At MELTA we have a workshop coming upon 27 February 2010 with Karenne Sylvester, who has been teaching blended learning courses using Ning, a social networking cum online course creation tool. She's started an online series on how to learn English on her blog. Her first post is on how she gets her students reading blogs, and includes the blogs she recommends to her students, and they include my favorites and introduced me to some new ones, especially Dominic Cole's, a blogger who keeps up not one but three very interesting blogs. Really cool. This is Karenne's list:
I'd add Dominic Cole's main blog: http://www.dcielts.com/archive/ Karenne will be starting up her own blog for learners again, too.
And what about the Business Spotlight and Spotlight crowd, who write real blogs, and nice ones, too, but for a magazine? For some reason the blogging world hasn't accepted them as one of their own. I'm not sure why that is. Is it unacceptable to recommend a magazine blog? Or is it that they're not engaging on Twitter, or commenting on other people's blogs? I figure that might be a faux pas in the blogging community. Yet the blogs are clearly directed at a language learner, and are explicitly educational. I don't think that's a bad thing.
This article from the MELTA News archive was written by Lucy Mellersh. She also set up a wiki for MELTA at http://melta.wikispaces.com: Dear Auntie Web, I keep hearing my students talking about wikis. I don't want to show my ignorance by asking what they are. Could you help? Love from Victoria
Dear Vicky, A wiki is a website with an edit button. Clicking on Edit transforms the browser into an editor and you, the reader, into a co-author.
For starters, here's Lee Lefever's introduction to Wikis in Plain English:
Wikis are free
Wikis are very easy to create and change, you don't have to know any html. You notice a typo? Just click on Edit, correct it, and save your changes. Some information is missing? Just click on Edit and add it.
Wikis are designed to be edited by groups of people rather than just one individual. Wikis are perfect for collaborative projects because they allow a group of people to work together on the same document.
Wikis are stored and edited on the Internet so you can access them from anywhere.
The history of changes to a wiki is stored alongside the wiki itself, so you can easily revert to a previous version.
A discussion area is attached to every wiki page where you can ask questions and make suggestions about that page.
Wikis are good places for collecting and structuring information. A wiki is a linked group of pages that can include text, pictures and even audio or video clips.
The best known use of a wiki is for Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org/ an online encyclopedia written by its readers. But don't let this example restrict your ideas about ways to use a collectively edited website with your classes. There are several types of wiki in use, all wikis achieve the same aims using slightly different software. For some wikis, such as Wikipedia, you will need to use commands for formatting text, I like to use Wikispaces because there are no commands to learn.
What about business English? In the business world, wikis are increasingly being used as knowledge bases in company intranets. Specialist information can be recorded that might otherwise be lost when an employee leaves. Wikis remove the bureaucracy that creates obstacles to the collection of knowledge.
Wikis in the classroom If you've ever thought it would be nice to have a class website, a wiki is ideal. The wiki format is particularly suited to mixed ability classes because it allows everyone to contribute in their own way. Creating meaningful content brings the language alive, students will be scanning and reading for gist when searching for information to include. Students can edit and add to each-other's stuff thus honing their composition, grammar and vocabulary skills, while playing a part in creating a piece of work they can all be proud of. Here are some ideas for using wikis with your class:
A city guide for Munich or for a town in an English speaking country.
A class or language school web page showcasing student work or with useful info about nearby cafes and parks or the closest public transport.
Students can work on wiki pages focussing on a hobby, interest, or a subject relevant to their work
Create a wiki project around an existing story. If you're dealing with a particular book or film in your class, you could create a wiki to expand on this theme. Get students to write imaginary interviews with the characters, tell the story from a different point of view, describe what they think happened next, or what happened before.
Students could compile a guide giving tips and links for practicing English
Students could collect information about a particular aspect of the target culture. The Edinburgh Fringe, American food (with recipies), table manners, the South African music scene.
Create a learning record where language tips and vocabulary can be collected and expanded upon as they come up in class. Asking a weaker student to put something into the wiki will help them to review it and gain a deeper understanding of the topic. You can check and modify the resulting information.
Students could make a wiki about accents or regional language differences (you can even embed audio and video into a wiki).
A glossary of difficult words and phrases. Students could just add a word, or they could attempt to define it or describe its use.
Students could write reviews of easy readers from the class libarary
Teachers could share teaching ideas to go with a particular textbook or curriculum unit.
Teachers could collect and structure teaching ideas and reviews of teacher development workshops.
Wikis support collaboration regardless of the time of day or location, so you could even use the wiki in projects with partner classes abroad.
Make your changes (maybe by adding another limerick), the editor works like a simple word-processor.
When you're finished, click on the Save button (you can also leave a short note about the edit and give your name in the note field at the bottom of the page)
Joining Wikispaces There are many implementations of the wiki idea. Wikispaces http://www.wikispaces.com is easy to use and free and therefore the perfect wiki for beginners. Create an account with Wikispaces by choosing a user name, entering a password and your email address and clicking on the Join button.
Creating a wiki Create a new wikispace for your class, your school or your community. Do it at the same time as joining from the Space name field on the Join Now! page, or if you're already a member, click on the Make a New Space link under Actions. Choose a name for the wiki, this name will be shown at the top of the pages as well as becoming part of the web address. For example, melta.wikispaces.com A tutorial will walk you through some of the wiki basics, or you can just start by editing the first page (Home).
Linking Create links from your wiki by highlighting a word and then choosing the link icon (looks like a chain).
A window appears asking where you want to link to. Choose from a list of pages belonging to the same wikispace or enter a URL to link to an external web page.
Adding a page Create additional pages by clicking on New Page at the top of the sidebar on the left. Pages created in this way will automatically get added to a table of contents on the left.
Note that you can only create new pages when you are logged in. You will be prompted for a page name.
Adding pictures Upload images and files from your computer and add them to your wiki or add them directly from the Internet. Only logged in users can upload files and images. Click on the picture icon
A window appears where you can browse and upload files from your computer. Once you've uploaded the image it will appear in the window, double-click on it to insert it onto your wiki page.
Adding members Once your wiki is set up, you might decide to restrict editing to just your own students.
Ask your students to register with wikispaces.
Ask them to request membership of your space by clicking on the Join this Space link near the top of their sidebar.
Go to Manage Space (link in the sidebar)
Under Space Settings, click on Members and Permissions
Scroll down the page and add them from the list of Pending Membership Requests
When all members of your class have joined your wiki, click on Protected under Space Permissions to stop other people from being able to edit.
Wikis for teachers These two sites offer educational resources for teachers and they provide a platform for sharing learning materials you have created:
At MELTA, the Munich English Language Teachers’ Association, there are many teachers who are quite frustrated with new media technology. There it is, you can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it, but you just can’t quite get your hands on it. There are techie blogs out there, sure, Nik Peachey (http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com) is one of the best, but they’re “so high-igh-igh above me”, and it makes a teacher feel awfully old, doesn’t it, to have to trawl through the language and only understand maybe half of it. Well, it's a shame when good teachers with deep knowledge feel like idiots. That is one of the things that we really need to change. Lucy Mellersh built this blog for MELTA about a year ago to go with the tech advice column, Ask Auntie Web, in the MELTA Newsletter. But then MELTA kept it under wraps because we wanted to promote the MELTA Forum (http://www.melta.de/meltaboard/index.php). That forum is a communication platform for MELTA members. Yet we're a big community of teachers out here on the web, with great big questions and a great big pool of knowledge. So here goes a relaunch:
Let’s build Ask Auntie Web into the blog it could be. Let's make it a place to share knowledge. As you know, the most productive part of learning is asking the right questions. What have you always wanted to be able to do in teaching? What applications would you need to make your classes simply brilliant? What tech tricks have you seen somewhere that you'd really like to be able do yourself? Ask Auntie Web, and we can start a discussion.
Photo: George Sled, Panoramio How it works: You can post comments under each blogpost. Or you can become an author on this blog, and join the writing team. Just send an email to "info (at) melta (dot) de" (this strange spelling is to avoid spam, so translate it to a normal email address). You can also follow the Auntie Web conversation on twitter. You haven't discovered twitter yet? Then read the first blogpost, below.
A window appears where you can browse and upload files from your computer. Once you've uploaded the image it will appear in the window, double-click on it to insert it onto your wiki page.
