Resume buku "how to teach english with technology" chapter 6-12

6. How to use chat

Chat has enermous potential to link students around the world, in real time. It is a technology that many learners will often be familiar with and will use in their social lives, so it is worth exploiting in the classroom where possible.

When we talking about chat, weneed to distinguish between text and audio chat, and between public and privat chat, all of which can take place one-to-one or between groups of users. Chat users are able to see status/ availability of other chat users, such as wether the user is online, away, busy, and so on.

There is a view that online text chat is the virtual equivalent to mobile phone texting, in which abbreviated forms, for example, CU L8r for see you later, are the norm. We would recomended that students generally use standard written English convention in the text chat and email. They are more likely to be interacting with other non-native speakers and writers, and abbreviated forms can be confusing.

Using chat in the classroom – whether text or voice chat – can be hugely motivating to learners. We first need to remind ourselves that text chat and voice chat are two entirely different media. Text chat requires written (typed) interaction, while voice chat relies on spoken interaction. Learners are using two different sets of skills for these two means of communication.

7. Blogs, wikis and podcast

Blogs in language teaching

A teacher may encourage their learners to each set up and maintain their own individual blogs. These known as student blogs, learners can be asked to post their blogs one or twice a week, or however often the teacher judges convinent, and content can range from comments on current affairs to description of daily activities. Other learners, from the same class, from other classes or even from classes in other countries, can be encaouraged to post comments and reactions to student blog postings. Student blogs lend themselves well to teacher training and development, too. A trainee teacher, for example, can be encouraged to reflect on what they are learning, or on classes that they are teaching, by means of a revlective blog.

Wikis in language teaching

A wiki on the other hand, is like a public website, or public web page, started by one person, but which subsequent visitors can add to, delete or change as they wish. Instead of being a statistic web page or website like a blog, a wiki is more dynamic, and can have multiple authors. A wiki is like having a publicly accesible word processing document available online, which anyone can edit.

The wiki can be kept as an internal class project, and given the public nature of the internet, it is probably worh asking other classes/learners to take a look at wiki, and possibly to contribute to it. In the case of younger learners, a wiki can be viewed by parents.

Podcast in language teaching

 The closest analogy to a podcast is that of a radio or a TV show, but the difference is that you can listen or wacth a podcast on a topic that interest you whenever you want to. Typically a podcast will consist a ‘show’ which is released either sporadically or at regular intervals, for example every day or once a week.

There are two main uses of podcast in teaching. Firstly, learners can listen podcasts  made by others and, secondly, they can produce they own podcasts. It is becoming increasingly common in tertiary education, for example, for professors to record lectures as podcasts, so that student who miss a class can download the lecture podcasts for later listening on their computers or mobile devices like an MP3 player.

8. Online reference tools

A thesauruses can do wonders for writing projects. It can encourage learners to be more adventurous in their creative writing in the same time as helping them to analyse their output more critically.

A concordancer is similar to a search engine in may respects. Essentially, it is a small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns an occurrences of particular word or phares. Concordancer are often considered to be the domain of the language researcher or the kind of tool used by writers of grammar references and weighty linguistic tomes.

9. Technology-based courseware

CD-ROMs are often included free or a little extra cost with coursebooks and workbooks. These CD-ROMs are primarily designed for learners to work on alone as follow-up to a lesson, either in a school self-access centre or at home. They can include features such as allowing learners to choose their own path thorough the CD-ROM materials by making their own ‘lesson plans’ – choosing which activities to do and in what order to do them.

DVDs are ussually used as an alternative to video cassettes, which are becoming increasingly outdated. DVDs allow viewer to choose from various language options. On an EFL coursebook DVD will generally find more video, which takes a lot of disc space, than you would find on a CD-ROM.

10. Producing electronic materials

One of the easiest way of getting started in this area is to use some of the example exercise generators which can be found online. These produce a variety of exercises, from printable resources to be taken into class to exercises which can be turned into web pages and made available on the internet, both for your learners and for other teachers if you decide you want to share them. On of the most popular is the Discover School Puzzlemaker.

Puzzle makers are ideal tools for reviewing vocabulariy, and take the hard workout of preparing many different quick quizzes. In addition, you can give your students the oppurtunity to prepare quizzez them selves using these tools. Another useful tool is Smile. This tool allows you to create a free account in which to manage your own online bank of exercise with student tracking and a good variety of exercise types. Here you can choose from multiple choice, true/false, drag and drop, sentence mix, paragraph mix, cloze and multiple select.

11. E-learning: online teaching and training

e-learning refers to  learning that takes place using technology, such as internet, CD-ROMs and portable devices like mobile phones or MP3 players. There are several terms associated with e-learning, which are often used interchangeably and which can be rather confusing.

Online learning is often delivered via a learning ‘platform’ or Virtual Learning Enviroment (VLE). Also known as a Learner Management System (LMS), or a virtual classroom, a VLE is a web-based platform on which course content can be stored. The advantage of a VLE for course delivery is that everything is in one place, and most VLEs provide tracking facilities, so that the online tutor can see who has logged in when, and see what activities learners have done, or what documents and forums they have accesed.

12. Preparing for the future

In the ten years that we have been training teacher to use technology on ELT, the pace of change has been slow. However, there sings now that the pace is begining to accelerate whith the advent of more user-friendly tools and sofware, and greater opportunities for more formalised training.

The way we work technology is undergoing a swift period of change, and the emphasis now is very much on the emergence of what has become known as Web 2.0, which preceives the transition of the world wide wide from a disparate collection of websites to a fully-fledged computing platform, which deliver services and applications (software programs) to end users, wherever they may be.

One of the real growth areas over the next few years will be in the area of distributed learning and training. This is particulary relevant in contexts where the costsof a few computers and a good internet connection are far lower than the more traditional approach of transporting participants and tutors location for face-to-face training. We would also expect to see a change in the way people  learn languages, and the way they continue whith their professional development or lifelong learning as time contraints put more strain on their everyday lives.