Meeting One Presentations

[Janos Blasszauer]

Members and associates of E-Help are invited to post a summary of their forthcoming presentation here

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What I have done with ICT that has improved the quality of teaching/learning and what I would like to be able to do in future with ICT?

I have been interested in the potentials of information technology in English as a foreign language (EFL) education since 1997, when I read about email projects in English language teaching journals. I started thinking about the application of the technology to meet the requirements of communicative methodology and the project-based approach. As an EFL teacher, British Council in-service teacher educator, and European Schoolnet project advisor, I had an opportunity to take an increasingly growing interest in developing teaching practices and methods.

The guiding principle in my teaching is that teachers should seek to empower students with the necessary skills to take control of their own learning (i.e., helping students to learn how to learn). In order to achive this goal I have turned to making good use of ICT. I have involved my students in telecollaborative projects, webquest projects and tried to exploit one of the main potentials of the Internet, namely its power that enables fast and cheap way of communication.

I think ICT in the future will link more and more schools to the global learning community, and by creating student-centred learning environments the teacher’s role will shift from being the purveyor of information to the role of an organiser, collaborator and coach.

I also share Stephen Bax's views who claims that computers will be "... an integral part of every lesson, like a pen or a book. Teachers and students will use them without fear or inhibition, and equally without an exaggerated respect for what they can do. They will not be the centre of any lesson but they will play a part in almost all. They will be completely integrated into all other aspects of classroom life, alongside coursebooks, teachers and notepads. They will almost go unnoticed."

As for teaching history, well I'm not a history teacher but I'm member of several lists and the other day someone asked if anyone knew of any web resources that would be useful for designing an oral history project for High Schoolers about local

history/history of their school.

And even though I am a teacher of English I've found some recommended sites highly relevant to my teaching context. For example the http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/education.html http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/education.html site

(scroll down on the landing page and you will find an overview of teaching Oral Histories, A Brief Guide to Developing Student Oral History Projects with Interviewing tips and more, and Lesson Plans and Activities that use Oral Histories.)

[Vicente López-Brea Fernández]

I am no expert, but I am convinced that tools are helpful if we are able to provide a reason for use and a safe atmosphere to use them. In this sense I consider that ICT provide for the language teacher a relatively safe environment (provided the teacher "feels" confident with the media), but also a strongly realistic use of language, thus providing a reason to learn. There is little doubt that we, language teachers, need to focus on the use of language, and ICT make it easy for us to do so. Bringing a sense of reality also contributes to facilitate learners be less dependent, fostering their autonomy.

Still what I may foresee for the future is, in the context of Spain and Madrid specifically, is an extension of relationships among the different curricular areas, in which language teachers contribute to the linguistic development of both teachers of other subjects and students. The uses of ICT will enable to facilitate the intercommunication of teachers and students, and I think there will be an extension of communities of users hooked to wider thematic areas.

[Graham Davies]

János writes:

The guiding principle in my teaching is that teachers should seek to empower students with the necessary skills to take control of their own learning (i.e., helping students to learn how to learn). In order to achieve this goal I have turned to making good use of ICT. I have involved my students in telecollaborative projects, webquest projects and tried to exploit one of the main potentials of the Internet, namely its power that enables fast and cheap way of communication.

A couple of references to resources on telecollaboration and webquests:

See Module 1.5, Section 14 at the ICT4LT website, where we discuss email videoconferencing, chat rooms, MUDs and MOOs in the context of language teaching: http://www.ict4lt.org

See especially, the references to Robert O’Dowd’s website:

- Videoconferencing: http://www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/videoc.html

- Telecollaboration: http://www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/collab

We mention webquests in Section 7 of the same module, especially:

- The WebQuest page: http://webquest.sdsu.edu

- LanguageQuest: http://www.ecml.at/projects/voll/our_resou...quest/index.htm

- TalenQuest: http://www.talenquest.nl (in Dutch - but many of the links are in other languages)

- Treasure Hunt: http://www.well.ac.uk/wellproj/workshp1/treasure.htm

The second of the above references will take you to the European Centre for Modern Languages website in Graz, which has offered several courses in the use of ICT in language teaching in the context of VOLL (Vocationally Oriented Language Learning) and where outcomes of the courses have been published.

You may find my personal list of links (300+) to language-related websites relevant:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/websites.htm

[Isabelle Voegeli]

The use of ENA in a classroom: a case study

European NAvigator (ENA), a multimedia database on the history and institutions of post-war Europe, is the flagship service of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE). The objective of ENA is to offer high quality multimedia documents to the students and the teachers by means of ICT. For two years we have worked with some pilote sites to see concretely how such a database can be used in class. That is essential for us especially as the CVCE is a content producer and we want to adapt our database as closely as possible to the needs of the effective users.

The question we were however confronted with is: do the users really know what they need? Indeed many teachers are not used to introduce ICT in their courses because of an insufficient equipment of their school or because of pedagogical uneasiness. My actual challenge is to encourage the use of ICT, and especially of ENA, help the users to get rid of their anxiousness and encourage them to get innovative in their way of teaching. By reporting some of my experiences, I would like to broach the question of the complementarity or concurrence between traditional education and ICT based teaching.

[Dan Lyndon]

As I have been writing my presentation it has developed along sufficiently different lines to warrant a new entry:

‘Information is not learning’ Using the Internet as an effective teaching tool

The World Wide Web has given teachers and students of history access to an ‘information superhighway’ previously unparalleled. However, whilst there are obvious advantages in terms of the resources now available on the Internet, this has not necessarily been translated into the effective teaching and learning of history. This paper will look at the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet as a teaching tool. It will highlight the benefits of using webquests as a method for ensuring the use of higher order thinking skills when using the Internet. The paper will conclude with a case study looking at a webquest that I have written about the contribution of black and asian soldiers in the First World War (www.comptonhistory.com/ww1webquest.htm).