Mobile Learning

Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy (www.theconsultants-e.com). She is co-author of How to Teach English with Technology, Learning English as a Foreign Language for Dummies and Teaching Online.
She is currently working on a new book on Digital Literacies, and also on an e-book –Webinars.

We had the chance to listen to her talk (workshop), here in Santa Fe. She gave us very useful ideas and explained how we can use mobile devices in our classrooms, as an alternative to the common (and old-fashioned) way of teaching.

“Using mobile flashcards for vocabulary,watching video podcasts or listening to audio podcasts, using dictionaries on phones are all mobile language learning activities that many learners already do” -she expresses- “What does this mean for us? Well, as teachers it’s up to us to let our students know about the mobile options and apps which are increasingly available to them, many of them for free, and which they can download and use or their own out-of-class learning”. M-learning, then, demonstrates that just with a smartphone, an ordinary device nowadays, we can engage our students in the English lessons and make them more enjoyable and interactive.

You can visit /www.academia.edu/ and read an entry that Nicky herself wrote, to learn more about this topic. Or you can watch her many talks on YouTube, as this one on "Digital Literacies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDdoRT-qiTI

Designing our own teaching materials

How can we best design our own teaching materials?

Taking into account the Guidelines for designing effective English language teaching materials, proposed by Jocelyn Howard and Jae Major (2005), we can assert that there are many reasons why us, (future) teachers of English, choose to produce and use our own material. But, we need to bear in mind some factors in order to better achieve this aim.

First of all, we need to consider as the most important factor our students. We have to meet their learning needs, interests, background knowledge and motivation so as to best fit them.

The curriculum and the context are variables that have a significant impact on our choices; because a curriculum (imposed by the school or the State) outlines the objective of the course of studies, and we need to adapt our materials to it; and the context in which we are working, will definitely determine the kind of materials that may need to be designed.

We agree with Howard that these materials should be contextualised, to the realities and experiences of learners, and to the curriculum they are intended to address. They have to be meaningful to the lessons (the topic/theme we are dealing with at the moment of teaching), in order to ensure a purposeful and motivating experience. (Guideline #1)

In addition, materials produced should also give our learners opportunities to integrate all the language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) in an authentic manner and to become competent when using each of them. (Guideline #5) We can take advantage of new technologies and, for example, use an app that caters for all types of learners (visual, auditory,and so on) so as to give all of them the opportunity to put what they learn into practice in an engaging way.

Having said all that, we can conclude that following these suggestions, designing our own teaching materials could make the difference in our classrooms, especially with all the resources and devices available nowadays!
In a previous entry, we wrote about web 2.0 tools and how these apps can be aplied in the classroom.

References

• Howard, J., & Major, J. (2004). Guidelines for designing effective English language teaching materials. The TESOLANZ Journal, 12, 50-58.

Teachers Web 2.0

What is web 2.0?

"Web 1.0 was read-only where Internet users went online to find information. It was similar to going to the library to find books. With Web 2.0, which is read/write, people have become active participants and content creators. They not only find information on the Internet, but they also create and share content". (Thompson, 2007)

Web 2.0 technologies instead, – such as blogs, wikis, podcasting, social bookmarking, and social networking sites – allow users to easily publish content online and to connect and network with other people from all over the world who have similar interests.

According to Hurlburt (2008), " Web 2.0 technologies encourage and enable teachers and learners to share ideas and collaborate in innovative ways". They also encourage us, teachers, to reconsider the way we teach and learn; moreover, to transform our teaching practices in a way that we can provide our students with more active and meaningful learning. 

In order to become better teachers, we have tried some web 2.0 applications and thought in which way we could use them in our classroom.

First, we tried Quizlet which is a tool that allows teachers to create a group with his/her students and share different sets of concepts to be practiced.

The teacher needs to provide the concepts and their meanings, and this app automatically create different types of games for students to practice vocabulary, for example. The teacher can create a set and ask students to play the games and, as the application give points to each game, make a “competition”; in this way they learn while playing.

It is a tool that can be used with secondary school students, but not with primary school pupils because the games are a bit difficult for them.

We also examined Timeglider, an interactive timeline. This app, allows you to show events (present, future and even pre-historical times) in a different way, very attractive for students. It can be used, for example, when teaching Past Simple, so students can create a timeline to talk about a past event. They can include videos, pictures and even audio files on it. They can also mark the importance of the different events they include by zooming the icons in and out. Once they build a timeline, they can share it by copying an URL for placing on blogs and other web pages.

Build your wild self it is a great tool to use with children. It helps them to practice vocabulary related to parts of the body. There are two pre-set characters, a girl and a boy, and kids can choose and add any part of human or animal body and they can also add a background, for example ocean, jungle, and so on. When they choose, for example, gorilla arms, they will hear the sound gorillas produce; it is very amusing for kids. Once they have created their wild-self and they have named it, they can share it sending it via e-mail or clicking on “guardar imagen como” or they might just print it. What’s more, the app gives them the “analysis” of each part of the body they chose once their character is completed.

Here is one of our creations!

So, give it a try to these apps, and make your lessons more engaging for your 2.0 students!




References

• Hurlburt, S. (2008). Defining tools for a new learning space: Writing and reading class blogs. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 4 (2),182-189. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no2/hurlburt0608.pdf,.
• Thompson, J. (2007). Is education 1.0 ready for web 2.0 students? Innovate, 3(4).

Sources

http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Digital native students vs. Digital inmigrant teachers

As we all know, technology rules on every aspect of our lives, whether we are watching TV, texting or sending an e-mail, but what about education? Today’s learners are more acquainted with technological devices than teachers, but why? The reason is they are Digital Natives, i.e. they have born in a digital world while teachers were not, and that is why they (we) are called Digital Immigrants (Marc Prensky, 2001).

Students complain about being bored at school, learning nothing; of course it is easy to think that is their own fault because students don’t pay attention.  But what if we think about “the great canyon” existing between these two generations? We need to give this problem a lot of thought.

Is there anything teachers can do to help in the learning process? Surely! One thing is to use current contents; it is useless for students to learn Latin for example. Another helpful idea is to modify the teaching methodology; we may learn to adapt ourselves to this new era by using email, mobile phones (smart ones or dumb ones), Facebook, and so forth, but it just isn’t very natural for us, and perhaps it will never be. It’s like learning a second language: you can communicate but with some struggle.

When we are young, we absorb language so quickly and unconsciously, but find it so much harder to learn a new language when we are older; the same seems to be true for technology. So if there's some new app you want to try, and you keep failing, don’t give up just get a few of your colleagues, friends, or even students to help you. In that way, you're all learning together. Try something new! Constant communication is a young fashion that doesn’t seem to disappear, it remains generation after generation. If we say children are texting all the time, take advantage of that! After all, they are reading and writing, aren't they?

The reality is that there are pros and cons on both sides, so we should seek for mutual understanding. Obviously, applying any solution requires hard work; nevertheless, the reward is worthy! It is all about talking to and learning from people who view things in a different way.

References

• Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the horizon, 9(5), 1-6.