ESL on my Mind
This morning I was reading an article in Language Learning & Technology. This journal seeks to disseminate research to foreign and second language educators in the US and around the world on issues related to technology and language education.
The title of the article was Emerging Technologies - Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration by Bob Godwin-Jones.. He writes about collaborative opportunities.The article made reference to a blog for CALL created by Jim Duber and Aaron Campbell’s Web logs in ESL classes which I have made reference to in an earlier post) and Campbell’s own blog, the New Tanuki which contains resources for his EFL students and others. Bob Godwin-Jones provides a good overview of blogs, RSS feeds, and wikis plus the potentials these tools offer.
I found one initiative that he wrote about quite interesting. It is blam! and here is what he wrote:
An example of such an initiative is blam!, a template tool for writing and collecting reviews (of books, CDs, etc.). It uses Amazon’s Web services to gather the meta-data for an item, translates it into HTML, including any images and reference links. This is automatically placed into the editing environment, to be added to the writer’s review. The review is then posted to a blog. One could envision such a tool for language lessons posted on the Web. The FLEX (Foreign Language Lesson Exchange) lesson typography at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is a step in that direction.
I still have not mastered RSS which I want to do and have many other things I need to learn first, but the possiblities scream out here! I’ll come back later and read up on this a little more thoroughly. Has anyone tried using this yet? Any thoughts on it?
I have a keen interest in ESL. The school where I used to teach had a high population of ESL students and we were always striving to meet their language needs. I’ve learned so much from these students. My sister also publishes Topics, an online magazine for learners of English. I love reading the students’ writings and have used their stories with ESL and other children to “broaden their horizons” and to give them ideas for writing. I’ve gotten my sister very interested in weblogs now and we are going to brainstorm a little later this summer on some ideas for collaborative projects.
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