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nearly a third of American college courses are now taught online.

anguage instructors need to be convinced that online education presents a responsible learning environment for students,

lexibility. S

Zoom performs incredibly well in low bandwidth environments.

A great selection of annotation tools, so you can share your screen, and then write and draw on the screen like a real whiteboard.

Easy process to record classes.

Five ways you can start to engage with your pupils on social media

reate a Facebook page

Create a Twitter account. S

Some of the most productive parts of the class were the weekly take-home assignments that asked the students to post comments on their social networking sites while using connected viewing technology

While the students learned a lot from the class assignments, they were initially anxious about letting an instructor into their social network. I felt it was necessary to preserve the anonymity of the students for the study so I wanted to keep their comments about the connected viewing private.

Unfortunately, the only way to ensure this anonymity was to create a “secret” Facebook group. “Secret” Facebook groups are one of three categories of groups that allow members of the social network to collaborate on a project. Though this setting allows all posts and members to remain confidential it also required me, as the creator of the “secret” Facebook group, to “friend” all of my students so that I could then add them to the group.

  38   SOCiaL-NetwOrKiNg SiteS 2001). This difference in ‘lifestyle’ gives educators reason to believe we shouldincorporate SNS usage into our class-related activities, to capture these students’imaginations and t their thought patterns and socializing habits (Godwin-Jones,2008; Winke & Goertler, 2008).However, although technology is an integral part of neomillennial students’lives, they often do not know how to use technology in ways that would benet them in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) (Dieu & Stevens, 2007;Kolaitis, Mahoney, Pomann, & Hubbard, 2006; Winke & Goertler, 2008). Suc - cessful CALL activities, then, often require a substantial training period at theoutset (Jones & Bissoonauth-Bedford, 2008; Kolaitis et al., 2006), and studentsmay be less enthusiastic about a class’s language and culture projects if the formof computer-mediated communication ( CMC) employed is not the type they areaccustomed to using (McBride & Wildner-Bassett, 2008; Thorne, 2003). A usefulresponse may be to craft CALL activities more to the practices that our studentsare familiar with (Winke & Goertler, 2008). SNSs are an obvious possibility to consider, given their tremendous popularity.If we can get our F

we can get our FL students to interact socially on SNSs, then they may beengaged in more authentic social and communicative behavior than typically hap-pens in classrooms, because “instead of merely simulating other modes of interac-tion, technology mediated communication is, in and of itself, the real thing

  40   SOCiaL-NetwOrKiNg SiteS and sites like it, knowing, socially and technically, how to re-use media in thisparticular way has become foundational for communication and creative expres- sion over the Web” (Perkel, 2008, p. 218). We can call this activity of writing/remixing the self through the manipulationof text and media ‘ self-authorship.’ Within the framework of CALL, this term refers to students authoring their own materials which can then serve as the basisfor learning and lessons. Using student-created materials as the center of a lesson ts with a student-centered pedagogy (Dieu, Campbell, & Ammann, 2006). Self-authorship activities can increase interest and time on task, and they put students in a more active role in their own learning process (Kramsch, A’Ness, & Lam,2000; Nikolova, 2002).Students must take an active role in their learning. They cannot simply be handed knowledge from an expert because understanding is the result of a cre- ative process one must work through over time with other people (Bereiter, 2002). Learning

I made sure that they understood why I felt using a translator for work that the students were supposed to do is plagiarism. This has to be the first step.

On one of the very first days, I take the lyrics of a popular song that most students would know and paste it into a translator.

 Still, the students liked it and I was able to get a good sense of where student mastery of the material was and I gleaned which students need to focus where in terms of pronunciation and basic grammar.  I will do this again.

It is good for me to see that even when there is no grade riding on it, students still watch one another’s videos: in other words, they want to watch each other.  I can’t speculate as to what drives that, but as an instructor, I am pleased simply that they do it.