Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. Digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music. These stories may be recorded with the help of different programs, such as Microsoft Power Point or Movie Maker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLzc0OVcFrI&feature=related, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXWAsPjMJU . 

This is another very interesting and creative assignment for EFL learners. When students create a movie or interactive slide show to tell their story, in this case learning becomes personal. Students can improve their writing, show creativity, and have a voice. Digital storytelling again is a tool to make classes more interactive and engaging. Having students rate each others’ stories, comment or why not work in groups to have one interesting story created by the whole class. This is an additional technology-based assignment that may help us involve our students in learning process. 

Podcasts and Language Teaching

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts in this century of digital-native environment teachers should be highly vigilant to be able to use technologies for students’ benefits. For example one of the ways is using blogs in the classroom, which will help us to develop our students’ reading and writing skills. But there is no need to worry about listening and speaking skills, because for this we have PODCASTS.

Podcasts are audio or video files that can be easily created and uploaded to the internet or downloaded from it. So, podcasting is the ability to create or listen to audio or video content either live or downloaded for later use.

First of all I would like to speak about my own experience of podcasting. For the first time I’ve got familiar with the meaning of this term during my speaking course that I had in summer 2011. During this course we had an assignment to listen to podcasts and to bring the information to the class. At that time I felt really very unhappy, not because I didn’t like podcasting, in the contrary, because I’ve got familiar with it rather late. Because I’ve realized that I’ve wasted so much valuable time while I could listen and discover so many interesting and useful podcasts. However, “Better late than never” with this phrase in mind I’ve integrated podcasting into my everyday life, I’ve subscribed to some very interesting podcasts in English and in French (http://www.thepsychfiles.com/, www.learnfrenchbypodcast.com) and every single day I follow them when I do simple things like my everyday make-up, having breakfast, going to bed etc. 

How podcasting may be useful in language teaching? 

One of the most important things in foreign language classroom is the ability to provide as much authentic material as possible. In my opinion podcast is one of the “most “authentic materials. Podcasts may help us to get our students familiar with so different accents and variations of English, different speed of speech, pronunciation etc. It is known that all these factors play an important role in comprehensibility, so first of all podcasts increase students’ comprehensibility of native speech. 

Most of the podcasts provide transcripts with the audio recordings. This may be used for students giving them assignment to read and record themselves and compare with native speakers speech. This will give them a clear picture of nativelikeness of their speech. Very often students would end by imitating the native speech. It is more useful than just repeating and practicing words or sounds like we were doing at school. Researches show that podcasting is greatly welcomed by students, like the results of a research conducted by Ducate L. and Lomicka L. (2009) showed that Podcast project was perceived positively by students, and they appreciated the feedback given for their recordings and enjoyed opportunities for creativity during podcasts.

 Finally podcasts as blogs make the learning process more interactive. Students may evaluate each other’s recordings and give constructive feedback to peers and create positive and friendly atmosphere in the classroom. And my opinion is that positive environment is the pledge of successful learning and teaching.

 Blogging and Language Teaching

As a reasonable continuation of my last post I would like to speak about blogging, weblogs and of course about its role in foreign language learning and teaching. A blog is a personal website that contains some content which is organized like a journal or a diary. Blogs may be personal, professional, educational etc. Some educational blogs are for example http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/ etc. So, it can be easily inferred that blogs first of all are very useful and effective for self-education and self-development. Blogging may also be useful for those who have plenty of interesting ideas or thoughts and who need to share it with others. And this function of sharing ideas makes blogs very useful in classrooms, especially in foreign language classrooms. Very often we require from our students to express their ideas and share it with their mates and for this purpose blog writing is an additional tool that EFL teachers may use to make classes more interactive and creative.

Blogs are also very useful for developing students’ reading and writing skills and increasing their ability to think critically because blogs provide place for commenting posts, and everyone can easily write his/her opinion about every single post. All these factors are very little arguments supporting the usefulness of blogs in the classroom. That’s why I would like to mention the results of an article, which proves once again the effectiveness of blogging in classrooms. Fellner T. and Apple M. in their article “Developing Writing Fluency and Lexical Complexity with Blogs” discuss the results of a research conducted with 21 students. The results of the study showed improvements in writing fluency as well as increase in the number of words that participants used in their blogs. The research also showed that blog writing provided students with more opportunities for meaningful negotiation through commenting each other’s posts. This interactive aspect appeared one of the most interesting aspects for students.

Blogs are also attractive for students because it is another opportunity for them to deal with the computer. And this may make them feel more serious people who use the computer not only for playing or chatting, but really for working. So, let’s use blogging in our classes and make our students work with pleasure. 

Useful links:

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/04/blogs-in-education.html

"The Hole in the Wall" experiments

In his talk Sugata Mitra, the author of “the Hole in the wall” experiments emphasizes the role and the importance of self-teaching in education. In his experiments Sugata MItra getting into areas with poorly developed education put a powerful PC and a touchpad into the wall providing with high-speed internet and a browser. I confess that it’s really fascinating to see children trying to find out solutions in groups, learning and teaching each other even in the case when they didn’t know English. The experiments showed that children very rapidly got used to the computer without any help and even started to use some English words in their daily life.  

Watching this talk I immediately though about my six-year-old cousin who lives in Artik, a city in Gyumri Region in Armenia. Having a computer with Internet connection and Google as the home page of their browser he arrived to find lots of web sites of on-line games, typing the word MARIO in Google, having in mind that Mario is a name of a game. I would not be so amazed if I didn’t know that neither his mother nor his father could help him, just because they are not so familiar with the Internet. 

It’s interesting to note that children, when they find a new video game, they never read the instructions of how to play the game. Just because they don’t need much time to find it out themselves, and neither do I :-)

  All above mentioned showed once again how effectively works self - teaching and how it is important for us, as teachers to provide our students enough time for not only doing homework assignments but also for self-teaching. 

References: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Pictures retrieved from:
http://www.quotesbuddy.com/education-quotes/self-education/

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-06/parenting/29733511_1_computers-learning-internet

Reflection on the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman

There are kind of titles that give me an immediate clue about what a book or an article will be about. “The world is flat” was a metaphoric title that made me reflect on it some minutes and finally I got confused and had no idea how the author would argue this idea.  Watching the presentation of the book done by the author I was assured that this book is not a science-fiction but it is our reality, it speaks about the world which moves much faster than it seems to us, and how it’s important to stay awake.   

The arguments that Friedman gives supporting the flatness of the world are very surprising and at the same time very trivial. First of all Friedman speaks about the globalization in the 21th century. The fact that people become more able to work together and to easily share with each other culture, education and economy is a factor that makes the world flat. Speaking about several flatteners Friedman claims that this is only the beginning of this phenomenon. The first flattener that Friedman analyzes in the book is the Collapse of Berlin War 11.89, which allowed people from one side to collaborate with the other side. The other important flattener is the Netscape. The Internet broadened people to people connectivity giving equal possibilities for every single user “No company can dominate the internet”.  However people to people connectivity is not enough to have a flat world, so it’s time to apply the internet. The internet gives us opportunity to get the application of another computer from any location and from any distance (e-tickets, e-magazines etc.) These three factors created new “platform for collaboration”, which make the world flatter. The other flatteners are new sources of collaboration that exist in 21^st century such as open sources, offshoring, insourcing etc. 

These new sources of collaboration are highly important in education. Open source is a new form of collaboration which gives learners infinite possibilities to get information, to learn independently and to share ideas, an example is Wikipedia which is globally produced open encyclopedia. 

Friedman argues that all these flatteners work together and move very rapidly and we must learn how to learn, we must teach ourselves, we must be innovative and curious in order to manage to keep a real connection with the world and people and not to stay behind.

So, in conclusion it can be noted that Friedman’s book is a kind of prehistory of the digital youth portrait of 21^st century, which is a natural result of a generation that lives in a “flat world”.

Useful links
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/the-world-is-flat

Digital Youth Portrait

 

The changes caused by electronic revolution in 21^st century concerned all the possible fields and the education is not an exception. For this digital generation education needs rapid changing and this change is mainly technical based. Such changes in humanity’s educational needs also require changes in pedagogy; teaching methods need to accord with subject material. There is no sense to compare the thinking, understanding and world conception of this generation with the previous one. And it is not at all surprising: hello smart boards, good bye blackboards, you don’t need a piece of chalk you can use your finger instead to tap on the board, you need more information than the teacher provides, don’t worry, go online you will learn more and more: there is an abundance of information; you can find enough information even to teach your teachers.

The digital youth portrait of 21 century amazes me, and it really makes me feel good and proud. It’s really impressive to see the creativity, the curiosity and the engagement of little kids in this digital world. Nowadays children have the possibility to learn more, to get more information and this leads to a greater desire to discover, to understand and to apply what is new for them. They are not only able to use the internet, to search for things they crave applying it, discovering new things and demonstrating it to others. They know exactly what they need and they manage to find it without any problem. 

In these conditions teachers’ role becomes highly difficult. We need to organize classes in a way to make it more interesting, more informative and more engaging than what children can find independently at home. So, teachers are the ones who need to be involved in this digital world in order to understand, help and give something new to children. Because the children that are digital natives today are still children and they still need to be taught and the most important role that a good teacher may play in their life is to give them right directions and to help them learn how to learn independently. 

Useful links:

http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6856773-how-the-internet-revolutionized-education?chromedomain=technolog 

http://digitallifeacademy.com/blog/archives/63

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