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Many say and I do agree that as teachers we cannot ignore technology when teaching. Not only can it enhance learning but is also a real life skill that our students and course participants need to learn. Most importantly, technology can be a great motivator, especially but not exclusive for young learners.

As I said before, I can identify with all the roles suggested for a teacher and I have always liked technology but I am not a trained technician or IT specialist. That is why sometimes I do wish I had a specialist at hand who could maintain my website for example so that I could invest more time in improving my teaching and coming up with new motivating, fun and effective learning and teaching ideas. After all, we’ve always been told that technology makes life easier and saves us time, right?

The reason why  I felt like writing this post is that I spent most of yesterday with website maintenance upgrading the LMS (Learning Management System) Moodle and installing Sloodle (a Second Life mash-up module for Moodle) and learning more skills in Second Life® that are deemed essential for educators. If you are interested in more details, I posted about this in my Second Life experiments blog.

Having said this, I still like technology and integrating it into my lessons The video in my next post states pretty much where I stand in that regard.

My first Second Life English course has finished, certificates handed out, the SLexperiments Wiki and group has been constantly growing since we started it and I have been exploring Second Life’s potential for language teaching for a while now. Throughout this journey and as a member of the Webheads (an online community of practise), I have learned and experienced that sharing what one knows is a very powerful way of learning more.

This and the fact that reflecting on one’s learning and teaching helps one to become a better teacher and learner were the reasons why I had decided to blog about my Second Life English course and publishing my lesson plans. I do hope there will be more feedback and comments on the lessons and my reflections so I and other teachers can benefit even more and improve our teaching.

The logical next step is to give a public online presentation about this fascinating journey, my explorations and teaching experience. The presentation is mainly directed towards teachers but some of my students will (hopefully) also be present and learners wanting learn about new ways of improving their language skills or companies looking for effective and motivating language courses are most welcome to attend.

The presentation will be on the WiziQ virtual classroom platform and is scheduled for Thursday, 28 August 2008 at 3pm GMT. Here is the link where you can sign up for the session.

I am looking forward to seeing you there.

Update:

If you missed the live presentation, you can watch the recording using the same link as above (for signing up). Above, you can see the slides of the presentation.

Here is a link to all my Second Life postson this blog.

Potential of Second Life

Now, that I know more about Second Life, I see its potential for language education. It is …

• Immersive: 
  • Opportunities to speak to native speakers or non-native speakers in real situations
  • Role-plays can take place in the actual setting: If they are learning shopping language, they can actually go shopping, practise ordering food in a restaurant, go on field trips to places where the target language is spoken.
• Collaborative: Work with others to complete tasks (e.g. project work)
• Provides a safe environment to try out the language
• Caters to the needs of different learner types (visual, kinaesthetic, auditory) and intelligences (Gardner’s MI theory).
• Helps shy students to overcome their shyness step-by step by first using text chat and then voice. It makes it easier to speak as it is their avatar and not themselves doing this. Nobody sees them blush.
• For those who can only attend distance learning classes, SL gives participants a feeling of really being present and experience a “real” class atmosphere.

Formal versus informal learning

The question is: “Should learning in SL be formal or informal?” Some say it is, after all, a game and teachers should not mess with it. Learning should be entirely informal (e.g. practising speaking with native speakers).

As in Real Life and as I know from my own experience of learning foreign languages, I think the combination of formal and informal learning works best for optimal results (e.g. attending classes in a language school in the morning and immersing oneself into the language outside class by going shopping, meeting people, going to the cinema) In Second Life, we give students the safe environment and provide them with language input and controlled practice to make sure they have the language and use it correctly. This  gives them the courage to go out into the open SL world and seek opportunities to practise it. Lessons should include field trips to places where it is easy to contact and speak with other residents to give students an idea where to go in their own time. Teachers could also visit events together with their students after preparing them to participate in discussions. This should give students enough self-confidence to go out by themselves and practise their language skills further without needing a safety net and any formal instructions any longer.

Limitations and strengths

SL has limitations when teaching (e.g. limited gestures, facial expressions which result in more teacher talk- though there are first steps like lyp synching), no whiteboard to write or draw on quickly. On the other hand, there are possibilities that you do not have in RL (e.g. going on field trips, teleporting to places, making and copying objects indefinitely to name a few). So, I think when planning and conducting a lesson, it is crucial to keep these in mind. What happens often is that we try to replicate Real Life. I wonder why? Are we so used to thinking in boxes? Is it too much freedom? I’m sure with time we will see much more innovative SL-ways of teaching and maybe these will even influence our Real Life teaching in a positive way.

Reservations?

Yes. It won’t suit everybody. Some will feel uncomfortable due to the double challenge of getting to grips with the language and the technology. When students pay for the course they will be unhappy when things don’t function properly or things take long due to lag, etc. I also sometimes feel responsible for students that I bring into Second Life. What if they get addicted, visit inappropriate mature locations or fall prey to residents whose intentions are not good? This is why I prefer to teach those who are already in SL and even if I bring students there from outside, they are adults and responsible for themselves. 

Conclusion

Despite the challenges of teaching in Second Life and the technical issues like instability and lag, I see the potential of SL for teaching languages and prefer to be part of finding out how best to teach in SL instead of waiting for researh results. 

Finally, Second Life is fascinating but it is, after all, only a tool. And tools are only then helpful in reaching your goals when you choose them appropriately taking students needs and wants into consideration and not deciding based on your personal love affair with a tool.

“What would be the components of a training course for teachers who want to use SL in and for their teaching?”.

He added some ideas to start the discussion:

1. Build up a list of pedagogically useful tools.
2. Build up a list of pedagogically useful sites in SL.
3. Study possible pedagogical uses of notecards, IMs, etc.
4. List basic movements the teacher must be proficient at (walking, moving, flying, teleporting, etc.).

There are some other Second Life skills that teachers should know (e.g. writing and sending notecards, group chat, etc.). While these are all important technical skills teachers should know and would make up one component of the course, this alone will, of course, not be sufficient to make teachers good educators in Second Life.  

The second component would be to look at the pedagogical side of teaching in SL. I would have teachers share their believes about teaching and learning in general and what they think teaching in SL would be like. Why they want to teach in SL in the first place? 

If possible, I would have them observe some SL lessons (maybe good and bad examples) and ask them for feedback.

Have them think about “How much about what they know about teaching in RL can be transferred to SL? 

Have them think about what makes SL unique. What are the strengths of SL compared to RL classes? When does it make sense to teach in SL and when in RL? Is there a special SL pedagogy? Many teachers and schools simply try to replicate Real Life in Second Life building traditional looking classrooms.I have visited different schools, talked to directors and observed lessons, and what I have seen was sometimes appalling. 

Finally, you can only really learn how to teach by actually teaching. This is also true for teaching in Second Life. Therefore, the last component of the course would be teaching either peers or, even better, real students and receiving peer and tutor feedback and reflecting on their teaching.

At the end of such a course, teachers will also be able to decide whether they really like teaching in SL or not. 

Besides the content of the course, a trainer would also have to decide on how to deliver the course — entirely in Second Life or only partly. If in Second Life, the trainer would naturally lead by example and conduct the session using SL pedagogy

This is not a complete list and I’d love to know what others think. So: 

If you were a teacher interested in teaching in Second Life, what would you like to see covered in the course?

And if you are already a teacher or teacher trainer in Second Life, what would you add to the list?

At the moment, Odiogo only works with English text and there is no choice of voices. However, the quality is quite good compaired to some other similar services.

The podcasts can be listened to online by simply clicking on the listen button on top of each post or they can be downloaded as MP3 files and used offline.

Odiogo has two main uses:

1. If you are a teacher you can easily create original listening material from your or your classes’ blogs. Students can, thus, not only read the posts but also listen along. The quality of the voice is good enough and the words are generally pronounced correctly. Students can even practice a bit of intonation. Another advantage is that it helps proof-reading and finding mistakes. It happened several times to me that while listening to the Odiogo podcast, I detected spelling and even punctuation mistakes. So, students could listen to the podcasts of their own blog posts or of their peers’ while reading along and try to find and correct mistakes themselves or give each other feedback. Peer and self-correction is often much more effective and less demotivating than teacher correction and also helps them to become autonomous learners. The podcasts will automatically be updated with the corrections.Even if sometimes words or sentences are pronounced incorrectly, Odio can be a great teaching tool for raising awareness, which is so crucial for learning to take place. Students will sometimes be puzzled by how Odiogo pronounces something or how it stesses sentences. This will hopefully make students either look up or ask for the correct pronunciation. They will, sometimes, find that they had been pronouncing a word the wrong way for a long time without noticing. And sometimes, though rarely, they will be correct and Odiogo wrong, which can be extremely motivating. It will students also give the chance to detect differences between American and British or other Englishes. Odiogo uses mostly an American English pronunciation.
2. Odio is also a great tool if you want to make your blog more accessible so that visually impaired visitors can listen to your blog posts.

Had to right that boring letter or have been working on that assingment for days? Why not copy it to Wordle and make a piece of art of it? It makes a beautiful cover for the assignment. I can also imagine other uses, like writing some key words about a person and making a postcard of it to send to that person as a greeting. The teacher could also make a postcard out of the students’ essays or blog posts and send it back together with the grading to say “thank you” for their efforts. Of course, students can also make their own after finishing an assignment. These can be exhibited in the classroom or on the class blog and the class can vote for the most beautiful one.

Here is a Wordle piece of art of this post :

Follow this link to see my assignments turned into colourful word clouds.

Updated on 25 July 2008:

José Picardo had an interesting idea on how to use Wordle in a lesson. He created Wordle clouds of two online news articles on the same topic. Students in pairs described to their partners what their article was about by looking at the tag cloud. Dictionary work was also planned in. A very creative and engaging pre-reading task in my opinion.

In one of the comments on José’s blog I found another interesting classroom activity with Wordle. A class of 5-7 year olds went on an excursion to an art gallery. Then they brainstormed and voted for the words that best described the event and created a Wordle picture with those.

I started preparing for the DELTA long before the actual course by doing research on the Internet, reading about various topics and taking an online teacher development course. What I found most difficult was to find insider information about the DELTA course. There were very few personal accounts. There are also no exam preparation books on the market for the DELTA as there are for all the other Cambridge exams. There was some information scattered on the Internet but it was difficult to get a real picture of what the course really was like.

This gave me the idea to create the Project DELTA Wiki as a platform for information about the DELTA. So far, there hasn’t been much participation but I hope this will change with time. So, if you are about to take the DELTA, you have the diploma already or you are a DELTA tutor, you are very welcome to contribute to the Wiki with your personal experience, your knowledge or with your questions.

One of the things that helped me a lot during the DELTA was to see sample assignments by former DELTA candidates. This is why I have decided to publish my DELTA assignments online on my website. On the Wiki you can find a link to more sample assignments by other former candidates.