An experience written by Eduardo Antonio Ramirez Davies, Gloria Ines Moreno Arenas, Benjamín García Hernández and Anet Johana Acevedo Zapata
Taken from: http://lwbi.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/ed5-cartoon.jpg
We as teachers wonder many times what might catch our students attention, specially teenagers, when it comes in designing a lesson. Most of the times, we hope that the lesson will motivate them and create a discussion around the topic. So how can we engage them and at same time improve their language learning?
We are aware that Internet and Media in general are a main staple in our learners’ life, as a matter of fact, during our classes or conversations around classes, we hear talk about the latest Facebook game or gossip. There are times we need a given tune and our learners direct us to Youtube or in many cases they are hooked up with their smart-phones in various I.M s at the same time.
Taken from: http://www.glasbergen.com/wp-content/gallery/elementary-school/toon338.gif
According to Beatty (2003) any given process in which the learner uses a computer or materials from other sources, as videos, will result in an improvement of language learning.
So, keeping this in mind, we wanted to design a class assisted with computers and Internet but the question was: how and where? The answer was right in front of our noses: Learning Management Systems (MOODLE, WebCT), our courses at FUNIBER are on one if these!!!. LMS, in a nutshell, is basically a software where you can administer your class (add material, discussions quizzes etc.,) and obtain a report of your students’ activities.
Taken from: http://www.glasbergen.com/wp-content/gallery/elementary-school/edu56.gif
Meskill (2002) states that CALL can foster learning autonomy, with varied and authentic material which can motivate our students, being flexible and adaptable to their needs. This allowed us to tailor make a lesson according to our students specific needs permitting the accomplishment of a specified goal from our curriculum.
Bearing this in mind and with a little patience and with the help of Google we were able to find out how MOODLE worked, did a leap into faith and designed a small lesson for a ninth grade classroom around a social stigma, discrimination .
The main goal of this lesson was to create awareness around the different types of discrimination and make a commercial against discrimination as a product. We used tools as Forums, Web pages, Videos etc. all integrated in one place.
The steps we followed in the lesson were:
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1. Read the following text
2. Answer and refute the following questions
3. Make a list! Forum
4. Watch the following videos!
5. What do you think?
6. The task
If you are interested in knowing the contents of the steps above enter as a guest to:
http://tonyrd.gnomio.com/login/index.php
And these are some samples of the products:
and
What Computers Can and Can’t “Do” (based on Meskil, 2002, p. 122)
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Computers CAN |
Computer CAN’T |
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Judge predetermined right-or-wrong answers, e.g., multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks |
Judge unexpected input |
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Provide immediate, yet fixed, feedback, suggestions, and encouragement |
Provide individualized feedback beyond a predetermined list of messages |
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Provide authentic information throughmultimedia – texts, images, sounds,videos, and animations |
Engage learner in rich negotiation of meaning characteristic of face-to-face interaction |
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Motivate task persistence Record learner’s writing, speech, and learning progress |
Motivate depth and quality of engagement characteristic of human interaction |
MOTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
We can conclude that ICT based activities definitely motivate students more than working with traditional methods. Students commit themselves towards the task and even those who are weak in English get highly involved in language tasks. In our experience, using Internet in class encourage students to get what they need while practising argumentation and presentation of specific information, exposing learners to authentic learning language materials.
Motivation then translates into a positive attitude towards language learning. Other benefits derived from motivation can be creativity, better production, self confidence, better interaction with a more open communication, problem solving skills and cooperative skills.
Some interesting sites where you can create your MOODLE course for free: