11 Technology in the EFL World-1

8/12/2019 11 Technology in the EFL World-1

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International House World Organisation

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IH Teacher Trainer

Module Eleven Technology in the EFL WorldPre Module Reading

1 IntroductionYou are probably aware that technology is playing an increasing role in theway we interact with the world, with information and with each other. Astechnology continues to gain prominence in the way that peoplecommunicate, in the EFL world we are continually looking at the opportunitiesit affords. Clearly one of the key advantages is access, creating opportunitiesfor learners and teachers to access learning and training, irrespective of theirlocation.In this unit, well look at tools that can be used for training, both face-to-faceand online, but with a particular emphasis on online tools. A lot of these canbe used in face-to-face courses, though, and several are of interest to thetrainer, or teacher, because of the opportunities for collaboration and learnerautonomy they present.Technology is a rapidly changing field, and new tools are appearing all thetime that offer opportunities for training and teaching, so its a good idea to tryand keep abreast of things through social networking (joining Facebookgroups, following other teachers on Twitter, for example) and socialbookmarking, where users share links to websites and so on (such as Diigo orScoopit).

2 Online training versus face-to-face trainingIf youve got to this stage of your professional development, its likely that youhave been on training courses and possibly delivered training courses ortraining sessions for teachers. A lot of things that can be done in a trainingsession can also be done online, and the online environment can also openup other opportunities.Online training is often delivered through an online classroom, called a VirtualLearning Environment (VLE), such as the one you are using on this course.The whole course can be delivered through the VLE, with materials deliveredonline, participants engaging in discussion, quizzes, and all the other activities

youve been doing so far. The tutor and course administrator can control whatthe participants can see and have access to, can provide feedback and so on.Popular VLEs include Moodle, which youre using, and Blackboard, but otherswill keep appearing and a lot of the features can be replicated using otherservices such as the various features of Google.Other tools that can be used in online training include wikis, blogs, socialmediaand so on. There are numerous online tools and websites that can alsobe used. Some have been designed for education and training, others areadapted by teachers and trainers to suit their needs. It is important as anonline trainer, or as a trainer in the technological world, to keep up with whichtools are useful, how tools can be used in training, and also how we can pass


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on to the teachers that we are training an awareness of how differ tools canbe used in their teaching.

The traineesProbably the main consideration when training online, as opposed to face-to-face, is the trainees and how they interact with the material, with each other,and with the trainer. Ensuring engagement and involvement is one of the keyroles of the online trainer. The form this takes will depend largely on the typeof activity and communication that the trainees are engaged in. This couldtake the form of synchronous, where everyone is online at the same time, orasynchronous, where everyone communicates in their own time,communication, which we'll discuss later.As a teacher and trainer you no doubt take into account the learning styles

and preferences of your learned and trainees. In online training this is equally,if not more, important. As well as bringing their learning preferences withthem, participants in online training environments bring with them differentways of engaging with the material and each other. This will affect how thetrainer interacts and engages with them and the materials they are using.A useful text for online trainers is Gilly Salmon's E-moderating: The key toteaching and learning online (RoutledgeFalmer; 2003).She highlights fivestages of development through the online experience:

Access and motivation- The system is set up and accessed andparticipants are welcomed and encouraged

Online socialization- Messages are sent and received and participants get

used to being in the online environment Information exchange- Information exchanges flow freely and participants

are encouraged to become independent, confident and enthusiastic aboutworking online

Knowledge construction- Participants begin to interact with each other inmore exposed and and participative ways

Development- Participants become responsible for their own learning


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(Salmon, G. 2003. E-moderating: The key to teaching and learning online.RoutledgeFarmer. Oxon.)

Whether teaching online or tutoring a training course, it is useful to think aboutthis model and look at how the course participants are progressing. We canalso think about how we as tutors can help move the trainees through the

stages to a point where they are starting to achieve stages four and five. Wemay need to include activities that will help foster interaction related to eachstage and we need to bear in mind that different people will move through thestages at different rates, so keeping an eye on the level of involvement ofeach participant is important.Another factor to consider when encouraging positive online interaction isdirect interactionversus vicarious interaction(often referred to in theonline community as 'lurking', although this tends to carry a negativeconnotation). Just as in any classroom, some participants prefer to leap in toforums, discussions and so on all guns blazing. These will often be the peoplewho shout out the answer to every question in your classroom and are very


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active in group work. This is direct interaction, and can be seen in onlinebehaviours such as replying frequently to posts on forums, posting answers toactivities as soon as possible, and so on. And just as other students in yourclassroom might prefer to sit back and listen to what is going on or thinkthings over before speaking, so some online participants prefer to readthrough posts, for example, and will post infrequently, if at all. This is vicariousinteraction. As with any categorisation of learning styles and learner types,most people will appear somewhere along a scale, rather than at theextremes, and for an individual they may move along the scale at differentstages of a course. As a tutor, it is useful to have an awareness of how theseapproaches will affect someone's involvement on a course. Just becausesomeone doesn't post as much as others on a forum, for example, does notnecessarily mean that they are not engaging with the material on the course,

but you might want to look at ways of encouraging participation and moredirect interaction, just as you might utilise pair work in class to encourageincreased participation.

Online presenceAt this point it is worth thinking about the different forms of online presence. Ina classroom there is obviously a very real sense of presence, as everyone isin the room at the same time and interacting with each other and the materialsprovided. Clearly in online training this is not so tangible and the tutor needsto take steps to try and create a feeling of presence. We can generally thinkabout 3 types of presence: social presence, teacher presence, and

cognitive presence (terms taken from Dr. D. Randy Garrison). It is the role ofthe tutor to promote a feeling of presence in all these areas. This is largelydone, as it is in a face-to-face classroom, through incorporating a variety ofactivities and ensuring regular communication between participants, includingthe trainer.Social presence, as it sounds, can be seen as the interaction betweenparticipants socially, and their ability to appear online as real people. In theclassroom, you might do a getting-to-know-you activity in the first class, forexample, whereas online you will do a similar activity to get trainees to look ateach others' profiles. However, during the course, as trainees do not actuallyspend time in each others' presence, we need to continue to promote this

social interaction, especially if the course is largely asynchronous, with fewopportunities for the trainees to be online at the same time.Teacher presence is an important concept for us as trainers. Trainees need tofeel that they have some engagement with the trainer and some input fromthem. In the face-to-face classroom you can monitor learners, engage withwhat they are saying to each other and so on, but clearly online theparticipants cannot get a sense of your presence if you are 'monitoring' byreading forums, for example. It is therefore a good idea for the trainer tomaintain a constant sense of their presence on the course by, for example,responding to posts that people make, even if it is just to acknowledge whatthey have said and encourage others to respond to it. Teacher presence also


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comes across in the design of activities that will encourage cognitive andsocial processes that will then lead to meaningful learning.Cognitive presence involves getting learners to engage cognitively with thematerial. In class we engage learners cognitively by getting them to 'dothings', for example by doing matching activities they need to think aboutwhich definition goes with which word, for example, by using their backgroundknowledge, clues they might have such as word form, and so on. Similarly,online we want learners or trainees to engage with the material they arelooking at. The activity might need to be set up differently, and may wellinvolve some manipulation of the technology, but the principal is the same. Aswith face-to-face learning, we don't want the learners or trainees to be passivereceptacles of knowledge. We want them to engage actively with the materialand give them feedback on their performance. This feedback could be

delivered through the course platform itself, such as the correct answers to amatching activity, or through the tutor giving feedback on a forum discussion.By taking all of these areas into account, including the normal considerationsof learning styles etc., we can then try to ensure that as much learning aspossible is taking place.

3 Online toolsTechnology, especially the online environment, provides plenty ofopportunities for interaction and trainee engagement. In terms ofcommunication, we have already mentioned synchronous andasynchronous communication. On a training course, it is useful to have a

combination of both.As we mentioned previously, asynchronous communication involvesparticipants communicating and responding to each other in their own time.The most common example in training is the use of forums where traineescan discuss issues arising, such as you have been using on this course.Synchronous communication involves participants being online at the sametime. Examples include meeting in an online space such as Adobe Connectfor a talk or discussion. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, andboth will suit different learning styles and different learner types, so a coursethat includes elements of both will encourage higher levels of interaction andengagement. Synchronous communication is harder to organise, for the

obvious reason that getting all participants online at the same time can bedifficult. Courses tend to therefore have a heavier weighting of asynchronousactivities.Let us, then, look at some of the tools available. We mentioned earlier virtuallearning environments (VLEs). These tend to come with a variety of tools in-built that will allow you to incorporate different activities and variety ofinteraction. On this course you have already used the forums several timesand you may have taken advantage of the chat feature. There is also a wiki.ForumsBy now you have already had a reasonable amount of experience with these.They are often used as a means of generating discussion. They are useful in


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that they allow the course participants to post whenever they have the timeand they can also think about and research what they want to say. Anotherclear advantage is that postings stay on the forum, so they can be kept as arecord of the discussion, they can be looked back over as trainees gathertheir thoughts and can be used as source material for later tasks. However,we talked earlier about direct and vicarious interaction. An issue with forumscan be the differ times at which people post. This can also be influenced byexternal factors such as the individuals workload, personal commitments,commitment to the course, and so on. This can frequently lead to frustrations.Participants with a strong leaning towards direct interaction can quicklybecome frustrated, even annoyed, about the lack of response, or slowresponse, to their forum postings. The tutor can attempt to address thisthrough making their own responses, thus providing some input and

feedback, through encouraging other participants to comment, often byposting further questions, or by providing group tasks with deadlines andother similar tasks.Another danger with forums is the potential that they become long andrepetitive or can lose the 'thread' as people respond to earlier postings on thatthread (threadis the term used describe one string of forum posts respondingto an initial post that starts the 'conversation'). The teacher / tutor can dealwith this using a few techniques. The first part of their role is to make sure thateverybody is 'on topic', i.e. discussing the correct subject, and encouragingmovement of the discussion to a differ forum, if need be (for example, mostcourses have some sort of 'social forum' where participants can discuss

anything they like. There are also techniques such as weavingthat the onlinetutor employs. Weaving is a technique whereby the tutor summarises thepoints that have been made in a particular thread into a cohesive whole. Atthis point the tutor is not giving feedback, but summarising what has beensaid so that everyone has a clear idea of the outcome of the discussion. Theycan also summarise and respond to what has been said. Of course, as peopleare contributing to forums a synchronously, i.e. at different times, the tutor canalso respond to individual posts and give feedback or input on what has beensaid.

Wikis

Wikis are websites that allow anyone who has access to add and edit theinformation contained within. The most famous example is Wikipedia, whereyou can edit any entry you like, but there is also the option for theadministrator to reject edits and return to previous versions of the page. Thebenefits of wikis for training are that they allow trainees to work collaborativelyin building up a bank of information, to cognitively engage with what othershave done and engage with it through edits and comments, and this can buildup to a bank of knowledge for future trainees and so on. Wikis are generallyquite straight-forward to use but, as with any tool, some time spent ensuringthat trainees can use the tool will have a large pay off later.You can create your own wikis at:


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http://pbworks.comhttp://www.wikispaces.com

BlogsBlogs are effectively online journals. They can be set up very easily and areusually kept by one person with the facility for others to post comments oneach entry. They can be used in training as a reflective tool for participant tokeep a journal of their progress and what they are learning on the course, asa means for providing training texts, links and so on, or as a means forparticipants to write information about different aspects of teaching, forexample.Popular blogging sites are:www.blogger.com

www.wordpress.com

PodcastsPodcasts are effectively downloadable radio programmes. If you want to hearexamples, go to the BBC where there are many. There are also podcastsmade especially for language learners.Podcasts can be used in training for delivering training in the form of mini-lectures that trainees can download and listen to, or participants could maketheir own podcasts on certain themes or topics. Working collaboratively on aproject like this will help them to engage cognitively with the issues.

Social MediaIm sure youve come across social media such as Facebook and Twitter bynow. These cross over into EFL and teacher education in a couple of ways.You may already be a member of a teaching related group on Facebook, suchas one of the International House groups or IATEFL. These are ways thatteachers stay in touch and share ideas. Similarly, Twitter has a largecommunity of EFL teachers sharing resources and discussion issues in EFLteaching, for example through ELTChat. To get the best out of Twitter it is agood idea to follow hashtags (# followed by the topic title, for example#eltchat; #iatefl; #tefl and so on). Its also a good idea to follow people whopost about teaching and so on. You can follow people from Jeremy Harmer

(@Harmerj) and Jim Scrivener (@jimscriv) to the person sitting next to you inthe teachers room, or your colleagues on this course.

4 ActivitiesA lot of activities that can be done in the classroom, or training room, can beadapted to work online with a little imagination. There are now also someuseful resource books with examples of activities that can be specifically usedonline (See Further Reading).Some activities are especially designed to be used online, however. Probablythe most popular of these is the webquest. In this activity the students, ortrainees, use a worksheet, or other means of prompting, to find information on


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the Internet. This is then gathered up into a presentation or another similartype of productive activity. You can find some examples of webquests here:http://www.theconsultants-e.com/resources/webquests/repository.aspx

5 Further ReadingYou can find examples of lessons using technology here:http://www.theconsultants-e.com/resources/lessons/lessonrepository.aspx

Salmon, G. 2003. E-moderating: The key to teaching and learning online.RoutledgeFarmer. Oxon.

Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. 2007. How to teach English with technology.

Pearson. Harlow.

http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com- Russell Stannards site containingvideo tutorials on different tools and how they can be used in teaching

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11 Technology in the EFL World-1