This
week there were so many tools to cover. In Group 3, we had Prezi, Glogster and
Powerpoint. In group 4, there were a host of options from Google Maps, Earth
and Docs to ZooBurst, a 3D pop-up book maker.
I
played around with quite a few (I’m quite the hit with my 4 year old daughter
after I made her a story as a 3D pop-up book on the computer). I originally thought
this tool was better suited to very young children, but I think it might be
useful in a Japanese classroom too. It’s tough to get beginner learners
interested. They are at the reading level of a small child in Japanese, but
their interests do not run to picture books about hungry caterpillars anymore.
However, they might be interested in writing their own little stories and
animating them in Zooburst. They could share them and read each other’s to get more
reading practice too. So I think there might be a place for Zooburst in my professional
ICT library after all.
It’s
still scary each week how these tools can suck time and energy from you. I
think I will need to be very focused and task-oriented as I set up ICT
libraries and resources for my two teaching areas (Japanese and biology, so not
a lot of overlap there). Next week I’ll share the lesson plan I developed using
the Group 4 tools and this week I’ll focus on Group 3.
On
to Group 3 tools then:
In
earlier weeks, we had been given a link to a glog that intrigued me.
This
Glog seemed like a great way to keep all links, videos, images, audio etc about
a topic in one place. It was also aesthetically pleasing, and that makes me
happy.
It
was designed using Glogster, so I decided to try my hand at Glogging.
Glogs, Blogs and Weeblies
Yet
again, it was immediately apparent that Glogging was a time-consuming business.
And as much as I liked the idea of having everything in one place, and the
aesthetics that were achievable, I found myself questioning what a Glog did
better than a blog, or a Weebly. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I’d be better
off learning to use a few tools really well, rather than a great number of
tools poorly.
I
spent some time comparing the functions that each offers, and in the end I
think that each of these tools has its place. I love that a Glog is so easy to
customise, I can easily drop items and position them wherever I want. It looks
great. But if you needed students to follow through work in a particular order,
a glog might not be best. Also, I find that even in the heart of Sydney with
broadband internet (probably as good as these things get in Australia), a glog
loads quite slowly. Each item takes time to load and it’s frustrating.
But
the one thing that has me sold on glogs is that if you have a teacher account,
you are able to assign your students accounts off your main page. This means
you can see what they are doing from your “teacher screen”. (Source: http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/go-get-glogged-with-glogster/ I think this
is what makes a glog a tool that I would want to have in my bag of tricks, in
addition to blogs, wikis and websites.
I’ve
summarised some of these points, and compared glogs, blogs and websites in the
table below.
My Glog
As
I mentioned above, I think the biggest selling point of a glog is that it’s so
very easy to get your class using it, and to be able to guide them as they
work. Unfortunately, without a class to check this function on, I decided to
start by creating my own glog that I could use in a classroom setting.
I
created a fairly simple “interactive poster” designed to help students master
telling the time in Japanese.
Here
is a link to my glog:
I
am really excited about the use of ICTs such as glogs, blogs and weeblies in
teaching languages. There is an ongoing debate among teachers of Japanese as a
foreign language. The scripts students need to master to be able to write
Japanese are universally acknowledged as one of the most difficult written
systems in the world. There are 3 different scripts required and they each have
different uses. Some argue that we should begin teaching students these scripts
from the very beginning, to give them the most amount of time possible to
master such a difficult written language (Miura 1987). Others argue that we
should teach them as Japanese children learn; that is, by learning to speak
first and then by learning to write (Matsunaga 1995). The problem with this is
that people learning a second language who are not babies and toddlers
naturally find themselves wanting some way to take notes (visual
representation) of what they are learning. For students of Japanese who cannot
write in Japanese, this means making use of Romanised Japanese (known as romaji).
I’ve made a table and a quick video to explain what I mean:
One of the problems that can
arise if students rely on the use of romaji for too long, is that they come to
feel that learning the Japanese scripts is too hard and not worth the effort.
For this reason, even those who advocate delaying the introduction of the
Japanese scripts do not advocate delaying for too long.
I have found that the use of ICTs
allows me to provide students with audio hints. I presented the times as a
visual cue (a picture of a clock face), then in kanji and then in hiragana. I
did not provide romaji, but I am aware that some students may have trouble
reading and pronouncing the Japanese scripts without any romaji. Instead, I
provided a short video file so that they could listen to the pronunciation. Of
course, students who felt they needed the cue would then be free to write down
the corresponding romaji in their notes.
I think this is a huge benefit
for anyone teaching Japanese as a foreign language, and a really
transformational use of an ICT to transcend a common issue in the Japanese
classroom.
Making the most of my glog
Just giving the students a link
to the glog and asking them to look it over for homework would fail to make the
best use of the potential of a glog. If I were using this glog in a classroom,
I would set up stations around the room with different activities. I would
begin the lesson with all the students together, recap how to tell time and
then give the students an ipad each so that they could access the glog. Then I
would divide them into groups and have them each go to a different activity.
After students have rotated
through the activities, I would get them back together and end the lesson with
a listening quiz – made by them. Each student uploaded a sentence with a time
in it. I would play them for the class, and have them write down the time and
try to guess who is speaking.
Future Directions
I’m still not quite sure how the
student accounts attached to a teacher’s account on glogster function, but it
is possible that students could upload all their work from the activities onto
their own glog instead a of wiki. They could then start building their own “telling
time” learning space. I’m keen to learn more about how teachers and students
can use glogster in partnership.
But even just with the basic glog
I made, some ipads and some activity tables, I can see a world of language
learning potential. Language learning,
especially for beginners, can involve a lot of rote learning. Memorising words
and patterns is important, but it quickly becomes tedious. ICTs could definitely
help to keep students motivated to carry on with the rote learning, and also
provide them with the support they need to begin slightly more advanced tasks
such as basic role plays.
References
Retrieved Arpil 5, 2015
Dewey,
D.P. 2004. Connections Between Student
and teacher Attitudes Regarding Script Choice in First-year Japanese Language
Classrooms. Foreign Language Annals. 37 (4): 567-577.
Miura,
A. 1987. Amerika ni okeru Nihongo kyooiku
no shomondai {Problems in Japanese Language Teaching in the USA} Nihongo
Kyooiku 63: 6-19.
Matsunaga,
S. 1995. The role of phonological coding
in reading kanji: A research report and some pedagogical implications.
Technical Report #6. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Second Language Teaching
and Curriculum Center.
No comments:
Post a Comment