I harvested knowledge and joy in this class

This course is my favorite one so far. It involves a lot of technology use and fun!!! I have learned so much out of this course. We got to explore a number of tools throughout the semester: Second Life, other Virtual Worlds, language learning apps, collaboration apps, Word cloud apps and etc. They are very helpful for my language learning and also my teaching. I think I will keep coming back to the course website to explore more about the tools in depth.

Reflection on group meetings

This is my first time to have a group meeting with students from Spain. It was quite amazing to collaborate with them for 8 weeks. I got to experience the way Spanish speakers talk or respond throughout the project which was exciting. More interestingly, I realized we were actually a part of a telecollaboration project after the first group meeting. I could see that the project has evolved so much that we learned a lot out of it. In addition, I got to experience the impact of scaffolding on our group projects. What we learned out of each class was actually a scaffolding for our group projects. We read so much about CMC and TEPBLL, and the knowledge of that led us to our group discussions or presentations about telecollaboration projects. It was very interesting to see that.

Week 15 I bought knowledge at the MALL!

We explored a few mobile apps for language learning in class. It was quite interesting to investigate the pedagogical application of MALL because I have been using MALL for learning languages. Duolingo is the first MALL that I used for learning Italian. The experience was not bad at all, but this app still has some issues. Firstly, the intonation of speech in the app was awkward. It negatively affected the way I spoke Italian. Secondly, the vocabulary in each category is limited which is not useful for advanced learners. Finally, learners don't get to interact with people by using the app.

For MALL in general, they certainly have strengths compared to traditional classroom settings. You can get access to learning 24/7 and get instant correction. This can suit different needs of learners because some may want to go crazy about learning languages. Other than the efficiency, MALL is mostly free to use. This can offer opportunities for people who cannot afford for learning in a university.

However, one thing that MALL cannot compete with traditional classroom setting is the interaction with people. Learning in a traditional classroom gives people a platform to interact with each other. This can help with learners' speaking because they can get timely feedback from their peers or teachers. Timely feedback is highly significantly for learners' speaking. Without the awareness of mistakes, learners may find it harder to correct their speaking.

Week 14 Thanksgiving Break!!!

I had so much fun during the break! I got to enjoy my first thanksgiving in the States.

Week 13 Podcasting and Expert Panel

It was interesting to see that podcasts can be divided into 4 categories: discrete-category podcasts, ESL-focused podcasts, general audience podcasts and super podcasts. I spent a lot more on general audience podcasts like TED talks because those podcasts offer more creative ideas from different disciplines while providing language inputs. The ideas acquired from the podcasts can further motivate me to apply the language inputs in my daily learning. However, the choice of podcasts varies among learners. Learners at beginner level may not choose general audience because this category requires more knowledge of advanced vocabulary. However, they can choose superpodcasts for their language learning because this type offers a wide range of podcasts which suit needs of different levels.

The application of podcasts in language learning is highly useful. As an English learner, I started using podcasts for learning a few years ago. The immense input from podcasts has helped me level up to advanced level. This illustrates the potential of podcasts for learning. Moreover, podcasts should be very beneficial for auditory learners because these learners acquire input faster by listening.

Aside from the discussion about podcasts, we also have our Expert Panel presentations this week. My group presented on scaffolding strategies in a telecollaborative project. Scaffolding strategies in a project are provided for all levels of learners. However, the amount of scaffolding for low-levels may exceed that for higher levels because higher levels seem to struggle less in public speaking or understanding. Moreover, scaffolding strategies should be implemented at different phases of a project so that learners can better acquire the knowledge.

Week 12 Learning styles

Before the discussion in class, I have never heard of these learning styles: Auditory, Tactile, Visual and Kinesthetic. However, The awareness of these learning styles gave me a lot of insights into constructing effective scaffoldings in my final project. In my project, scaffolding has been taken into consideration, but it is not student-oriented because I didn't consider students' needs. The discussion about the learning styles really gave me an opportunity to revise my scaffolding. Perhaps conducting a survey about students' styles before the implementation of the project will help me adapt my scaffolding strategies.

Other than the application in a collaborative project, the awareness of learning styles can be applied in my teaching. Honestly, I have never thought about my students' learning styles before, but now the consideration of their styles can help improve the effectiveness of my teaching. Integrating more visuals, audio input and also group discussions may allow students to absorb the knowledge faster.

Week 11 Wiki and language learning apps

Wiki was a brand new tool for me. I don't like its interface, but its potential for pedagogical application was immense. Wiki can function really well for a telecollaboration project because it allows different users to synchronously or asynchronously work on a task or a project. If students from different countries want to learn about cultures, all of them can add the content in the same document on Wiki. In this way, they can compare the similarities and differences between their cultures. Doing this can not only save their time to google sources, but also give them a full picture of what other people do in their countries. Other than the potential for a collaborative project, Wiki can also be used for teaching. As an ESL instructor, we have a number of group discussions or work in class. If students can Wiki for their group work, it can save them a lot of time because they don't need to communicate via emails.

Aside from exploring Wiki, we also investigated a list of language learning tools: Livemocha, BeSpeke, Lingualia and etc. These tools are free to use, and they are user friendly. Language learners can have more options if they don't like some of them.


I introduced these tools to my students in class and gave them around 10 minutes to explore the tools. My students were all excited about the tools because they could have more opportunities to practice their English by using these language learning applications.

With no doubt, these tools are useful for learning languages, but their effectiveness is still debatable. The reason is that free versions place restrictions on access to everything. If learners want more access, they need to pay for premium.

Week 10 TEBPLL projects

We examined two major projects that Dr. Sadler and Dooly conducted in the past few years. These projects were carried out between schools in different countries. In project 1, students were learning language through appreciating arts. They gained a lot of improvement through this project as it could be seen from their entries in the journal. Their vocabulary were expanding, and the level of their vocabulary were rising. This outcome really shocked me because the participants were mostly involved in enjoying arts. However, their competence in different areas were boosted.

Project 2 is probably my favorite. A lot of scaffolding was integrated in this project. Students were firstly provided with flashcards to learn vocabulary, and then they were guided to use those new vocabulary for the technology-enhanced section. In technology-enhanced section, students started to apply what they have learned in previous section to diagnose and deal with patients. Based on cases presented from Machinima, they needed to give suggestions using those vocabulary. The entire process was amazing because the scaffolding was designed very well. It let me see that scaffolding could affect the design of the project. This takeaway has changed my perspective of conducting collaboration project, and it also gave me some insights into constructing activity sequence in my final project.

Week 9 Presentation

In group meeting 4, my group discussed about Uni-collaboration website where university educators can share their resources with each other. This website is awesome because it collects a lot of useful resources from educators around the world. University educators can upload their projects on the website and also use projects designed by other people. This seems to be a group brainstorming which expands the potential of critical thinking. Other than sharing their projects, those educators can also collaborate with each other. They can create a collaboration project between their classes. This idea lets me realize that collaboration is not just for students. More interestingly, I found that there were a couple of Chinese universities participating in this big project. It illustrates that collaboration is also getting popular in China. This is great because it means I can obtain more sources to conduct collaboration projects in the future in China.


Aside from the presentations, we also explored some interesting tools: Blogger, WordPress and Wix. All of these websites are designed for creating a website or a blog. They serve well for our teaching. My instructor used blogger to create his own course website. His course website looks awesome because you can customize it and put images or videos on the website. This can be beneficial for teaching because students can easily find what they need on the website.

My technical review

Week 8 Discussions

We had lots of discussions this week. Firstly, we discussed about articles about TEPBLL. I was assigned to read the article Promoting competency-based language teaching through project-based language learning written by Dooly in 2013. This article really gave me a lot more insights into TEPBLL and other theories. It let me see the differences between PBLL and PBL as well as PBLL and TBLT. It was quite interesting to see that language learning theories were evolving. From Project based learning, task-based language teaching to project based language learning, the theories have grown so much. Undoubtedly, PBLL theories share a lot of common features with the other two theories, but its focus on authentic purpose really help learners gain more in learning. The scaffolding that is integrated in PBLL gives learners more opportunities to explore by themselves. This will enhance learners' ability to solve problems and also their competence in many different areas.

Another thing that I liked about this article is the author brought up the topic about low-level language learners in a collaboration project. Whether low-level language learners need more training and scaffolding before the project really interested me. I believed they did need more scaffolding than higher level learners since their language proficiency may caused issues in a project. This article did not specifically pinpoint this topic, but offered some suggestions to get low-level learners engaged in a project. The authors' suggestions were focused on enhancing those learners' confidence in speaking since a collaborative project requires interaction. The author suggested that teachers should slowly build on the scaffolding to help learners overcome their fear of communication.

Aside from the discussion about TEPBLL, we also investigated some word cloud applications: Tagul, Wordle and Tagxedo. These applications can be used for language teaching. They can be applied to a warm-up discussion where students need to find out what they will be learning based on the words presented. Other than that, those applications can be used for teaching high frequency words used in academic papers.

Week7 Virtual Worlds

We mainly explored 5 interesting virtual worlds: Haboo, Club Penguin, Weeworld, Woogi World and Chit Chat City. Not all of these VWs are designed for language learning, but you can always discover its pedagogical application.

My group did some investigation about Club Penguin. This application was mostly designed for children. Although it was not aimed for language learning, it still had some pedagogical potential. One of its application is the games in there can be used to expand children's vocabulary. Take the game Smoothie Smash for instance, we can use that to teach the vocal of fruits to children. This method sounds a bit simple, but it is useful because we integrate games into language teaching. In addition, it may be more effective than merely teaching children vocabulary by reading. Some studies have found that children absorb knowledge faster when they are really interested in learning something.


Another application of Club Penguin is we can use it to teach children practical skills in our life. For instance, you can keep pets in this virtual world. In this case, we can teach them how to take care of pet in real life by showing them how to feed a pet. These simple things in Club Penguin can be used in many different ways as long as you are creative.




Aside from exploring these virtual worlds, we also had a discussion about the readings. My group read the article Second language use, socialization, and learning in Internet interest communities and online gaming written by Thorne, Black and Sykes. One thing that interested me was the online learning community. This type of community is beneficial for language learning because it's interest oriented. Having passion about something can really improve learner's efficiency. However, one thing that concerns me is whether this type of community can also hinder learner's language acquisition because some active community members are non native speakers. If they provided problematic feedback in terms of linguistics, would that hamper other learners' learning?  

Week5 Theory of Project Based Language Learning

We started off with a discussion about CMC & PBTELL theories, and then moved on to another discussion about tools that we could use for our first online meeting. In this entries, I want to first talk about the lists of tools that we explored and then focus on those theories.

We went through a list of tools like Skype, google+ and etc. All of those tools were great because they enable us to video chat with our group members. Skype and google+ are the most common tool that people use to chat online, but it seems to me that both of them don't work really well when it comes to video chat across countries. In this case, one thing that I wish we could have done in class was to test the quality of all the tools in groups.

Now I want to talk about those CMC theories. There are three major concepts mentioned in class: behaviorism, cognitive and sociocognitive. These concepts, to a certain extent, help explain the process of language learning. For behaviorism, its reinforcement theory gives us a new perspective to perceive how telecollaboration can enrich its use. Learners in a telecollaboration project can provide positive and negative reinforcement for each other. For example, English native speakers can give English learners feedback to help those learners achieve better learning outcomes. For sociocognitive theory, telecollaboration project can still play an important role in helping learners learn a language because there will be a lot of interaction involved in the project. The peers can interact with each other either via video chat or written forms.

Week 4 Preparation for collaboration & Screen recording software

We did a lot of preparation for the collaboration and explored Camtasia this week.

We signed the contract for collaboration, discussed about TEAMMATES evaluation system and talked about the focus of 1st group meeting. Other than that, we also drafted a nice email to welcome our groups.

Another activity this week was explore the functions of Camtasia because we need to do a technical review by recording ourselves. Camtasia was brand new to us, but it was an awesome tool to me based on what I have learned from the tutorial. You can do screen capture, film editing, audio editing and many other things with Camtasia. These functions will serve really well for technical review since we need to record our screen and voice. I believe this tool can also be useful for teaching--especially online teaching--because it gives us an opportunity to demonstrating what we want the audience to know while keeping our voice. The function of adjusting the window of the screen and ourselves allows us to emphasize things we want.

Week 3 Other Virtual Environment and Setting

Tuesday

we had a discussion about upcoming collaboration with students in Spain. It was really exciting to know that we were going to collaborate with other language learners. After the discussion, we talked about making an individual and class introduction video for our collaboration group in Spain. Then we moved on to a Second Life building activity which was the most interesting part in today's class. Last week, we have explored things in Second Life, so the building activity today allowed us to investigate the pedagogical potential of Second Life. Building things in this VW might sound a bit simple, but the reality was the opposite. It could take you an hour to build a chair.


After this activity, I realized this VW actually had immense potential of helping people learn a language. We can build up a museum for language learner to explore items in there by themselves. We can also create a Scavenger hunt in the VW so that leaners could be exposed to more vocabulary. Other than this function, Second Life can also be used to hold a conference or a meeting. This use sounds amazing to me because it makes telecollaboration more accessible and effective. With this use, we don't need to fly all the way to Europe or somewhere else to attend a conference. We can just invite educators to share their insightful findings in Second Life. How cool is that!!!

Thursday

we went out shooting class intro video! Great experience!

 

Week 2 Second Life and Education

In this class, we mainly explored the Second Life. We had a tour in Second Life and learn some basic skills in this virtual world. I started to get the idea about why Second Life was introduced in this class. As we were doing the tour, I was surprised about how virtual worlds could be used for language learning. The fact that lectures and meetings could be incorporated in the virtual world really shocked me because I have never thought about the pedagogical purposes of virtual worlds. I used to play Legends of League, and I knew we could also play against people from other countries. However, I did not use it for pedagogical purposes. Another case that occurred to me was one of my best friends who did meet people from Europe or America when playing an online game. He told me it really helped him with language learning. Surely, unlike LOL or games like that, Second Life is more education-focused since there weren’t a lot of games going on in there.

In the first time when I logged in Second Life, I ran into an avatar who started talking to me in Spanish!! I was quite excited about that since I planned on learning Spanish as my 4th language. As we digged deep into Second Life, I came to realize that a great many tools that we had been using could be applied for language learning or teaching. All we had to do was to figure out the way to use for language learning.

After reading the article Language learning in virtual worlds: Research and Practice written by Sadler and Dooly in 2013, I got to know more about using technologies for language teaching. In that article, they presented some statistics of  an experiment they had conducted in a class in Spain. They tested the effectiveness of Second Life on assisting children's language learning. The data demonstrates that the use of VW in language learning has enriched the education purpose. Using VW for language learning helped learners--especially those who were intimidated by speaking to others in person--gain confidence in talking and learning. In addition, VW helped learners achieve the “5Cs” as they can explore new things ranged from specific subjects like art to a broader scope e.g., culture. The knowledge of the potential of VW gave me some insights into teaching Chinese students who were struggling with learning English back in China.

Week1 Intro to Second Life

This is Jason Ou, a chinese student who is fighting to be a teacher, haha! I have no knowledge of computer-meditated language learning. However, I have been a language learner for over 10 years, so I believe I can find some answers to questions I have about language learning in this class. I started using technology to learn English when I was a sophomore in college, and I have seen so much growth in my path of learning English. Therefore, I am eager to dive into this class to know more about learning language with technologies.

Today we learned about a virtual world called Second Life. This tool was brand new to me, and I did not understand the relation to language learning until the teacher brought it up. We focused on the avatar in Second Life in this class such that we could start exploring more in this virtual world.