Pondering about the final project.

As the final project in our Technology in Foreign Language course I need to come up with a research study that can be implemented in our classrooms and that can help explaining the advantages of using a specific kind of technology in the development of one or several skills.

I have always been interested in the first approach to a foreign language, that is...with zero or close to zero knowledge, and particularly in how students learn how to break that first fear barrier to speak with errors and to sound ridiculous or illogical. Like many other FL teachers I also believe that it is very important to integrate the cultural context into the learning process as a way to remember the power of being able to understand and interact with other realities around the world. So the first idea I had was to teach the students how to make a better use of the new technologies for this purpose in a podcast forum. Podcasts are very portable and very easy to create using accessible resources other than the Language Lab. In fact, most of the podcasts out there are spoken directly into the home PC using a built-in or external microphone. The idea is to give the students the opportunity, from the very beginning, to explore their capacity to speak a foreign language and express their own ideas about a general topic, outside of the classroom environment. I still don’t know exactly how I could incorporate this experiment into the daily class plan and that’s why it is still a work in progress.

Using a very simple online forum platform, instead of written messages, the students would create oral anonymous comments around a topic of their current interest such as life at school, or social events or even interaction with foreign cultures. The general idea is that the students listen to their own progress in pronunciation and use of vocabulary and grammar by comparing their podcasts. In theory this project could also demonstrate how technology could have a positive effect on the students as they socialize online in a more relaxed environment than the classroom. My idea is that all students would be required to upload a message (using ftp, for example) to the debate forum of no more than 60 seconds every 2-3 days or every week. The message could be saved as an mp3 or wav file under a knick name or alias with the date. As the semester progresses their voices are going to be more and more familiar to each other and eventually the nicknames will become useless, but their oral skills may have improve considerably.

Of course many of the students will look for ways to be able to speak without pronunciation or grammatical errors, and they would probably even read their comments from a convenient source but, would they have tried to do so if there was no other opportunity to speak the target language along the week? I think that the benefits from this could be great. Also, there can be other activities incorporated to the forum such as polls to find out how the students feel about creating podcasts and links to other websites or other media that could enhance the cultural aspect of the debates.

As of today I have two questions that I intend to answer with this research:

1) Is the podcast technology a better (faster, more relaxed, natural) way to impulse the oral production in students at beginner level in FL education?

2) How does an online oral forum contributes to enhance teaching of cultural aspects in FL education?

What do you think? Any comments?

Blogs and the internet in FL education

I must confess that even though I am a big fan of the internet and I spend more than half of my day online, I've always had a problem keeping up with postings on my blog, my facebook, myspace, and all of those my-life-online sites that have taken over the world. I like sharing with people, and I like reading about other people's opinions, tastes, perspectives...I like posting my own debates and even some of my own creative writing, and I definitely like receiving comments on those. The problem is that I'm also a very social person OFF-line and I fear the fact I cannot control my privacy the same way on the internet.
Today the the internet is a vast universe of information where you can answer almost every single question, including what is Mr. X is wearing today as he passes the London Eye near the Big Ben (check out www.earthcam.com for some amazing live webcams around the world). Thanks to the internet, we can get a recipe for smoked salmon Tokio Sushi-Ya style in one second and impress our mother on her birthday...but most amazingly...we can make all kind of shopping, investing, politics (!!!), and even have our own community of friends from all over the world without ever leaving your desk. In this endless space of cosmic proportions blogs are a hand-picked selection based on individual interests that somehow organize the information in an easier, more "organic" way.
Even though many students have the same problem I have with blogging, I think that of all online resources out there, blogs have the most potential in FL teaching because they are a very simple and "familiar" way to approach technology. In my opinion the "affective factor" (as researchers call it in our readings) has a more positive weight on the outcomes of blogging for a FL class. First of all, I think that blogs help breaking the fear barrier to make mistakes and sound ridiculous..and it creates a very different kind of interaction with the teacher. Your student's blog can be a discussion forum about things they are actually interested, and because is online...they can feed from all the websites on the target language and create their own kind of immersion. I would say that combining blogs and podcasts would be an ideal way to enrich your FL teaching. Considering the amazing popularity of online communities like Facebook or Myspace or Hi5, I think that Blogs can also simulate an online Spanish or French or whatever language immersion that can produce a very different kind of interest towards the foreign language and culture amongst young students. Due to time constrains it would be impossible to bring the blog to the classroom, but I think that is exactly the point: your students will be dedicating a lot of valuable time outside the school to interact with the second language and the culture in a more attractive, fun way. The difference between this and a long distance FL course would be...blogs can (should) be way lighter on the grammatical explanations and more concentrated into actually USING the language to communicate. Simply put, they can be just more social than anything else...and that is the kind of approach to FL education that in my opinion brings the best results.
So if I was going to commit to start a Spanish blog for teaching...I would probably make it a little closer to what facebook is right now. Blogs hold all kind of media and feeds from other sites that I would suggest my students, and then I would let them decide what to use and how to use it. I would only monitor their comments on each other posts and make the corrections right there. The cool thing would be...no need to say the truth....they get to be whoever they want to be.
I'm sure this is not precisely a novelty idea...there must be a lot of FL education through blogs right now (in fact, ask Moniqua about her spanish class blog!)...but I foresee that it won't be long before blogs or other some other kind of interactive online forums become the standard supplement to foreign language education.

New blogging skills

Half an hour to try out some new resources on with blogs. I'm posting this on a blog for the first time...check them out!

Ok this is a nerdy yet very cool video..also very popular on youtube, that I always show my students after the 3-4 week of their first semester.



Here is another embedded feature..is a sort of hang man game.

One more! This is a cool one, you can actually embed a map of wherever...this is the UF Football Stadium, double click to zoom in!!

Language Translations

Finally, this is just a link to a few retouched pics I took this winter in London.
You will need to click on your browser's BACK arrow to come back to this blog.
thank you for watching and...
wait for more!

On Powepoint

One advantage that I have noticed in the constant use of Powerpoints is how much you can recycle with them. There is a large amount of material in that format for language learning all over the internet, and most of it is designed to be shared and adapted to different programs (I found a good collection here). I think that sharing these ideas across the internet is a great way to combine different methodologies in the FL teaching, and I have used many of them in my own classes. I bring a new PP presentation every other class and it has been particularly useful in vocabulary and conjugation exercises. The students seem to respond very well over all, and I try to include a good combination of grammar and humor so it can also have an entertaining effect. I believe PP works as a great complement to the use of the board and chalk, specially because of the great variety of material and multimedia formats you can include in them, and is a lot more appealing than transparencies.
My last PP in class was from an idea I saw on a website. The slides presented a flash card game to practice the conjugation of some verbal forms and it can be used as an interactive challenge between two halves of the class. The students download the PP from my website the night before to learn the new words and they came prepared to play with a good pronunciation as well.
I think that PP can be a great teaching tool, yet I also make an extensive use of the board, and the CD and Video players. The most obvious reason to use PP these days is because, when used well, they can condense the content of the class in a very friendly, creative and fun way. I think that specially in FL they have a lot of potential, and as the technology evolves there are more resources to combine many language skills at the same. This could create an environment of relaxed immersion in the foreign culture as well.

A slidewhow

So here is a little demo of some PowerPoint skills acquired along the school years. Nothing fancy, just something I came up with during the last 30 min of class yesterday night.
Click on the pic below to download and watch it.

I'll be back soon.

My week online

Who would have guessed just 20 years ago that the internet was going to become a substitute for your little trip to the market for some milk, or your career as an international celebrity? I think that the amount of activities we do online these days is so amazing that we have actually created a dependency that in some cases seems like an actual drug. One of the most generalized symptoms now a days is the "new mail" symptom. If you are one of us, you are probably not surprised to know about this sort of anxiety that overcomes your life when you haven't checked your email for two days. It is very interesting and very scary.
This is what I do: I have gathered all my emails into one spot, thunderbird...where I download all from three different accounts to minimize the effort. And this thunderbird from Mozilla is a portable version that I can plug in with my flash-drive anywhere with the internet on. (For those of you who want to know further uses of the flash drive...click here)
So this week I have visited 4 online stores for a variety of reasons, 5 different online newspapers, half a dozen of my favorite blogs, and about a hundred sites looking for different answers I have plugged into the google search bar. I have accessed the internet using my laptop at school, at home, at the coffee shop, and I have used my cell phone service to check the weather or the email when laptop is not around.
Another interesting fact about my computer experience overall is that I'm slowly in the process of abandoning the monopoly of Microsoft and Apple and I am converting all my systems to the most digestible forms of linux...which is a completely free operating system with a strong sense of community called Ubuntu, which is also the name of an African philosophy that reminds me about what technology could mean for us if we really wanted to:
"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."

Technology & Me

I guess I can consider myself a some what advanced user of all the main stream technology out there. I love experimenting with it, and it all started back in Cuba, where new technology was not precisely a very accessible thing. I think that was precisely that what encouraged me to learn more about it. I still remember my first computer, not too long ago (1990), which was a 286x running at some 155Mhz and with a couple of MB of hard drive...I loved it. Monochrome display, it had Windows version 3.0, something that can be seen in some museums today. And fighting against its constant problems made me a little bit obsessed about learning about parts and "alternative ways" to solve problems. I can probably say the same about my first tape recorder, my first TV, and my first Video Game that wasn't really mine, because I shared with a couple of friends. You can imagine that entering the world of Bestbuy for the first time when I moved to the US was something like the rabbit hole for me, and you can bet I spent many hours in that hole until I started to grow to catch up with the latest inventions.
I think that one of the things that makes me excited about all kinds of technology is that it requires a good amount of imagination. Way before the Ipod there was someone out there struggling with long meters of tape trying to figure out how to get ride of them. And way before the Wifi internet there was someone fighting against phone bills and an incredible slow dial up connection. No doubt that not all technology has improved our lives...but I believe that it is not hard to use all that imagination in a good, constructive, healthy and smart way.
I could go on and on about this, but instead I will split it into my next posts, as I share with you my internet usage during the week and more.