Ten youtube tips

Another useful teaching resource here with ten tips for using youtube in the classroom.

Tools for reflection: blogs, penzu

Susan posted on Penzu and I have already added a comment to her post:-) However this made me also realise that I was suggesting a more global theme that I felt needed tagging - we can't tag comments. (Susan, there is an example here of tagging - if you wanted to tag your own post, you can edit as the author and do that).

This reflection on tagging also exemplifies how we need to think about the specific affordances of these tools. As we know, things can get difficult to find again and tagging helps us to locate.

Anyway, thanks to Susan for trying out Penzu - I hadn't had a look before. As Irene noted, there is a share function and this caused me to think more about the private/public dimensions of tools such as Penzu or the blog we're now reading. Social networking seems to encourage much more of the public, in fact.

However, Penzu starts in the personal domain and I think as a personal learning diary, could be a simple but effective tool; learners could choose to share the content they wish or use it for metacognitive reflection, prompted by the teacher, about learning. But the teacher may never see the original content.

Other diaries may be shared dfor specific reasons. That also reminded me that when you guys come to doing your Developing Researcher Competence course, you'll be encouraged to keep a researcher diary. I have a student who logged her whole dissertation journey in a blog which I as supervisor could see Clare's research diary (link here as I know Clare has given me permission to show you:-) but Penzu could also serve quite well as a more private researcher diary.

So these thoughts are really musing about diaries, blogs (any other tools) for personal v collaborative use. We tend to spend quite a bit of time exploring the 'social' 'collaborative' but mustn't neglect private reflection:-) By the way I tried the share function in Penzu - you can select a code to embed into a blog or wiki for example. This is the embedded public code Diane's diary

Young learners producing vokis

This is a blog for young learners of French as a foreign language. Here they produce their own vokis. The 'voices' are not their own but those of the 'synthesised' selections you can choose from. So rather than the learners recording orally, then type in the text for it to be 'read' by the synthesised voice.

Young learner vokis

In French but transferable to Engish as a FL. The blog is clearly a space to which learners post their vokis for others to share and this seems to be a common use of blogs - more than a collaborative space as such perhaps? Maybe worth thinking about their affordances with these particular aims in mind - teacher blog, class blog, individual blog; task management, sharing, collaboration...

blog as a tool for teaching and learning?

Hi all
I wonder if you have emerging reflections on blogs as a specific tool.

How might this tool fit into a language learning context?
What are the pros and cons?
Can you relate these to specific attributes? eg it's synchronous; its content displays in a specific way; collaborators interact in specific ways (different from a wiki for example).

This week I enccouraged you to think about synchronous communication in relation to SLA principles. Does blog communication have any such potential?

Look forward to any thoughts you might have no matter how small:-)

Diane

How to use a blog?

I don't believe it is possible to make an a priori decision about the uses of a blog for a particular group of students. Testing it in practice is likely to produce different results with different students. I say this from experience. I use an online class journal with one group of students: this is not technically a blog (and is in fact based around google documents) but it shares many salient features with a blog. About half the class really enjoy it and find it a useful way of extending their use of English outside the classroom, a quarter occasionally use it, and a quarter more or less don't bother - or require firm prompting. For me this is neither surprising nor disappointing. Next term I will continue with the experiment. I am trying to test different ways of giving feedback - either commenting only on the content, or including comments on their language. 

Experiences of computer mediated communication in language learning

Those of you who have taken a look round have, I hope, got used to the features of a blog, an example of asynchronous communications.

As this has developed, it begins to feel very much like a VLE - as Julia says it's almost like setting up a web page with links to different resources though the centre of gravity here is the communications function.

Of course as with all CMCs and indeed all technologies, we need a reason to exploit the tool. Can we collect stories of your own experiences with CMC technologies? This might be as teachers or indeed as learners. Tell us what the purpose was; what role the tool played and any positive effects and challenges you think might be useful for others to think about. You might think back to how I narrated the research with the children using email to develop writing last week.

Remember recounting challenges is an important part of learning. Julia made some interesting comments about the public nature of this blog and I think we had similar comments when we did the group enquiry activity requiring reorting back on BBrd:-)

Can we also think ab out the nature of language production too? we did this when we thought about email. What expectations do we have in this tool? Might these define how we integrate it too?

Look forward to your thoughts:-)

Teaching old dogs new tricks...

Hi everyone

Just finishing off my assignment for Diane ready to hand in tomorrow....... ONLY JOKING!!! If only I could even decide where to start....

Anyway, I have to admit that I don't find all this blogging business very comfortable. It's really hard to start writing, knowing that different people might read what I say and think it's rubbish! Sending an email seems much less public, somehow, and therefore less scary.

I know one thing - it's important to realise that you're never too old to learn how to do new things. My mother is 84 and has learnt to do all sorts of things using the internet - she doesn't like having to learn the new 'tricks', but if she wants to see photos of my brother's family in Saudi, she has to do it, if she wants to shop online and have access to goods and services she can't reach in person, she has to do it. She finds it uncomfortable at first, but she's glad when she's mastered it. If she can do it, so can I....

Hope you're having a good day. I'm going to visit my Indian friends for a meal tonight, and my stomach is already rumbling in happy anticipation of delicious food.

Julia

Integrating tools

I was reading your views on blogs as personal and/or class tools and fully support the view that there must be hundreds of abandoned spaces out there! We do have to ask why bother!

I suspect in terms of blogs for learning, first of all the attributes of the tool itself need to be fit for purpose (eg your own use of the wikis and blogs for the webquest were your decisions. I have to say this is the first year that groups have defaulted to these collaborative tools rather than use the forum!). Yes, we're back to that word collaboration yet again:-)

Wikis clearly facilitate collaborative text construction in a way that blogs don't. The ease with which text is uploaded and reviewed is a definite attribute for creative projects, I feel. Maybe this is their strength and uses exploiting these features would seem to be logical. I do wonder if some wikis are more intuitive than others? I find myself reacting quite quickly to the 'look' of the tool and this can impact on my decision to make it a home for anything I do. You used different ones for your webquests - any thoughts on this, especially if that was your first encounter? I guess we could ask the same for most tools where we have choices, including blogs, but wikis seem to be a particular case in point:-)

Blogs clearly provide for discussion, but also seem to form a neat space for both sharing, archiving and display and I've seen various examples of them being used in this way. Along with the ability to tag entries, this seems to be again a specific set of attributes to act as a selling point.

This is a neat site that I explore with my UG class of primary school teaching assistants here in Manchester:-) In fact here are examples of blogs, podcasts, wikis all in one place - and in a primary learning context! Sandaig Primary school

What strikes me is there is no that much commenting and I felt this could be encouraged more (eg see the book review blog) but lots of 'display' - and clearly this can be seen by the children's parents too.

Here also is a nice example of Ning used in a global project around specific tasks that are aimed to make children more aware of others' voices around the world. Check thelink to the wiki from this main page for monthly tasks and uploaded projects Voices of the World

See what you think - oriented towards younger learners of course.
Diane

Approaches to blogging

As I was posting a comment back to Tony, I described Nik Peachey's blog as 'one to come back to' and I began thinking about the number of blogs I take a quick look at, but never return to, and the few that I do look at more regularly.

This made me wonder whether we read other people's blogs solely because we are interested in what we find there or whether as blog authors there might be some principles which could guide our approach to structuring and therefore make blogging a quick and easy experience for the reader.

To illustrate, Nik Peachey often posts on new software or Web2.0 applictaions he has come across. He systematically posts comments under headings: How to use this with students; what I liked; what I didn't like. Under these, bullet points are used quite a lot rather than extensive text. He also uses tagging systematically so you can easily browse the topics.

Tagging is a specific issue I suspect. This site by Ann Foreman (BC Spain) has some great posts (a veritable treasure trove of practical advice) including some nice examples of blogs. The tagging list is huge and possibly less transparent than Nik's as I wasn't sure why some tags took me to where I went, but does this make a difference? http://encouraginglearnerautonomy.blogspot.com/2007/03/setting-up-blog.html

Of course both these examples are targeted at teachers and are likely to grow quite large. Maybe learner blogs are set up more for specific projects and are more focussed by their very nature. Ann links to this BC blog which struck me as a nice idea to support exam classes and I suspect will continue to be easy to navigate as it grows http://fcebritishcouncilbilbao.blogspot.com/

So I wondered if you had examples of blogs that you might return to regularly, or learner blogs that look particularly clear and enticing?


Diane

Tools, tools, tools

I sometimes wonder if my old habits die so hard that I am reluctant to explore new communications tools. There is a sense that each new blog that comes out or each chat tool is just more of the same but then each does have specific characteristics that might make them more or less usable and these attributes might be important when making decisions about integration.

Nik Peachey on his excellent blog for language teachers http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/ linked to this list of blogging tools by Jane Hart for example http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/Tools/blogging.html Here the basic criteria revolve around cost and download flexibility, but there must be more to it when thinking about learning attributes? Some on this list look intriguing though and I wonder if any of you have experience of any of them (there are other types of tool too if you browse the links).

More interestingly, what tools do you use for regular communications and/or use with learners and why do you go for these given the choice we have? Is it possible to draw up a list of attributes that inform those choices? What distinguishes one synchronous text based chat tool from another? Or WebCT forum from Moodle forum tool:-) Do specific attributes make significant differences to interactions?