Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
ISTE 2010:"Tranforming American Education: Learning Powered By Technology"
Many of the broader-focus presentations at ISTE this year sketch a vision of the future of the educational environment...Which in fact isn't the future but the present. The presenter this morning outlined several ways that teaching & learning have changed/are changing:
1)mobility 24/7 (more and more people carry the internet around in their pocket...Why don't we educators find ways to leverage this fact instead of simply tolerating or limiting its use because it disturbs the status quo classroom). She also brought up personal learning networks and asked the audience how many people were aware of theirs (most were). It got me to thinking that perhaps one of our community college learning outcomes should include developing an awareness of and fluency in communicating with a personal learning network. We may eventually need to conflate "information literacy" outcome with "communication".
2) Increasing amounts of digital content
3) Print materials moving to online (and on that topic, online courses are evolving into a mashup of traditional print and digital content in a virtual "classroom"--like Angel, I guess--which allows students to personalize their learning space and consume information in digital or prinShe t form according to preference.
And some important points she made:
If we want to increase the number of college graduates in this country from where it stands at the current percentage of 39%, we need to do that by implementing technology, not by making college easier!! Technology facilitates learning by making learning more accessible to more students. Technology allows accommodation of different learning styles, abilities, disabilities, lifestyles...And it gives students a myriad of ways to express themselves. It expands the borders of the classroom by connecting formal and informal learning (e.g. in a personal learning network).
And on this note, I had a thought: why are we creating separate Faculty Learning Communities at TCC for UDL and technology? At present, both of these FLC's are new as of last year and separate entities. But there is no reason why they shouldn't...In fact, they are both working toward the same goal in very similar ways!
The proposal that the presenter discussed can be found at www.ed.gov/technology.
1)mobility 24/7 (more and more people carry the internet around in their pocket...Why don't we educators find ways to leverage this fact instead of simply tolerating or limiting its use because it disturbs the status quo classroom). She also brought up personal learning networks and asked the audience how many people were aware of theirs (most were). It got me to thinking that perhaps one of our community college learning outcomes should include developing an awareness of and fluency in communicating with a personal learning network. We may eventually need to conflate "information literacy" outcome with "communication".
2) Increasing amounts of digital content
3) Print materials moving to online (and on that topic, online courses are evolving into a mashup of traditional print and digital content in a virtual "classroom"--like Angel, I guess--which allows students to personalize their learning space and consume information in digital or prinShe t form according to preference.
And some important points she made:
If we want to increase the number of college graduates in this country from where it stands at the current percentage of 39%, we need to do that by implementing technology, not by making college easier!! Technology facilitates learning by making learning more accessible to more students. Technology allows accommodation of different learning styles, abilities, disabilities, lifestyles...And it gives students a myriad of ways to express themselves. It expands the borders of the classroom by connecting formal and informal learning (e.g. in a personal learning network).
And on this note, I had a thought: why are we creating separate Faculty Learning Communities at TCC for UDL and technology? At present, both of these FLC's are new as of last year and separate entities. But there is no reason why they shouldn't...In fact, they are both working toward the same goal in very similar ways!
The proposal that the presenter discussed can be found at www.ed.gov/technology.
Friday, June 25, 2010
"Using Secondlife In ESL"
My presentation on teaching ESL in SecondLife at the 2009 Higher Education Conference for Teaching & Learning in Wenatchee, Washington:
Using Secondlife In Esl 2
View more presentations from monicamonk.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Roleplays in Second Life
My advanced grammar students prepared roleplays designed around target grammar, for example, modals of advice & obligation, passive voice, perfect tenses, etc. I gave them the choice of acting in front of the class or acting in Second Life. Two of five groups chose the Second Life option.
The assignment requires a bit more of students than simply acting in front of the class. In fact, I'd argue that it mimics real life more, where we are not just speaking but usually doing many things simultaneously (like driving a car and talking on the cell phone!) At the same time as they are speaking English, they are manipulating a mouse and moving their avatar, choosing and using language for the communicative situation and lexical domain specific to their SL location and scene. In a classroom roleplay, students are usually just speaking to each other with minimal if any props or actions. In SL, as you'll see in this movie, they might be dancing, flying, driving a car, wearing different clothes and bodies...just about anything!
How they did it:
1) They used various free software (this one is CamStudio, which TCC provided) to record the movie off their computer.
2) Both students sat at computers side by side and logged on to SL. They ran CamStudio on one of the computers and plugged a multimedia USB headset into that same computer.
3) While each student moved her avatar around on their own computer, recording voice was done off of the one computer. They passed the headset back and forth to record their voices.
And that's it! Very simple. The students had had perhaps 4 classroom experiences in SL and completed the project with very little help from me. My contribution consisted mainly of giving them costumes and props, showing them how to go shopping at Yadni's Junkyard and other places for free stuff (where they picked up their own props) and dropping landmarks in their inventories for locations they could shoot their movie, such as Bucharest and Venice.
The assignment requires a bit more of students than simply acting in front of the class. In fact, I'd argue that it mimics real life more, where we are not just speaking but usually doing many things simultaneously (like driving a car and talking on the cell phone!) At the same time as they are speaking English, they are manipulating a mouse and moving their avatar, choosing and using language for the communicative situation and lexical domain specific to their SL location and scene. In a classroom roleplay, students are usually just speaking to each other with minimal if any props or actions. In SL, as you'll see in this movie, they might be dancing, flying, driving a car, wearing different clothes and bodies...just about anything!
How they did it:
1) They used various free software (this one is CamStudio, which TCC provided) to record the movie off their computer.
2) Both students sat at computers side by side and logged on to SL. They ran CamStudio on one of the computers and plugged a multimedia USB headset into that same computer.
3) While each student moved her avatar around on their own computer, recording voice was done off of the one computer. They passed the headset back and forth to record their voices.
And that's it! Very simple. The students had had perhaps 4 classroom experiences in SL and completed the project with very little help from me. My contribution consisted mainly of giving them costumes and props, showing them how to go shopping at Yadni's Junkyard and other places for free stuff (where they picked up their own props) and dropping landmarks in their inventories for locations they could shoot their movie, such as Bucharest and Venice.
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