Gardner on Digital Youth"

Nowadays, with Internet, everyone can have access to everything only by a simple “click”. When someone accesses to Internet, he/she can easily pretend to be someone else by created a false account. It might seem fun, but we have to be careful.

As Gardner says, we have to be aware of five factors while using digital medias: identity, privacy, trustworthy, ownership and credibility. Those are all part of ethic that people should respect. Gardner says that young people know about what is ethical or not, but they do not always apply or care about it. I think that, when we are young, those things don’t seem to affect us and we don’t care about the consequences of what we do. We just do as we want, without wondering about the repercussions of it.

Howard Gardner says that with the new digital media era, teachers are becoming less of a role model for students: they are perceived as being coaches. Before, teachers were at the center of students’ education; they were responsible for almost everything they would learn.  In today’s society, where we have more access to technology than before, teachers are using a lot of tools like blogs, forums, e-portfolios, webquests, and others to monitor students’ learning. They are not the center of the students’ learning anymore, but they cooperate to it by leading them to use tools.  

Here is a link to "Big Thinkers: Howard Gardner on Digital Youth"

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-howard-gardner-video