Used technologies
wiki - as a sort of VLE for asynchronous exchange between students in Italy and the USA and to lay the foundations for an ongoing project for the creation of a public intercultural wiki to be contributed to not only by our students but by anyone on the Web.
Skype - for synchronous oral excahanges in a telecollaboration project between students studying English in Italy and students studying Italian in the USA.
blogs - as a sort of VLE (course blog) for setting out e-tivities (Salmon, 2002) and exchanging information and personal blogs as a space for completing e-tivities, reflecting on the learning and expressing one's own creativity.
del.icio.us - to create a distributed resource network for students studying ESL and working on their final theses.
Feed syndication - to help students learn how to manage the information overload on the Web and have what they need to know come to them.
YouTube - for discussion and practice in the context of an ESL course.
Edutech wiki - to give students the opportunity to contribute to knowledge sharing in a community that goes beyond the classroom.
The tools were chosen with the following aims in mind:
- to give students numerous, authentic opportunities to read in English;
- to help students improve their communicative fluency in English and their reflective and critical thinking skills by publishing their thoughts, opinions and reactions on a course blog and on a personal blog;
- to help students improve their written accuracy in English by publishing on a wiki;
- to help students develop competency in the use of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and web syndication (rss feeds) in order to develop their practical research skills using online information networks as they look for, find and share online resources;
- to give students opportunities to collaborate in the creation of knowledge and share knowledge;
- to create online learner communitites;
- to help students learn how to effectively exploit the Web for their own autonomous, life-long learning and at the same time encourage them to become producers, creators, and sharers of knowledge in the ever-growing Web 2.0.
Experiences
I learned that my students are not part of the Net Generation (Obligner and Oblinger, 2005) nor are they Digital Natives (Prensky, 2001). Nonetheless, they are aware of the need to know how to exploit the Web and were more than willing to put up with initial frustrations in using these tools in order to find out how useful they can be. They have all mentioned numerous times how grateful they are that they are learning English and computer skills at the same time.
Students are often much more willing to express themselves online as opposed to in the classroom. Giving them environments where they can do this encourages high participation rates.
Blogging comes more naturally than wiki-ing as the former promotes ownership of writing and the latter promotes collective authoring, something students have had little to no exposure to. Though they may prefer blogging, they are able to see the benefits of learning how to wiki.
Blogs promote interaction, wikis collaboration.
Blogs promote informal writing, wikis formal, factual writing.
Both promote citing sources, linking, hypertexting and referencing.
Students love Skype. It is a fantastic resource for students, but requires a lot of organization on the part of instructors.
Structure is fundamental. If the activities are structured, students will learn from them. If they are not, students get lost.
It doesn't take long for students to see how tools like social bookmarking and feed syndication can make using the Internet more effective.
They produce more written work and oral work (Skype) than I have ever seen in a language class - and are happy to do it.
The down side? An incredible amount of work on the part of the instructor (students must feel like you're 'always there') and on the part of the students (it takes time to figure it all out and to create a community).
Possibly most importantly, students learn how to collaborate, they learn that they can be part of a literally global community of people creating and sharing knowledge and they create a real learner community beyond the boundaries of the classroom.
