This week, we began surveying web resources available for language teaching. The DuBravac chapter, after it's somewhat patronizing historical background of the web, touched on some resources that I particularly like. Web dictionaries are quite nice for their multimedia capabilities and the format allows for the inclusion of many example sentences, which often aren't available in conventional dictionaries due to length constraints. Corpora were another resource brought up that I quite like, as they are excellent tools for quickly gathering a score of example sentences useful for vocabulary teaching and inductive grammar activities. However, I much prefer having the teacher take the role of corpus curator, carefully selecting material to guide students to discoveries about language rather than deal with the (sometimes extensive) training needed to get a whole class on-board with corpora interfaces and meta-linguistic knowledge required to investigate more independently. One interesting idea that's new to me in the DuBravac chapter is using free surfing in the classroom. I think there is certainly potential for show and tell activities using free surfing in some learning contexts. With the rise of smartphones and tablets, free surfing could be constrained to small time periods and wouldn't require moving the whole class to the computer lab in order to incorporate into larger lessons- free surfing could be a quick warm-up activity ("Alright everyone, you have 5 minutes to find an interesting fact. Be ready to share!").
The Levy (2009) article was a bit disappointing for me. It's surprising how quickly CALL literature can feel out of date (if only slightly). For example, Levy mentioned using Track Changes in MS Word for collaborative writing... it's 2013 now, time to get on the cloud computing train and use Google Docs or Office.com! No one likes playing e-mail tag with multiple draft files. Levy made a somewhat valid point about the "caravan effect" of CALL, warning against moving along from cool watering hole (cool tech resource) to cool watering hole without concern for the journey (learning goals)- while I appreciate the sentiment about keeping focused on learner goals and outcomes, I also have to question whether staying at one watering hole is really worthwhile when bigger and clearer ones come along. In class and in the Levy article, Hot Potatoes came up, and I think in a lot of cases this is a prime example. There are sites such as Memrise, LiveMocha, Quizlet, etc that can accomplish most of the basic task types of Hot Potatoes without a lot of the technical mess (exporting, hosting, etc). However, I will say that Erin S. made a very good point that in less than robust educational settings, where for example internet access might not be pervasive and the institution has a small number of computers in a lab, Hot Potato modules could be developed for institution-wide in-house use, and I could see that being a worthy endeavor.
Reflecting further on the Hot Potato matter, I feel that there is a key point of distinction in CALL tech that we haven't discussed yet: can a teacher utilize and/or develop activities to a sufficient breadth, depth and standard of quality or is greater manpower required? I feel a good example of this was last semester teaching Reading/Vocab at the PIE. Randy initiated the use of MoodleReader.org, a nice site to keep track of students' extensive reading that also provides quizzes on a multitude of graded readers. It took efforts of several people in order to get it off the ground and working properly- Randy did a lot of the initial set up and contacted the webmaster for necessary permissions, Christine (CALL coordinator) set up student logins, Hannaliisa (the Assistant Director, with the help of student workers?) organized books in the library, I made a set of instructions for using the site, and all teachers in the level had to devote class time to familiarizing students with the site. Even if it was only Randy's class that uses MoodleReader, it still likely would've taken more than one person to get things up and running smoothly in an acceptable time frame. Although there were some issues with MoodleReader, I did feel it was useful, but this anecdote clearly highlights the need some resources have for greater support.
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