ePals

Aimed at giving students the opportunity to cooperate on projects with students from different cultures, ePals allows teachers to connect their classes online. This seems like a great way to get your students to interact with and become more aware or even interested in people from other cultures. The students aren’t the only ones who benefit. This looks like a fun way to expand our network of education professionals and perhaps experience some different perspectives from educators around the world.

I like the experiences they have listed, which are basically activity ideas that students can complete with their ePals from classes in other countries. One I liked in particular was the cultural exchange Taste of Culture experience, which asks students to share recipes from their culture with their ePal partners, and then go home and try to cook one of the recipes they learned about.

I would definitely consider using this kind of tool in my classroom. Especially in foreign language classes, students get really excited about foreign cultures and even more so when they can apply what they're learning to something productive and real. This kind of cultural exchange and cooperation gives students the opportunity to put their language skills and culture knowledge to use, and to learn more from natives of that culture. Even something as simple as a recipe exchange would be great for fostering positive experiences and a feeling of fellowship between students from distant cultures.

The Educator's PLN

I have recently joined The Educator’s PLN, a network for educators hosted on the customizable social networking platform Ning. As a new member exploring what the site has to offer, I am finding a lot of great content and potential here.

When I logged in and landed on the home page, I was immediately drawn to the Edchat page, where I found information for weekly Twitter chats about education. Not only that, but there are archives of transcripts from previous discussions. Extensive. For more discussion, there are forums. It seems like a good place to find interesting posts on a variety of topics. For more specific discussions, there are groups, which feature their own forums and comment section. Unfortunately, I am currently having a little difficulty finding currently active groups relative to my educational interests. There’s also a number of blogs users are posting directly on The Educator’s PLN, the advantages of which we’ve discussed a little bit before.

The section of the site I found most immediately attractive as a new member was the videos section.

It’s a great collection of videos submitted by users about anything related to education. I like to dig through the vastness of YouTube and such for useful material but it’s always difficult and time-consuming to find the good stuff. Using a social network as a way of curating videos we find useful as individuals is a great way to kind of filter out the less useful results when looking through content-hosting sites directly.

While the daily activity is not as abundant as some other groups found on more mainstream platforms, a social networking site dedicated entirely to educators has many perks, including less distracting unrelated content. I like the ability to connect and share accounts for other social networks in user profiles, offering an opportunity to expand our networks of knowledgeable professionals exponentially.

Connectivism

In Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, George Siemens explains the need to adopt more contemporary understandings of knowledge and learning that fit our current technology and educational habits. Prior learning theories, such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism, do not really address the practice of acquiring and sharing information through networks. Siemens describes connectivism as “the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.” And goes on to identify learning as “a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual” (Siemens, 2005).

Paul Chan, Score for 7th Light, 2007

Siemens’s depiction of today’s learner is much like a jazz musician. Though a more traditional player could be trained to read and recite music written on the score, many players without composition backgrounds find it difficult to improvise. In jazz, however, players tend to focus on playing by ear – that is, listening to the relationships between notes and mentally connecting those sounds to physical positions on their instruments. Jazz musicians often play around a barebones musical structure that offers players minimal information about the skeleton of the song. The individual notes and how they are voiced are not specified, left to the players to make those decisions on the fly. In traditional educational settings, learners may have similarly been expected to read and recite scripted knowledge. Today’s learner, like the jazz musician, seems better served by becoming familiar enough with their tools and skills to improvise by creating a solution when prompted by a particular situation. In his presentation What is Connectivism, Siemens notes, “through technology, we’ve had the ability to increase our participation in the creation and sharing of content” (Siemens, 2008). Like a musician listening, calling and responding to the other band members, the learner also uses this call-and-response trade of creative information with other nodes to acquire and share knowledge through their networks.

Diigo & Pinterest

Social bookmarking websites can be convenient places for educators to organize, explore and share web tools, activities, lesson plans, ideas and inspiration. Diigo and Pinterest are both platforms that offer the essential elements one would expect from a modern social bookmarking environment. That is, both allow the user to follow other users or specific tags and topics, message other users, and connect a variety of other social media accounts. While trying out Diigo and Pinterest, I’ve come across many situations where the functionality of the two sites overlap almost entirely, but there are some parts of the user experience and depth of tools that differed quite a bit for me.

Using Diigo has been pretty straightforward. The interface is clean and it is easy to navigate. Features of particular interest include tools that allow for in-depth descriptions, annotations, and outlines. It is also easy to edit many tags at once with the bulk editor, and to find related tags and groups. Diigo offers special Education Accounts with some features teachers may find useful for their classes, too.

Of course I have only been using it for a few days, so this may be a result of my own inexperience with the platform, but meaningful content has been harder to find on Pinterest. It feels like I have to click through a lot of seemingly unnecessary images and shallow infographics to get to any useful information. That said, I was able to find some great stuff through Pinterest. It just took me longer.

I am going to continue exploring both Diigo and Pinterest. I’ve already found some great sites through Diigo and, though the experience has been a bit clunky for me, I have found some useful ideas on Pinterest, as well.

Education for the Future

After watching the videos, the two that stuck for me were The Future Starts Now – 2012 edition and Future Learning | Mini Documentary | Good.

In The Future Starts Now – 2012 edition, information and communication technology (ICT) is looked at as an educational tool. Though schools may have access to this technology, it is rarely implemented in ways that truly benefit students. The video proposes that better use of this technology could connect students on a level more familiar to them with their education, and ideally increase graduation rates. The video focuses on Norway moving to become a “knowledge based society” (that is, build an economy based on citizen’s knowledge, as opposed to oil and resource trade), but really applies to any country at the moment. The video proposes “computers can teach us to learn things in different ways.” With elements of multimedia, networked communication, and access to so much information, I feel it is fair to say computers can teach us to learn things in different ways. Another good point is made in that connecting to students with newer technology is absolutely vital. Students are using all kinds of newer technology outside the class, and having teachers integrate it more meaningfully into education seems to engage students on a level they’re comfortable with.

Future Learning | Mini Documentary | Good is another video that addresses student interaction with technology. Early in the video, a big problem we deal with all the time in education is brought up – lack of student motivation. The video claims the current model of education stifles motivation. It claims there’s too much repetition and it’s all a bit irrelevant to the students’ real lives. I think that’s something a lot of us may agree with, but it’s still unclear how to address that exactly. The most meaningful moment in this video, for me, was challenging the goals of education. Are reading, writing, and arithmetic really antiquated goals for education? It sounds a bit forward, but I tend to agree with the idea that they could be at some point in the near future. Another part that resonated with me was the critique that, though schools may be implementing cutting edge technology, the content taught with this new technology is often fundamentally dated. If the content were truly interesting, the students would be engaged by their own curiosity. Content provided outside the context in which students could use it leaves it disconnected from their reality, and the things they study in class seem irrelevant when they leave school. 

The use of technology to build an environment in which students are active participants and can connect their education experience to making real-life accomplishments is a natural and efficient way to keep students interested and motivated.

Blogs for Language Classes

Blogging can be a fun way for students to put their language skills to use outside the classroom. Students can express their own thoughts and opinions on a variety of subjects without feeling the same immediate anxiety many language learners deal with when speaking aloud to the class. It gives students with poorer fluency an opportunity to take some time, gather their thoughts, and edit their contributions to their liking before clicking submit.

Another great advantage to having students keep a blog is that the content options are limitless. There are so many different kinds of blogs out there that it may be difficult to choose a topic to write about. Students could write weekly journal entries, but I’ve always found it difficult to keep students’ journals from becoming wearily repetitive. It may be more beneficial to have the teacher choose a new subject for each entry, posting an example to model useful structures and vocabulary on a blog of their own. Students could introduce their favorite artist or athlete, analyze a movie trailer, or review an album or game (ESL.C.9-12.3.1.1). It seems a good topic for students to blog about should not only be interesting for the student writing the entry, but should also invite conversation from other students in the comments section (ESL.C.9-12.4.1.1).

Students aren’t the only ones who could be using blogs for class. Many teachers do use blogs to share lesson plans, worksheets, and classroom strategies with other teachers, but teachers of younger learners could also be using blogs to keep parents in the loop by sharing news about the class and suggesting exercises or videos for staying sharp at home.