Innovative uses of ICTs in teaching and learning processes
Jeff Miller (The University of British Columbia)
Beyond the Learning Management System: Integrating Social Media in a Master’s of Educational Technology Program.
30 students follow the Master of Educational Technology at UBC. The idea behind the project was open new spaces by means of social media.
Affordances/constraints:
- Who is “in charge”?
- Who has the ability and authority to write/speak?
- What design tools are available to teachers/students?
- Who decides on the structure/content of materials and activities?
- What is private and what is public?
- How do we track engagement out of an LMS?
At the end of the course, all the scholarship is public.
In another course (ETEC540), part of the course is sitting on WebCT, but another part of it is out on the open at the UBC Wiki for ETEC540. Blogs were also used, but it came out that blogs are much less creative than wikis. And normally, the outcome of materials made by the students is bigger than the original material that the teacher put initially on the course’s website.
One of the biggest design challenges is how to create a community in each and every space, how to engage the members of that community, foster creation and not passive “consumption” of (learning) material, etc.
A good practice is to use leading edge technology, but not bleeding edge one; negotiating public and private learning spaces; developing sustainable development and delivery models; negotiating new roles.
Alfredo Álvarez Álvarez, María Dolores Porto Requejo (Universidad de Alcalá).
Collaborative environments 2.0 in the learning of languages in the university.
Web 2.0 and higher education: enables learner-centered teaching, individualized monitoring (different learning paths), autonomy in the learning process, reflection over one’s own learning (self-assessment).
Web 2.0 and language learning: need of valid experiences, lack of measuring instruments, need to reorganize traditional competences.
Social networking sites offer the possibility to interact amongst one’s peers and this stimulates the generation of knowledge. This stimulation is enhanced by the novelty of the platform.
Wikis and Social Networking Sites (Ning):
- Enable “real” activities (not only for the teacher’s eyes).
- Enable constant revisioning.
- High level of participation.
- Do not normally pose any difficulty in the use of the tool.
- Higher levels of self-confidence, as one’s evolution is quickly realized.
- High degrees of autonomy in the learning process.
- New and crossed leaderships: students leading a given discipline (i.e. get higher marks) work together with other (usually different) students that lead the usage or appropriation of the technology.
- Stimulate collaborative learning.
- Open possibilities of team working.
- Are perceived as personal spaces, neither working or learning spaces nor institutional spaces.
Karina Olmedo, Mariona Grané, Lucrezia Crescenzi, Rafael Suárez (Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius – Universidad de Barcelona).
Integration of mobile devicees in traditional e-learning environments.
How do students value the use of ICTs and mobile devices in learning processes? How does the use of the Internet and mobile devices once they have been used for learning?
The project was carried out on a master’s course on community managing. The mobile device was an iPad.
Most of the interaction in the course took place on a forum. Interviews were used to get the evaluation of the students on their learning processes, the usage of technology during and after the course, etc.
Most of the students changed their behaviours concerning the Internet: kind of usage and, most especially, the places where they use to connect to the Internet and the amount of time connected during the day, etc.
Adelaida Martín Bosque (CEA – University of New Haven); Mar Mejías Caravaca (IES Abroad Barcelona).
Twitter en la clase de ELE: desarrollando la PLN (Personal Learning Network) de los estudiantes.
Undergraduate students from the US that study Spanish for a semester in Barcelona, on an A1.1. and B2.1 level course lasting 45-60h.
First steps: create a new twitter account. On the one hand, they will be twitting in Spanish, and their followers are (usually) non-Spanish speakers. On the other hand, because of privacy issues.
Hashtags will be used to monitor the conversation on Twitter. Of course, the hashtag can be used by other people not belonging to the course but willing to join the ongoing conversation. Some directions were given on the number of tweets, how interaction should be (e.g. addressed not to the teacher, but to their peers), and some hints on who to follow on Twitter (celebrities, writers, etc. in other words, to get out of the community of the classroom).
Some examples:
- Interaction with other users leads to language correcting amongst peers, or even self-correcting.
- Mentions to other users and usage of several hashtags out of the course’s one.
Pros:
- Establishment of a strong learning community: #dudasELE.
- Overcoming the barriers of time and space.
- Development and use of communicative and metacognitive strategies.
- Development of the student’s digital competence.
- Integration of Web 2.0 tols.
Cons:
- Lack of Twitter expertise.
- Interference with personal life (the solution being a new dedicated account).
- Lack of trust in the tool (“Why do I have to use Twitter?”)
- Increase of workload.
- Requires higher commitment from teachers (see #profesELE and #TwitterELE).
- Need to create a new way to assess: Twitter Rubric.
More information at: Cómo evaluar el uso de Twitter con estudiantes de ELE.
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