Posts Tagged ‘e-learning’

JALTCALL 2007: Web 2.0 Tools for EFL

Friday, June 1st, 2007

Here we are at Waseda University in the middle of Tokyo. Several of us are now at our third workshop at JALTCALL 2007 looking into the world of Web 2.0 Tools for teaching and learning English. Some of us are blogging about the experience, and we’re going to link them together. The presenter is Marc Sheffner from Tezukayama University. We started with creating a Blogger account, moved on to changing the language, and customizing our templates for that cool look!

We then moved to Google Reader to sign up the blogs that we wrote. We were asked to get the feeds from our neighbors and add them as well. I now have a nice list of feeds to go nuts with. Students can then add each other’s RSS feeds to keep track of what everyone is writing. Bloglines is another reader that was mentioned.

We then moved on to another Web 2.0 tool: del.icio.us. This is the place to keep your bookmarks. At first it may seem like a lot of trouble, but if you use different browsers or move between different computers, you can access these bookmarks anytime anywhere (as long as the Internet is up where you are). Another bonus: tagging. You may have created many different folders to keep your bookmarks, but the sites you want to bookmark may fall under several categories. Tagging your bookmarks allows you to have multiple categories for your bookmarks. You can also share selected bookmarks with selected friends, colleagues, and students.

Thanks for the interesting presentation, Marc. I hope we weren’t too noisy over on the side. :-D

Call for Submissions at the Journal of Instruction Delivery Systems

Saturday, November 19th, 2005

The Journal of Instruction Delivery Systems is seeking high-quality papers on teaching and learning through online modalities. Here are the guidelines to give you an idea of what is expected. An online version is available here. If you have questions, you can contact the editor or me through the usual channels.

moodle 1.5

Wednesday, June 15th, 2005

Although there is no official announcement on the http://moodle.org homepage (it’s still linked as a beta version), the download page shows moodle 1.5 has reached stable status. I uploaded it last week, and I really like its feel. 1.5 has added a message feature which allows users to send an instant message to other members of courses. The message feature could be used in a number of ways. One is to alert learners who have not fulfilled a particular task that something needs to be done. For language teaching, it can also provide an opportunity for more spontaneous communication. Another feature is a more robust quiz module. The latest quiz module includes an adaptive function to allow users to try a missed question again or move to an easier question on the same item. Quiz-makers can choose a percentage for a penalty or allow learners to earn the same credit. I have not used the adaptive portion yet, but plans are in the works. Film at eleven…

On the downside, the wonderful Journal module is being phased out. For those of you who are not familiar with journals, they allow learners to respond in writing to a particular topic. Teachers can then evaluate all the learners as well as provide feedback, all from one page. Journals have been replaced by the Assignments module. Now teachers have to click on each student’s work and provide the feedback/evaluation on individual pages (in addition to the extra time for the loading of each page). Fortunately, Journals can be reactivated in the Modules page of the Administration area. This reactivation has saved me time and clicks in the past week.

As I learn more about the new version, I’ll try to bring my comments up to date.

JALTCALL 2005

Thursday, June 9th, 2005

Well another year, another JALTCALL conference, this time at Ritsumeikan University in Kusatsu, Shiga, Japan. I thought it was one of the better of the JALTCALLs, although the attendance numbers seemed to be smaller than in the past. Besides the opening and closing ceremonies, there were five types of presentations: keynotes/plenaries, papers, workshops, posters, and “show & tell.” As usual, there were a wide variety of presentations to see. The biggest problem, in my opinion, was the fact that at any one time there may have been as many as 15 presentations to choose from!

A simple breakdown of those I saw (more information coming as time permits):
Saturday
—The keynote on using video, voice, and text for for (a)synchronous communication…
—A networked project between Thai and Japanese learners of English, using a social constructivist model…
—Creating your own audio files for disseminating to learners (or anyone for that matter)…
—A workshop on putting your web page design and construction into your own hands…
—A new computer game targeted at 15-18 years olds for Japanese study…
—The latest in creating mobile CALL (think cell phones and/or PDAs)…
Sunday
—The plenary on keeping track of students’ learning in self-study mode…
—A talk on helping to make learners’ presentations more communicative…
—The latest multimedia solution from the folks at Longman’s…
—A workshop and paper on wikis…
—And, of course, mine on developing online learning communities…

Teaching Online Lessons

Thursday, February 17th, 2005

I’m in my final semester of coursework at Nova Southeastern University. One of the courses is called Instruction Delivery Systems. It’s an exciting course, and I’m glad that I waited until the end of my coursework to take it. I think I’m going to get its full value this way. Anyway, each of the 20 students in the course needs to teach a three-week mini-course to 3-6 students. We have to prepare our content and our objectives and teach everything on WebCT (a very user-unfriendly environment). I am teaching in the first session, and there are five students in the course. I’m teaching a mini-course on writing academic summaries which I thought could be useful for doctoral students. So far things are going well, and the students are providing excellent feedback and making great suggestions. Problems I’ve encountered are the students did not understand an assignment I gave because I did not explain it fully. This is one huge difference between a completely online course and a hybrid course (one that combines class time with online time). With a hybrid course, I have the advantage of being able to explain and demonstrate what I’m asking students to do. I’ll write more on the topic when I get there…