WEEK 8: Online Tools in Language Classrooms

The journey to innovation is in its 8th week. I have learned lots of things within those 7 weeks and this tradition of learning new things is still going on. This week we have explored ANVILL. ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a course management system where teachers can create oral communication course. It can be called “an innovative language lab”. Although it serves as a language lab,  it is different from the traditional language labs that we use. In ANVILL, learners have multiple ways of interacting. The students have a chance to step inside the window of their computers and interact with the real World where target language is actually used. The content is fairly easy to display. By the help of this tool, the students will find a way to share their own experiences with the other students from their country or from other countries.  ANVILL provides many useful features such as Voiceboard, Livechat, Forum etc. The teachers can post questions and students can response making their own video and audio recordings. I belive that it is an easy to use tool which will enhence student learning. The best part of ANVILL is that it is FREE! As teachers you can create your own teacher’s account from https://anvill.uoregon.edu/anvill2/user/teacher

At this point I have to thank Jeff Magoto for being with us in order to share his experiences and answering our questions.

This week, we have also experienced things other than ANVILL. We have met many tools to prepare online or offline worksheets for our classes. It is really great to know that a wide collection of useful online tools are there for the teachers to create online or offline worksheets, flashcards, tests and games. One can prepare worksheets by using the following sites;

• http://www.toolsforeducators.com/
• http://bogglesworldesl.com/http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspxhttp://hotpot.uvic.ca/  http://eolf.univ-fcomte.fr/index.php?page=technically-interesting-hot-potatoes-pages
• http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/create.htmlhttp://wizard.4teachers.org/
• http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/index.php
• http://poster.4teachers.org/worksheet/view.php?id=166165

 “Hot Potatoes”  is a very beneficial tool to create a variety of exercises and it is for this reason that it is one of my favorite sites. It is practical as you download it to ypur PC so that you can use it off line. Features such as JQuiz, JCross, JMatch, JMix, JCloze etc. are easy to use parts of the program. The below list consist of some of the tools that you can use in your teaching;

HotPotatoes Web

Poster Wizard

EasyTest Maker

Toolsfor educators

Lanternfish

CrossPuzzle Games

SMILE

 

I belive that the best part of preparing worksheets is that you can save time because the only thing you have to do with these sites is that you only prepare the questions, the rest of the work is done by the site itself. All the formating and cover pages are done by the site. By trial and error method, I belive that I have gained a lot from these sites. As using these tools is something new to me,  I had to work hard and create some very useful worksheets. Once you use them, you will find out that the hardest part of it is the first try. It will be only then that you will find it practical. 

The tools that we have used in this course generally serve for different purposes. For example Blogger is a good place to post comments and written tasks, Nicenet can be used for written class discussions. Nicenet can also be used for the sharing among colleagues. I will create a nicenet class so that I can show my collegues the use of Nicenet. You can use the padlet to genarate a “virtual wall” where every class member can share. We can guide our students to use the wall to share the sites they find useful with their friends whom they share groups. They can even share the wall for their personal needs. I personally created a wall for myself for my favorite music. You can visit my page from http://padlet.com/wall/mymusiclist  and add your favorite songs so that I can have an idea about your taste of musicJ.  If you want to share sites and files with students you can use Google Sites. Students can also share sites or files among each other as well by using this tool. One can use wiki and Google docs for class surveys.As it can be seen from the given sites, web is a great ocean full of tools to be used for educational purposes.

This week is a bit different from the previous weeks as I feel that we are coming to an end. While I feel satisfied on one side, I feel excited about the topics of the coming week too but,  I also feel a bit sad as we have only got 2 weeks left. All the pedagogically supported tools I have met in this course were new to me and I am sure I wouldn’t have had a chance to learn about them in another way.