Final week – Social media in ELT

25Feb08

Thanks to the organisers and other participants for a great course. I agreed with so much of what that Gabriela said in her post that I won’t repeat it here. Let the collaboration continue and looking forward to meeting up with many of the same people next year and, hopefully, on other occasions before.

Just one thing which I stupidly left out of the end-of-course survey on ideas for EVO next year – I’d really be interested in focussing on practical ideas for collaborative class projects.


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Week 5 – Social media in ELT

16Feb08

The best thing that’s happened to me this week has been being pointed in the direction of John Seely Brown. Read his Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age with great enjoyment and was amazed too see that it’s based on a presentation he made in 1999. He really had his finger on the button to read and analyse the significance of the varied forms of learning that were emerging around him. After looking for more stuff written/produced by him, found this video of a presentation he made in 2007. Not only inspiring stuff but full of concrete examples of ways of learning that go far beyond the classroom walls.


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Week 4 – Social media in ELT

09Feb08

Done a lot of browsing and reading but not sure where it’s got me. Still not very motivated to set up a wiki for my students and Graham Wengner’s great post on the downside of collaborative projects didn’t help. However, Gabriela’s post on the forum made me move my butt, so I’ve set up a wiki to set the ball rolling: http://smielt.pbwiki.com. I hope someone picks it up and helps add some content! If you’re asked for an invite key, it’s collaborative.

On the positive side was glad to have been directed via Sarah Braxton’s blog to the Beyond School blog where there’s a great posting discussing the Did you know? video. I’ve used this quite a lot as a debating point with my classes on whether education is keeping pace with technology. So, it was salutary to read Clay Burrel’s words and watch the video Did you ever wonder? which looks at things from a very different perspective and makes the key task for educators that of creating awareness of the ways we are misusing our planet.


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Week 3 – Social media in ELT

02Feb08
  • What are the new literacy skills that your students can acquire by using the tools (flickr, 43trio, del.icio.us, twitter) introduced in this week?
  • What are the collaborative potential of these tools for language learning? How would you use these tools to set up collaborative projects between classes from different schools or countries?
  • The tools introduced in this week emphasize the concept of online social networking. How essential is that for language learning? What are the benefits of that? What are the challenges?

The lesson I draw from this week is that I’m a one-out-of-4 social networker. I don’t like the 43trio, am dubious about twitter – not sure I have time for it, and use flickr only as a source for photos using the search resource FlickrStorm
(which is in fact great – click on advanced and select Creative Commons to make sure that you can use the photos you select). The only one I use and have recommended to others is del.icio.us.

My feeling is (and one that I’ve heard voiced during this course in a Guardian article, sorry I can’t remember the author or title) is that it’s up to my students to use the social networking resources they feel happy with. If they get into twittering or Facebook, fine but I don’t think it’s my role to push them into it. Having said that, I’d be really interested to hear anybody’s positive experience in using them to build up relations between students in different countries or schools.


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Week 2 – Social media in ELT

25Jan08

Here are this week’s discussion points:

  • What are the benefits/constraints that these open environments may bring in your context?
  • What are the pedagogical implications of social media for ELT?
  • Are you promoting open participatory skills in ELT? How?
  • Can these social media help you? How?

I’ve no doubt about the value of using blogs with my students. I teach English at the British Council in Bilbao, Spain and as a matter of course now set up blogs with all my classes (from teenagers and above) and also use them for teacher training. Call me a born again blogger! I’ve just watched a video that Berta has on her blog which sums up well the positive response I’ve seen them get.

However, I’m not so sure about using the whole range of social networking systems that we’ve been discussing. I’m quite shy and only feel comfortable in a group once I’ve established some point of contact, so I don’t tend to use them personally. And when I’m working with young learners, I’m in loco parentis and can’t assume that my students’ parents have the same idea as me about developing their responsible use of the Internet. I identify with Sarah and what she says in her post on these 2 points, and welcome the discussion that Illya has opened up on the issue.

So in the end the web resources I use most with my students are more for encouraging their creative potential than for networking, although, of course, they do lead to interaction between them. Here are my favourites:

  • voicethread which I really like because students can choose photos about subjects that interest them and then talk about them. We then listen to what they say together which allows me to help them both with language and pronunciation (see how I’ve used it here)
  • voki which is great fun. Students create their own animated character and then put a voice to it – which is great for breaking down inhibitions, allowing them to exaggerate and to capture the natural rhythms and tones of speech (see how I’ve used it here)
  • animoto where students can easily make slick videos and then interview each other (see how I’ve used it here)

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