Tuesday, April 19, 2011

TWICE (Two Way Interactive Connections in Education )

The Michigan Merit Curriculum's Online Learning Experience Guideline document has a great list of online courses, learning experiences, and ways to incorporate online learning into the classroom. My favorite of these was TWICE. It allows you to video conference with other classrooms on collaborative projects. One of my favorite ideas is reading the same book as another classroom and discussing it with them. However, this would be effective if the students simply communicated with other students in English. Monolingual classrooms often fall into the habit of translating because everyone can understand them. Being forced to talk with a speaker of another language would show them how to communicate when they can't slip into Korean.
The main pedagogical strategies I would use would be scaffolding until the students are comfortable using the technology, having the students work together collaboratively to check each other and make sure that they understand, and then having the students do the work on their own. I try to make my lessons as student-based as possible by having them use their own content and ideas.

I'm not sure which technologies would actually be hard to use with my students. In fact, since my students are in university, they're often more comfortable with technology than I am.  The main problem they face with technology is when they can't understand the texts. Therefore, the most difficult tool to use would be an RSS feed. However, there are RSS feeds for websites like breakingnewsenglish.com which might be useful. To be honest, I think all of these technologies would be useful and easy to use with my students.

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