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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.

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.

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 am not saying we shouldn’t embrace technology and experiment with new tools. To the contrary, I’m all for experimenting but this should not happen to the expense of our students. It is our responsibility as teachers to not make false promises to our students and make them believe that simply by using the latest gadgets they will learn faster and become better.

We should try to see educational technology, Web 2.0 tools, MUVEs like Second Life for what they are — tools to help improve learning and teaching. Used appropriately, they can be extremely motivating and empowering.

The most interesting presentation for me was the one about IWB software (interactive whiteboard). It was the first time for me to see the software life. But I was more interested in the tool used during the presentation. It was not a regular IWB but a much less expensive and portable tool. This tool can be taken anywhere and any white surface can be used as the screen. There are many such portable “IWBs”. The one used for this presentation) was e-beam.

I had been thinking of buying one for my off-line classes but wasn’t sure whether they really worked well. The presenter had no problems during the life event except in cases where he had to reach the top of the screen. In these cases he had to walk back to the laptop. This “problem” is due to the fact that, contrary to the fixed-size IWBs, the portable ones have the advantage that there is no limit to the size of the “screen”