Group items tagged

The debate about teaching languages online continues - with Rosetta Stone at the center of this article.  With a teacher, without a teacher, with RS or without, the key is still how it is taught and that can differ widely from class to class!

I totally agree with you. I think that RS is a good tool to use in place of a textbook, but it doesn't change the fact that you need more than a textbook to learn something with great quality. Conversation is key and having someone there to converse with is what helps and increases the learning. If you don't use it, you loose it fast.

From the website:  (and there is a companion website, see below) In spite of the proliferation of online learning in higher education, creating online courses can still evoke a good deal of frustration, negativity, and wariness in those who need to create them. Essentials of Online Course Design takes a fresh, thoughtfully designed, step-by-step approach to online course development. At its core is a set of standards that are based on best practices in the field of online learning and teaching. Pedagogical, organizational and visual design principles are presented and modeled throughout the book and users will quickly learn from the guide's hands-on approach. The course design process begins with the elements of a classroom syllabus which, after a series of guided steps, easily evolve into an online course outline. The guide's key features include: a practical approach informed by theory clean interior design that offers straightforward guidance from page one clear and jargon-free language examples, screen shots, and illustrations to clarify and support the text a Companion Website with examples, adaptable templates, interactive learning features, and online resources a checklist of online course design standards that readers can use to self-evaluate. Essentials of Online Course Design serves as a best-practice model for designing online courses. After reading this book, readers will find that preparing for online teaching is, contrary to popular belief, a satisfying and engaging experience. The core issue is simply good design: pedagogical, organizational, and visual. Companion website:  http://www.marjorievai.com/WEBSITE-CONTENTS.html

Abstract: This paper sets the stage for the articles selected for the special issue "Language learning and social media: (r)evolution?". Starting with some definitions of mainstream terms like "social media", "web 2.0", "social web", "social networking sites (SNS)" and "web 2.0 language learning communities". The purpose is not to "reinvent the wheel" by suggesting new definitions, but to synthesize definitions of mainstream terms and juxtapose them to similar concepts from CALL literature. We then critically discuss three key features of web 2.0 technologies (user participation, openness and network effects). Despite the fact that these three features were present to some extent in technologies prior to social media, we examine whether they take on a radically different meaning in the social media era. Research insights are discussed in the last section of the paper.

Little is known about the population of educators who teach online, especially with relationship to preparation from their teacher education programs. This article discusses the results of a national survey of K-12 online teachers from across the nation to ascertain how prepared they felt they were with regard to three key areas: technology, pedagogy, and content, including combinations of these domains, as described by the technological pedagogical content knowledge framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Overall, K-12 online teachers indicated that they felt the most prepared in the areas of pedagogy, content, and pedagogical content. They felt least prepared in the areas of technology, including technological pedagogical knowledge, technological content knowledge, and technological pedagogical content knowledge. Implications for the field of teacher education are discussed, including the need to more fully integrate technology within the coursework and field experiences of teacher candidates, and the need to create courses, or specific modules within existing courses, to address topics of importance to virtual teaching.

Abstract: "In academic settings where digital badges are taking over conventional task formats, educators are faced with the challenge of how to deliver and assess content and skills within badges. Imposing a mastery learning approach, where feedback is key, to a digital badge system may be a potential solution to using digital badges within higher education. As a way to support student learning, Guskey, Journal of Advanced Academics, 19(1), 8-31 (2007) emphasizes the importance of not only frequent feedback but specific feedback. In order to examine how students are using feedback to inform their coursework within a digital badge context, an online survey was designed consisting of open-ended questions about the nature and value of instructional feedback within a digital badge system. Results from the questionnaire indicated three major thematic groups illustrating feedback from the students' perspective: Importance and Nature of Feedback, Authority over Knowledge and Learning, and Learning for Mastery."

I am fascinated by this notion of "lurking" to describe students/ people on-line who do not respond immediately but take time to read and reflect. Interesting research questions whether this impacts their learning positively and how to assess their learning. Maybe someone can find a better name, too?

Although this article is about British language education and it's two years old, my interest was piqued when I read it: ""Languages cannot be taught, they can only be learnt. The best way is to tell students right away that they are responsible for their own learning process, and the teacher is just a guide who has to motivate them."" Made me think about relevancy and how Tech is only one part of that.

Really interesting. I wonder if we changed the setting to the U.S. if the same difficulties would apply. I never really thought about grammar being discarded simply because students don't know it well enough. While I've found that most students we teach don't understand their mother tongue, I still think that the shift to task-based work had as much to do with the lack of real communication skills. Just teaching them grammar and relying on them to go abroad to learn to speak wasn't doing it. That being said, I think the mixture of methods is best, and by mixture I mean the integration of many methods into accomplishing a task. And I agree that the meta-learning is key.

I remember getting a comment from a student once, many years ago, that she had learned more about English grammar in my Spanish class than anywhere else... (sigh)

Wow!! 150+ iPod/iPhone apps charted by price, grade level and subject. There are only a couple that mention language learning (Spanish), but I think a number of them could be adapted.

The top listed sites in a number of categories for these awards! They're not language-specific, but you can find a lot of good educational uses of blogs, tweets, wikis, podcasts, webinars, and other categories.

For those that are interested in knowing a step-by-step process in setting up a facebook account for your school district. Article talks about all of the different things that one must think about when setting up a site.

great article for literature review and explanation of acronyms and historical background

This is an annotation of a reading activity/ practice, from a guest blogger, Mónica Romero, to Grant Boulanger's Exploring the convergence of Language Acquisition and Arts. Like his CI suggestions and Freebies

Ooh, the internet tells me it's Free Voluntary Reading. This is an interesting article. I'm not sure it would be directly applicable to any of the classes I teach right now, but it's good food for thought.

Examples on how to use Whatsapp in the language classroom

The use of Whatsapp in the language classroom to promote conversation in the target language

This one worked! and I can see your highlights! =)

I offer a course in my school called Computer Mediated Language Learning. But this article gives a new perspective of what computer assisted can be.

Nice data to back up our use of all of these great online resources-- Thanks for sharing!

Active participation in discussions is a key to success. If you use a flipped classroom, providing useful vocabulary and sentence structures they might want to use to talk about a particular topic also helps the students participate more in discussions.

#carlatech16, group1 #Facebook #texting

Yes, I agree, we can't just immediately dismiss social media in the classroom because of safety issues. We have to learn ways to work with them.