What challenges did Soares face when using blogs with her ESL students, and what lessons did she learn? How does she feel about using blogs with students in the future? Levy describes several types of technologies. Choose one of them and describe how you might want to use it (or have used it), also discuss some of considerations that need to be taken when using this technology with ESL students.
The first challenge Soares had was deciding what type of blog to create: tutor, learner, or class style blog. After that, there were a lot of issues with her students lack of computer skills, and a lack of desire to use the blog. When Soares posted questions to the class there were usually no responses (she noticed this trend in other education blogs from around the world as she started to do research). Other challenges: blogs work better with older learners, students were not consistent about responding, the students responses were too short.
Soraes learned things that are important for any educators that is considering the use of a blog (but keep in mind, she worked with younger students) : apply explatory practices as a teacher (look around the internet at the competition and have students help), make trial blogs, teach students how to use a blog before starting, consider that students have very different levels of computer skills, remember it is classwork, so students like to work on it in class and not at home, and finally it is best to start out working in groups but students should later work independently. Admittedly, it is a lot of things for the teacher to consider and I can understand why some might balk at the idea of using a blog in class.
Levy gives an excellent summary of current CALL technology. It is worth mentioning the core 5, before focusing finally on the most interesting CALL of all, mobile technology. 1 Learning Managment Systems (LMS) are the teacher-centered techs like WebCT and Blackboard, these are very useful but typical of what often scares off educators. A somewhat complicated piece of technology. 2 Audio-video conferencing is summed up best by looking at Sype technology or perhaps Star Trek That is, talking to educators and students via video conferences. 3 Aritificial Intelligence is something I discussed before on this blog, it is great. 4 Speech/Pronunciation recognition is something I have often heard students complain about, native speakers (me) have even had trouble getting "recognized" on some of this CALL. Finally, 5 Mobile technology is surely the most exciting. The mobile phone Thorton research in Japan sounded especially interesting. With the popularity cell-phone internet technology combined with i-pod and MP3 this area of CALL stands out. If motivation and and audio-visual learners are your concerns, which K-12 would be, this technology could help ELLs or main streamed student alike. For higher level ELLs pod-casting is still a great resource, and should be used by the instructor for things like audio quizzes, and pronunciation practice.
