Lucy’s Blog

Being a good girl in my SMIELT class

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Homework: Week 2, Pedagogical implications

January 30, 2008 at 8:28 am · Filed under Uncategorized and tagged: , ,

What are the pedagogical implications of social media for ELT?

I think that social media is brilliant for languages, it has some useful elements for other educational uses, but language learning is about communication and that certainly happens a lot with social media.

Are you promoting open participatory skills in ELT? How?

Well, I’m doing my best. I have set up a moodle platform for a part-time CELTA course, they’re using that enthusiastically, networking and collaborating well online as well as offline. The Sessums article is interesting and the New Media Literacies site looks worth keeping tabs on.  I’ll have to use that list as something to aim for in my teaching.

Can these social media help you? How?

Yes, they’re fun, hip, and in the meantime there is a tool for every need (or if not there will be one next week). At my institution there is no staffroom or regular time to meet other teachers, the teachers tend to get very isolated so this could help them to connect and share ideas. It might also be appropriate for some of the normal courses once the teachers find out how easy it is to use.

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dog chewed my homework!

January 28, 2008 at 1:06 am · Filed under Uncategorized and tagged:

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the different social media things I’m trying out (and I already knew quite a few of them).  Haven’t found time to read those scholarly journal articles yet (I must admit I got distracted on the Internet this evening after following links suggested in the “What is social media” booklet).  Now it’s getting late here and I’ve got to get up with the kids and the larks tomorrow morning so I’m off to bed.  I hope to catch up with my week 2 tasks tomorrow and not get too far behind.

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Educational Networks

January 25, 2008 at 12:33 pm · Filed under Uncategorized and tagged:

I followed a trail of links from somewhere (can’t remember where I started) and ended up at Vicki Davis’s Cool Cat Teacher blog.  She has a lot of interesting stuff to say about using social networking tools in education.  She’s instigated projects such as Flat Classroom, and she uses Ning networks among other things.  (I’d like to find out more about using these, I’d never heard of Ning until this SMIELT course started.)

It’s hard to keep up with everything I’m hearing about at the moment, there is so much that is new and interesting.

Anne asked (in a comment) which tools she should use for her group of German teenage girls.  Could Ning be the right thing and if so, how would she find a partner class?

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Big Brother Facebook

January 23, 2008 at 10:10 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Check out this short informative video:

http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/

If you want to know more, there’s a recent article in the Guardian about Facebook, it’s rather long and starts with a lot of stuff about why the author doesn’t like it, but towards the end he goes into the shady side of it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

Big Brother is watching you! Creepy stuff!

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My answers: Week 1

January 21, 2008 at 1:24 am · Filed under smielt tasks and tagged: , ,

What have you noticed about the various platforms that you have opened accounts on? What do they have in common? How do they differ?
That question is too big for this time of night!

Are these environments different from LMS (like Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle and others)? How?
Yes these tools are very different to most LMSs. Moodle does go in this direction but I hear that the others are less open to communication and collaboration.

    What does “social media” mean for you? Which social media have you used already and what are your feelings about it?
    I use delicious a lot, but mostly for myself, I enjoy flickr but rarely post my own stuff., I rarely blog. Some of this stuff will certainly be useful to me, the mashup with Google Earth for instance. Some things are hard to predict. I can’t imagine becoming a twitterter but I bet kids like it. A lot of these things draw you in while you’re there (e.g. the 43 trio) but I have no inner need to return, I feel rather that I’ve wasted my time a bit.

    I enjoy helping to create something useful and meaningful, like Wikipedia pages. On the other hand, now that Wikipedia has started taking itself too seriously, the fun is draining out of it. This might be a danger for other applications., too

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    Nose back to the grindstone

    January 21, 2008 at 1:05 am · Filed under Uncategorized

    Signed up with Twitter. Already had a follower (and I was already following him), don’t know how that happened as I didn’t let them trawl thru my email addresses but at least I know the guy I’m following.

    Signed up with community maps and made a map with a few of the local indoor pools:

    http://www.communitywalk.com/munich/germany/swimming_pools_of_munich/map/205386

    Signed up with voicethread, let it access my flickr page, hope I won’t regret that.

    http://voicethread.com/#u37669

    Signed up with dotSUB too, currently have not content.

    Added links to most of these in my blogroll.

    Added blurb about myself.

    Lucy

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    Here’s the Blog

    January 18, 2008 at 10:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

    So far I’ve never had enough to say to warrant a blog, but maybe I’ll keep this up for the duration of the SMIELT course.

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