Last CALL.. Hah! Get it?

So.... This is it. The final blog entry for the CALL section in LT 548 and the one thing I that this course hammered home for me is this... I am human and I make mistakes. Some of my mistakes happen to be MUCH more egregious than others. In particular, I am deeply disappointed in having let down the members of my group by failing to show up for the group presentation. In no way can I excuse this and I am deeply regretful.

While my responsibilities to my classmates is of paramount importance, my failure to attend the course has also let me something of a rather large hole to fill for this final blog with nothing to fill it up. It is impossible for me to really reflect on what other groups presented in the class, simply because I was not there. I have decided to gather what information I can, checking out the websites developed by my classmates and gleaning information from some of the other open blogs on blackboard.

Reflections on the presentations

Ai, Kate and Sura's presentation regarding computer assisted reading is really fascinating and, quite surprisingly, may serve as a resource for my terminal project with its focus on aspects related to MALL as a tool for reading development among elementary school students. However, what I found most interesting was the fact that scores didn't appear to be impacted by the use of CAREER technology, but student behaviors were. I have to admit, though. I'm also intrigued by their idea of using mind-mapping programs as a method to enhance reading comprehension. Previously, I had only considered using mind-maps as a method of organizing ideas for writing, but now I see it working for a variety of purposes. This is something I can see using in my classroom regularly to help with reading, writing and listening skills.

Mafouda, Jaiyi and Ilsa's page regarding listening skills and CALL was very impressive and brought up several important issues for me. While the article which Mafourda covered suggests that the use of digital stories makes listening more interesting and interactive, I am really not convinced how that it is somehow more interactive than listening to a story read by a teacher, especially at early levels. Where I can see some benefits would be in learner access to pronunciation. Perhaps the most interesting is Jaiyi's take on CALL's ability to control the rate of speech and the impact that has on comprehension. I know in my own learning, the ability to control the speech rate of an authentic text (text in the broad sense), was invaluable. With that said, I am not sure about the use of subtitles as a method for improving listening comprehension. In my estimation, it would seem that students would tend to ignore the listening part and it could become a reading exercise instead. Where subtitles may help students is in their ability to graphically distinguish phonological features.

With Marc, Sojung and Lucy's presentation regarding CMC and synchronous communication, the benefits are much more clear. by using CMC in a variety of ways, students can focus on meaning and form. I was especially impressed by Lucy's section in which she discussed how synchronous communication techniques can be used to focus on form by shifting register from informal to more formal communication. I also enjoyed Marc's take on CMC for meaning negotiation by his illustration of a variety of tasks which can be developed for synchronous communication, especially direction giving and receiving. Where I see synchronous communication as being most beneficial and most useful is in its ability to serve as a record of progress in linguistic development, showing learners where they started and where they ended up.

Puywa and Marnie's presentation on using CALL to assist in self-regulated teaching was highly interesting and the challenges faced by learners in an environment without the communicative assistance of other learners makes any language learning very difficult. However, by using CALL one can see how it can effectively teach less common languages. Puywa's videos illustrate how CALL can be used for integrated skills teacing. One more thing. I love how they used Google sites and Google docs to build their presentation. It was incredibly seamless and is definitely something I want to try out in the future with one of my own classes.

Final Reflections

I'm going to use the analogy of a carpenter to illustrate my point. Before January, if I wanted to build something, I was like a carpenter with a hammer and a saw. I could get the job done but it was going to take me a long time. Now, I have a toolbox full of power tools, like a power saw and a nail gun, which makes it easier to build something and whatever it is I'm building will be much stronger than anything built previously. I have to say, between Freemind, Endnote and all of the Microsoft Word instruction, my materials are going to shine compared to what they were like before. This has even extended into other areas. Like I said above, the integration of all the available Google tools allows for some serious collaboration between teacher and students and among students themselves. I'm also excited to build more materials with Xtranormal, ANVILL, Jing and Screencast-o-matic. There is just so much available.

So, what do I think of technology in the classroom? In my own presentation, I discussed how CALL can be built into an integrated hybrid course which allows for extended skills practice. For me, this is going to be key for me as a language teacher in the future. Adding an online component, when possible, provides students with a very rich, much deeper learning experience than they would otherwise have.  All of the presentations given by the groups in class reflect this point very well. Technology is another tool and, in the hands of creative teachers, can build a course which provides students with a level of richness previously unattainable.

In all, this was a wonderful course and a great learning experience for me. While helpful, in future iterations of this course, it would probably be helpful to combine many of the bibliography exercises into one unit. Correcting a bibliography and then presenting it again with the Endnote presentation may have been a little much. If those were combined into one unit, that would give us an hour of instruction for something else.

Endnote and lextutor

I have to say that Endnoteweb is really where it's at.  In fact, I've spent the last several days finding sources for my terminal project, which I suspect Endnoteweb, unlike Zotero, will actually make it easy to find and organize articles. So far, I've got about 25 articles in the queue. Perhaps the nicest part of the program was its ability to put the citations into an almost complete APA format. It really just required some minor tweaking. Here's a peek.

The one thing I missed was the capitalization of proper names. There is one downside for me, though. While I know that Endnoteweb it is free for me to use right now because I am a student at UO, paying for the service doesn't sound nearly so enticing.

As far as the second part of the class goes, lextutor.ca is quite possibly the ugliest, most unfriendly website I've seen in quite some time. However, it has some tools which are quite useful. The first one I'd like to address is vocabprofile. In developing one of my lessons for Trish's class, I decided to use this article as material for a level 4 RWG class. My question is whether or not the article was appropriate for the students' level.

So Nation's theory of vocabulary learning says that students should know at least 80 percent of the words in the article in order to be able to learn new vocabulary from context. In checking the text of this article, I was surprised to find many of the words in this article were "off-list words". In fact, 19 percent were off list, which means they are not on AWL, first 1000 list or first 2000 words list. This says to me I should have edited the article somewhat in order to ensure students have a better chance at comprehension.

I then put the same article through the familiarizer as well to see the word families lists and I could see using this as a tool for vocabulary expansion for students.

Finally, I really didn't get much of a chance to play with the concordancer on lextutor but I've seen it in action before. I have no doubt at all that this function will be tremendously useful for me as a teacher in the future.

Mind maps and OWL's

Here's the text of my first xtranormal movie.

So I've decided it's time to have some fun on this blog. I've recently decided it would be fun to make a movie instead of just typing up something. So twenty five dollars and an xtranormal account later, this is my first experiment in making a truly anonymous video blog.

Now... let's talk about mind maps. Oh, mind maps. What a useful tool for organizing old ideas and coming up with new ones. As you can see in one of the posts below this, I've used Freemind to play with organizing some of the ideas for my terminal project that have just been swimming around my head. If you look at it, you can kind of get a sense for what I'm thinking about in terms of MALL history, case studies and a basic outline for a needs analysis. Maybe the most useful part of Freemind, for me anyway, was its ability to track research abstracts. This lets me see how one bit of information is connected to another bit of information. My only complaint with this software is the fact that you can't link it to bibliography software like Zotero or Endnote. That really would have made it a complete package.

All right. Now let's talk about the second part of last week's class. I'll tell you, I try to spend as little time mired on the Purdue OWL website as I possibly can, mainly because I'm not the biggest fan in the world of A P A formatting. That being said, the OWL site is a great resource for all things citation related. It is laid out very well and I really has no trouble finding my way around the site. The in class exercise even made it a little tricky, sort of like a sadistic version of a treasure hunt. It was mean, but it was also a very useful activity. And to tell the truth, I'm really looking forward this week's lesson on using Endnote. I've used it once before as part of a demo in Trish Pashby's 608 class last term, but there's a ton I still need to learn.

So. That's it for right now. I think I'll post the text of this entry somewhere on the blog too. Just to be safe, you know? By the way, I'm probably going to try to build part of my presentation for next week using xtranormal. I think that it has some real potential in an educational setting, especially since I plan on using ANVILL as my platform. We'll see how this flies.

Bibliography Exercise

Hmmm.... many brain cells were used putting these citations into proper APA format.

Mind Mapping using FreeMind

Here's a quick sketch of my terminal project proposal. Needless to say, it is not fleshed out at all. I wanted to include the whole thing with links and everything, but I haven't been able to figure out how to make it work. So... here's a jpeg of it.

Moving into new and exciting realms

Topic One.

So when push comes to shove...  I have to admit, I was a little worried about how things were going to go at the beginning of class since we were all trying to figure out how to divvy up the time which we had allotted for our presentations. Thankfully, we have Mahfoudha. She really got the ball rolling for all of us with the time breakdown she created. Once it became apparent that there would be just ten short minutes for everyone to present, it really got everyone thinking about how to creatively present their materials. While I may have decried the overuse of websites before, I'm not thinking seriously about building one, possibly a wiki with embedded video. Another thought would be to build a mini course in ANVILL... hmmmmm, I'm going to have to consider that one a little more. Just to add one more iron into the presentation fire, today I was introduced to what may be one of the coolest presentation platforms I've ever run across. It is called prezi. It allows free reign through slides, embedded video and audio, allowing people to go anywhere in your sandbox they'd like. It's sort of like those old "Choose Your Adventure" books.

Topic Two.

I found much of the material in this section of the class quite engaging, in particular using the wrap text function around clip art. I'll admit it, I'm a clip art fanatic, and I am frequently pulling clip art off the internet in order to build documents. In fact, using clip art, word and gimp, I was able to build a mind map for the lecture portion of LT 548. It looks like this.

As a GTF at the AEI this term, I use tables every day to build my daily lesson plans. However, I still learned a ton. By far, the coolest tricks were the text wrap and image transparency. I am glad to have these in my tool kit. I mixed it all in with some of the word techniques we learned in the previous CALL session, including bullet pointing. In fact, I was so jazzed that I converted the handout I created in class into a pdf and posted it on my blog right away.

Topic 3. 

Screencasting with Jing was definitely the high point of the day. While the topic I picked for my screencast was slightly outside of what is normally seen, I found it incredibly easy to download and install the software. It took me just minutes to have my screencast built and in Dr. Healey's inbox. I've been trying to wrap my head around how I can use this tool for language teaching and I've come up with the idea of building a treasure map using this tool. It can also be used for form focused instruction, showing students parts of sentences, parts of paragraphs and parts of essays. I can't wait to play with it and exploit all of the possibilities. Where I think this software falls down is in its reliance on the cloud. I would love to be able to embed these screencasts on webpages, but having only a link really limits its usability, in my estimation.

Here's a screencast using Jing

This is my practice screencast using jing.... he audio quality is terrible because I was using the microphone which comes with my cell phone's headset.

http://screencast.com/t/atWFUt8oRMF