Group items tagged

Anderson is the author of a book about using social networking

Lara Anderson

Hangouts on Air (also known as HOAs) allows the entire world to watch your Hangout via a live broadcast to your Google+ stream using the power of YouTube. Hangouts on Air are recorded and saved to your YouTube channel automatically.

Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association, decries the movement towards a user-controlled Internet as “a world in which everyone is an expert in a world devoid of expertise”

technical usability

pedagogical usability

This article addresses the extent to which technology‐mediated social interactions dominate our daily lives, how we can leverage those interactions to the benefit of our learners, and how we can engage them in learning experiences in ways that will encourage them to practice language extensively.

Communicate the public nature of Twitter to parents. Consider an opt-out alternative for students or parents who are uncomfortable with participating in the classroom chat.

assist students in moving back and forth between their own words and technical or course-specific terms. And help highlight particular content with the use of sentence starters.

Do you feel the chat’s objective was reached? What was the most useful part of the chat? How might we improve the chat?

October 31, 2011

trying to have a conversation with someone you have never met, over a low quality video connection, in a language you don’t speak very well, is quite challenging socially as well as linguistically.

they use their comfort and skills with social media to connect students with the content area on a deeper level.

help students keep tabs on their upcoming assignments and assessments

I use Twitter as a way to provide practice during the days leading to macro-assessments, by providing sample test items, as well as study tips.

An unlimited number of users can contribute to a padlet at the same time, making collaborative work very easy.

  No account necessary to collaborate

adding example sentences to a shared class padlet

Gather responses globally — Create a Padlet with a question and post it on Twitter, a blog or other social media. (A hashtag like #comments4kids could help more people see it and respond.) See where in the world responses come from!

social media can also be used to enhance teaching and learning and it includes varied online technology tools that allow people to communicate easily via the internet to share information and resources.

demonstrations focused on contrasting cases help students achieve expert-like differentiation

Start small. Find one movie, song, or news source and incorporate it into your class. Expand once you are comfortable. Provide a clear link between what you want your students to learn and the media. Care must be taken provide the proper learning context. It takes time to integrate media effectively into a course. This is not edutainment, it is the conscious use of media to enable students to learn more. Use the subtitles feature for visual media. This is especially useful in focusing student attention on the words being said. Be prepared. Technology does not work 100% of the time so have a back up plan. If the media equipment does not work, go to plan B and continue on with your class without missing a beat. Evaluate student understanding. Students respond to incentives. If you require them to write a reaction paper, take a quiz, or place questions on your exams that relate to the media content they will pay more attention and learn more in the process. Stay legal. View the copyright information on the cautions page.

Studies

have concluded that collaborative and cooperative learning methods improve students' time on tasks and motivation to learn. Language teachers are finding that group activities and conversational pairing have distinct advantages over individualised tasks. Students enjoy interacting with each other, particularly in speaking activities, and opportunities to do so are relished. The prospect of school exchanges, making new social links abroad, and exploring new cultures is another powerful motivator. The pairing of language students with counterparts abroad is the next logical step. Working effectively online with native speakers is a challenging and alluring proposition.

The evidence to show individual progression achieved directly from paired or group interactions is hard to quantify. Monitoring, recording, and properly assessing individuals' performances in collaborative tasks is more difficult to achieve than the correction and grading of individual tests.