Social Media and the Classroom

          I think that blended and online coursework is wonderful, and I think that even in a digital forum, student-teacher and student-student interaction is a vital component of learning, but I don’t see any reason that those types of interactions shouldn’t be reserved for the learning platforms.  Online class sites can provide discussion boards, message boards, text chats, voice chats, and many additional forms of media sharing and online collaboration, and I have yet to hear of any reason that one of those options wouldn’t be equally as effective at disseminating information or facilitating interactions between students as non-educational social media.  Maybe someday someone will change my mind, but for now, I don’t want to be my students’ friend, Facebook or otherwise, I want to be their mentor.  Yes, I want my students to approach me with questions, but I don’t want them to rely on my constant virtual presence.  If I do my job, then they can use their knowledge and skills without me.

Furthermore, when students are completing my coursework, I want them to be focused on it.  I understand that distractions are inevitable and that most of my students consider themselves to be effective multitaskers, but I don’t see any reason to exacerbate this behavior by encouraging, or even requiring, students to use social media to stay abreast of coursework or to complete class activities.   I think that combining social media with classwork is at least as likely to provide a distraction from the classwork as it is to keep students engaged during out-of-class hours.

Speaking of out-of-class hours, I feel that the boundary between home and school is beneficial, and should be respected.  Students should not be constantly on-call.  This is stressful enough for a doctor, so how could it be appropriate for a teenager?  Students have a right to know when they are off-duty.  If they have participated in class and then completed their homework, then they should have the opportunity not to think about me or my class for a while.  I don’t need to be popping up in their feed all evening or all weekend.

I expect my students to take the class as seriously as I do.  Although at times some students do not meet that expectation, I respect the members of my class enough to assume they are responsible, capable students and then adapt my strategies for particular individuals that need more hand-holding.  My students are in high school, so even the youngest are only a few years from voting age and leaving home, and they have all been doing the education thing for a while now.  Because I take my class seriously, I keep my professional life and my personal life separate, and I want my students to do the same.  Yes, I am all for making a personal connection and connecting my content material to their personal interests, but I don’t feel like I have to become an active component of their private lives in order to do it.  

Curation Tools

           Until this week, I had never really thought about using Pinterest as a classroom resource.  However, now that I have seen some examples, like this one on Tapas http://pinterest.com/leticiaclen/tapas/  by Leticia Clendenen, I am starting to see some the potential.  Pinterest allows a presenter to present information in a wide variety of formats about a collection of related, but varied topics, and the resources can vary in depth and detail of explanation.  Allowing students to explore a set of pre-selected resources and allowing them to choose which ones to investigate is a great way to present differentiated information without singling out students as remedial and advanced. 

          In particular, I like the idea of using Pinterest when the goal is to expose students to a broader theme.  Sometimes, it is important to give students a general idea of what there is to know, but it is not essential that they all recall a particular set of facts.  Next year, I would like to try using Pinterest to curate information about Hispanic cities.  I really don’t like the way we teach culture now, because we just teach it by the book.  The book has decided what is important for everyone, but if each of us were to plan trips to visit any particular city, I am certain that few of us would plan identical itineraries.  I would love to take a harbor tour in Valparaiso and stop at a seafood restaurant, but someone else might be fascinated by Bernardo O’Higgins and want to spend more time at the history museum.  We could approximate this freedom of choice by using Pinterest to curate resources that will allow students to virtually explore the city. Students could click through it to get an idea of some of the features and attractions in the city, but then spend their time learning about the particular aspects that are interesting to them.  Not only that, but they can select the presentation methods that are best for them.  If they like videos, they can watch videos, if they want to see stills of well-known locations, murals, paintings, etc., they can do that.  If they want to read, they can read about what interests them.

          The assessment would have to reflect this variability. Students could be asked to recall a few essential facts, such as the geographic location of the city or type of currency, but then other prompts would have to be open-ended.  For example, students could be asked to describe three tourist attractions they would choose to visit if they went to this city, or describe three cultural experiences (food, festivals, dance) that they would choose to take part in.  For the open-ended responses, a basic rubric should be provided so that students can determine the level of detail expected in their responses.  Rather than asking students to recall specific facts like the name of a particular museum, or even what is on display, it is much more important to me that they know about the many opportunities that these places have to offer.

The Best Online Tools for Language Learning

Online learning is an exciting development in the field of education.  Online learning tools can be used to make lessons more engaging, meaningful, and individualized than traditional teaching methods.  These tools can also be used to conduct classes that never meet in one location, and possibly, never all meet at one time.  This has worried some educators, because student-teacher interaction and collaborative learning activities are not only strongly correlated with student success, but, perhaps just as importantly, communication skills and teamwork are important job skills that employers expect students to develop throughout the course of their education.  For these reasons, the technological tools that use the Internet to facilitate interaction have been of particular interest to me.

                As a foreign language teacher, I consider the need for verbal communication to be of particular importance.  For this reason, the tool that most interested me so far has been VoiceThread.com.  I can use this platform to facilitate speaking activities that the students can complete asynchronously.    I particularly like the idea of creating a screencast that can be accessed through VoiceThread.com, so that students can actively participate in a pre-planned lesson at their convenience.  Writing and performing short skits has also traditionally played a significant role in world language classrooms.   In an exclusively online format, the students are never together at the same location, and it is not reasonable to expect them to edit together files recorded remotely for what is intended to be a brief practice activity or formative assessment.   Fortunately, these types of activities can also be adapted to an online format.  Students can write the dialogue either independently or collaboratively via a shared file, such as a Google Doc, and then create the skit using an animation tool, such as www.XtraNormal.com.  I was very happy to learn that XtraNormal is equipped to handle a variety of languages, including Spanish.  Unfortunately, I think students would have to pay to use XtraNormal, since when I tried it myself, I couldn’t save the video using a guest account, and our district doesn’t have a paid account.  Once I receive the skits, I can post them for the entire class to view and require the students to give each other feedback, either verbally through a platform such as VoiceThread.com or written on a discussion board. 

                Language acquisition teachers often use graphic organizers to work with vocabulary, and there are many potentially useful online tools that allow users to digitally create a huge variety of graphic organizers, but, personally, I am less likely to use these, because in most cases, I think it is just as effective for students to write out titles and lists.  I feel similarly about Prezi.  It’s like a slideshow, but with no sequence.  When I work through information, both as a presenter and as a learner, I want the progression of information to be well planned out, not haphazard or random, so this really doesn’t appeal to me.  Even in those rare cases where there is no advantage to planning out the sequence of the presentation, at least if I go through a sequence from a clearly identified beginning to end, I know that I haven’t missed anything.  There are various other services that I would probably make more use of if either my district had a paid license or if the systems were integrated with our grading system.  Quizlet comes to mind.  Quizlet has some good tools available free of charge, but any good practice activity takes time to make.  Because I currently have no way to track which of my students complete Quizlet activities, I cannot make them mandatory, and I don’t feel as though I have enough students that would be motivated to do these activities purely of their own initiative to justify the time that creating them would take away from something else I could to for my class. 

                Even though at this moment, I don’t plan on using every tool that I’ve learned about, I’m really glad to have learned about so many different options and ideas.  The tools that are less appealing to me right now might be exactly what I need in the future, and, if nothing else, I now have a better idea of the vast variety of tools and activities available for the blended or online classroom.

Face-to-Face Learning versus Exclusively Online Learning

Often times, people don't realize just how many types of traditional classroom activities and interactions can be adapted to the online environment. However, there are still some significant differences, which you can see in the Venn diagram that I have created which compares the two.  Fortunately, the possibility of using the best aspects from both learning environments exists in the blended classroom, in which a variety of technological learning tools are used both within a brick-and-mortar classroom and at home as a supplement the classroom activities.

Session 2 Section 4 Cool Tools Blog: Cool Tools

      VoiceThread is a cloud-based application that allows an online instructor to upload media such as a presentation, word document, image, video, or audio recording and then facilitate an asynchronous discussion about the contents.  This is an excellent tool for a foreign language class, because for us, listening and comprehension and verbal responses are not just ways to reach a wider variety of learning styles, rather, they are essential skills in and of themselves.  One way that it could be used in my Spanish II class is to facilitate practice dialogues. 

     Traditionally, I assign each student a partner and have the partners go through a scripted dialogue while I walk around the room attempting to keep fifteen pairs of students on-task while simultaneously monitoring the grammar and pronunciation of up to thirty individuals.  The practice is vital, but even if I could split my attention that many ways (which I can’t), I’m not able to offer corrections to all of the students that would benefit from instructor feedback, either because I didn’t notice the problem in the first place or because I simply run out of time before the activity is over.  Until now, having all students practice at once was the only way I could think of to give all the students the practice opportunities that they need to develop their skills.

     VoiceThread allows for asynchronous discussion, so now all students can still get the practice, but they don’t all have to be talking at once.  Not only will this allow me as a teacher to more effectively monitor student engagement and performance, I feel that the format allows students to get more out of the same practice activity. Many adolescents are self-conscious about possibly making a mistake, so they often just rush through the exercise, because they know that their peers often won’t notice their mistakes if they just rush through the activity quickly enough.  Then, other students end up feeling pressured to keep up, so they rush through as well.  Allowing students to respond at their own pace would eliminate these problems and possibly make the practice even more beneficial, and yet, because it is a spoken rather than written discussion, students are still required to perform in real time, so they won’t be able to slow the activity down to the point at which the conversational applications would be entirely lost.

     Let me provide a specific example.  My Spanish II students learn to use indirect objects and indirect object pronouns.  Then, they are given prompts such as 1) to write an email, 2) to borrow money, 3) to tell secrets, etc., and they are expected to form a question using the prompt and an indirect object. The partner then responds to the questions using a complete sentence. In order to facilitate these practice dialogues asynchronously, I could use VoiceThread.

     To use VoiceThread, first I would create a presentation that defined indirect objects and indirect object pronouns and explained how to use them.  The presentation is displayed like a slideshow from within VoiceThread. After the explanation, I can post the activity instructions and example.  On the first slide, students are asked to use the prompts to create the questions following the model.  The students can then post audio comments containing the questions that they have formed.  Using the above example, the questions might be 1) To whom did you write an email?, 2) From whom did you borrow money?, 3) To whom do you tell a secret?.  If a student still has trouble forming the questions after going through the explanation and viewing the model, he or she could listen to other students forming the questions and emulate the sentence structure.  Rather than being cheating, learning to reproduce sentence structure is the goal of this activity, so there’s no problem there.

     On the next slide, I could ask the students to respond to the questions they just asked.  Using the same examples, these answers might be 1) I wrote an email to my grandma, 2) I borrowed money from my dad, 3) I told a secret to my friend, Sara.  Again, the students respond by posting audio comments. 

     I am also excited about this Web 2.0 tool, because I think it could be applied at more advanced levels to facilitate less scripted discussions in which students actually listen and respond to one another.  An advantage for the instructor is that this would allow for a more objective method of monitoring of participation.  An advantage for the students is that less outgoing students might find it easier to participate if they have all the time they need to process the information and formulate a response, especially if they don’t have to worry about forcing their way into a discussion that is being commandeered by a handful of talented or outgoing students, as always seems to happen in a physical class discussion.  There is a danger that rather than learn to respond in real time, students will simply type their responses into a translator and then read them into the discussion board, but since most students are not going to take extra steps if its not necessary, I think that simply making the expectations clear might be enough to largely avoid this problem.  The instructor should make it known in advance that the (non-scripted) voice discussion posts are graded for expression, and that perfection isn’t expected.  Then, if (when) we notice it happening anyway, we can raise the issue with the particular student.  Overall, I think we stand to gain more than we stand to lose by using this excited new tool.