Final Thoughts

I just wrote a message on the community blog about what I learned this semester. I thought I would add a few things here since that question asked us to focus on just one thing.

Perhaps one of the most important things that I will take away from this class is a different sense of awareness or sensitivity to the new technologies and the students of today who are growing up with them. I’m now in touch with the fact that technology is everywhere and it has permeated everything. There were some things, like Twitter, which I had never heard of before this class, and now I hear about Twitter at every turn. CNN tells its viewers to Twitter them; there are battles to see who can have the most followers. Before the class I was somewhat aware of blogging, but now I see blogs everywhere and I even have my own. New social networking sites such as Twine, Linkedin, and Hi5, are springing up all the time. I’ve even joined a few.

I am now much more sensitive to privacy issues than I was before. I had, of course, heard about a Miss America contestant whose nude photos had surfaced on Facebook or job applicants who were denied employment because of their MySpace content. But I hadn’t thought about the issue of privacy for students who might use technology in a class.

Before this class I had never heard of a teaching philosophy. I appreciated learning about it and it was good to have to put together my “teachnology” philosophy. It made me think hard about what how and why I would use technology in my teaching. Now, I think I should spend some time thinking about and articulating my teaching philosophy.

I think the time we spent reflecting on today’s students was well worth it. It’s not that I learned a lot of new things, but it was helpful to contextualize it.

Learning styles was not a new thing to me. It was interesting, though, to juxtapose learning style and technology.

I also really appreciated learning about new media. This was a totally new concept for me. I will now be more aware of how writing and storytelling are changing; how important images are and the usefulness of video.

I know I will use the skills and knowledge I’ve gained in this class. If I have the opportunity to teach, I have some very specific ideas for using technology to enhance my students’ learning. On the other hand, I might never actually teach English in the future so I might not have the chance to apply the learning in a pedagogical way. Even so, I know much of what I’ve learned will be useful in my personal life. I will keep my blog and make it a personal link with friends and family. I will start to be the keeper of our family webpage and stop relying on my husband to post things for me. I will constantly be aware of technology and will want to stay abreast of changes and new developments. I will have confidence that I can learn new technology. I’m very glad I took this class.

Final Presentation

I find myself doing some major procrastinating with the final presentation. After an entire semester of learning about various ways to use technology in the classroom, I have a pretty good idea what I'll use in my ESL classes but I don't have a good idea about how to present my ideas. I think part of my problem is the fact that I'm not currently teaching. It's been four years since I taught. On top of that, I don't have plans to teach in the near future and might, in fact, never teach. So it's hard for me to pull my ideas together and talk about what I plan to do with technology.

I know that the most important thing in any ESL class I might teach is to give the students plenty of opportunity for practice. Whether it's a listening class, a conversation class, a writing class or whatever, they need to practice. I used to tell my Japanese students the three most important things to do when learning English is practice, practice, practice. It was always fun to hear them quoting me on that.

Another thing I believe strongly is that it is important to create an environment where students can relax and feel comfortable practicing. When there is anxiety, language learning is harder.

Those are two goals I would have for technology in the ESL classroom--to give students a lot of practice, and to create a learning community where they feel safe and relaxed.

Knowing what I want to accomplish, the task now is to decide on the technology that will best meet those goals. I think the choice of technology would be related to the class I'm teaching. If I'm teaching writing, for example, blogging would be a good way to give students practice and create community. If I'm teaching listening, using sites on the internet could give them practice and having them create and listen to podcasts could give them community. For conversation, MOO could be useful. The writing done in a MOO is very conversation-like. And, of course, MOO creates community. In a speech class, I would have students make videos in addition to doing speeches in front of the class. When making a video, students would, hopefully, practice over and over to get the speech just right. I don't think students do that when they are speaking to the class. With a video, they would also have the chance to see and hear themselves. While this can be anxiety producing for some students, the anxiety will be ameliorated by practice. Watching each other's videos would help build community. Another option for community building is to have students work on the videos in small groups.

As I see that written out, I think one thing I should do for the presentation is to choose one class to focus on. That will make it easier to decide on the most appropriate technology.

So, now that I've organized my thoughts a little better, I think it's time to open a PowerPoint document and start putting it together. Monday will be here before I know it!

Blog Requirements

I don't know if it was during class or after class as we were leaving last night that Sue mentioned that to be "on track" with our blog requirements we should have 30 blogs total. I thought I was behind in my writing and thought I needed to spend time this week "catching up." After all, when I asked Judy how many points we would lose if we didn't have 30 blogs, she said, "150." Of course, she was just kidding.

I'm happy to say, though, when I checked today I learned I had written in my blog 32 times. I was very surprised. It seemed like I struggled to think of topics to write about but as I look back, maybe it wasn't as hard as I thought.

Some people have said in their blogs that they will continue to write after the class is over. I've thought about that as well. I believe I will continue to write. Without the pressure to have to write and without the pressure to write on "appropriate" topics, I think I can enjoy writing just for the fun of it.

I haven't told many people outside of the class about this site. (Just the other day, though, my tennis group started a blog and I signed in and left a comment as Effie, which will put them in touch with my blogspot.) After the class is over, I will probably let my friends and family know about the site. I'll put more pictures up on it and use it as a place to connect with people in a social way.

Professional Web Designers

I like simple websites. Robin Williams likes simple, uncluttered websites. However, I read somewhere recently (I didn’t make note of it at the time and now I can’t find it) that web designs are changing. They are becoming, like many modern things, geared toward the Millennials who like all things fast-paced, and exciting, which means moving, busy, hyper-active websites.

As I searched the web for examples of pages I like and don’t like I found something interesting. I found a number of websites for individuals and companies that do website design. I thought that might be a good place to find examples of “good” websites. However, I was mistaken. Many of the websites of designers were not designed very well. For example: http://www.alteredimpressions.com/ is a webpage that to me looks messy, clutter, and hard to follow. There are too many words on it and it just isn’t attractive.

On this page for professional web design, the text flows beyond the borders of the box and into over the Copyright insignia: http://risingline.com/ It seems very unprofessional to me.

The designers of http://www.sabiadesign.com/ chose a font that is very hard to read. It is small and is doing some strange pixeling and it’s pink! The page contains typos. And to top it off, there is a graphic that looks like curly hair that seems pretty distracting to me. I thought for sure with the pink font and curly hair graphic, this was a woman’s company, but I was wrong. In addition to all that, the designer talks a lot about himself. I find this much too personal for a business website that is trying to attract customers. After finding his portfolio where he links to some of his work I took a look at some of the pages he designed. They are busy and cluttered and some simply don’t work.

I did find one good thing on his website. It’s some interesting statistics. He doesn’t say where he got them so I don’t know if they are accurate, but they are interesting, nonetheless:

A few things you probably didn't know...
40% of users will not return to a site when they have had a negative experience.
79% of users scan a web page.
62% of users do not find what they are looking for on a site.
25% of users read slower online than in print.
Most users spend less than 10 minutes on most web sites.
A user will decide within 20 seconds if they are going to browse past the home page of your web site.

This all just goes to show you, anyone can design a webpage and someone might even pay you to do it. Maybe we can supplement our teaching salary with what we’re learning in this class. Someday we may come back and thank Judy for the newfound knowledge.

Webpage Woes

I'm busy working on my webpage assignment. I understand why I shy away from challenges like this. You would think that learning a new computer program (Dreamweaver) and designing a simple, straightforward webpage that will deliver my message would be enough for right now. But, noooo, I want to do more. I want rollover buttons and I want animated gif images and I want to import photos and on and on. So, I find myself not just trying to learn Dreamweaver, but now I'm busy trying to figure out Fireworks besides. There just isn't enough time for all that, not even taking into consideration my difficulty with technology in general.

I have been able to figure out how to make a rollover button and I have one of those on the page. I hope I can make myself satisfied with that and now move onto putting up my content.

Technology meets Religion

When churches started playing rock gospel music with guitars and drums, that was one thing. But now...the passion play on Twitter? Can it be?

A New York City church, founded in 1697, has joined the technology age and Tweeted the entire passion play, "in 140 character bursts," for three hours today.

You can read about it here.

I've never used Twitter myself. But I find it difficult to believe that anyone would have the patience to read through three hours of 140 character bursts. Was that an exercise in futility?

Well, I did a little more digging and found that there were many, many comments posted about the Passion Play. It looks like a lot of people followed it.

I also found a link on the church's website with the Tweets. Here's the link. Perhaps it wasn't three-hours worth of reading. Maybe it was a small number of tweets published over a three-hour period. Cody, as our Twitter expert, can you tell me more about this?

Word Map, Technology, and Gender

Digging a little deeper into the Cool Stuff blog on Twine, I found this interesting tidbit. Neoformix has made an interactive word map of the most popular words used on Twitter about the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The larger the word, the more often it was used. You click on the word and it will take you to all the Tweets that used that word. That is cool!

I made another observation while checking out these Tweets. Based on profile pictures, I estimate that around 90% of the Tweeters tweeting about the Web 2.0 Expo were males. That doesn't really surprise me. In general, males tend to be more interested in technology than females. When you combine attending a technology expo with using technology to talk about the expo, I would assume men would far outweigh women.

That's been true of the STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) for a long time. The Department of Education has been trying to find out how to attract more females into these areas for years.

So far, not only have they failed to get more females into the sciences, but males are becoming less interested in going into STEM courses. Where are our scientists and engineers of the future going to come from?