Week 3 – Social media in ELT
- 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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Anne,
“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.”
From what I have observed, my students use mostly Facebook to socialize; I haven’t seen them on Twitter – most of them use MSN or other types of instant communication to communicate with each other. As to the second part of your reflection, I don’t think many educators have used any of those tools for pedagogical purposes; I think we are still exploring how all of those can be used in language learning. Let’s wait and see what happens…