Week 7: Autonomy and Technology

Week 7 found me on the road again. This time it was an OSCE Community Cohesion Action Plan Workshop and the Conference to the launch of an online tool Super Citizen to track hate crimes and bias-motivated actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the events were such a great opportunity to exchange ideas about the work in the local community, I wasn't able to be in school at the same time. I somehow tried to compensate that with my virtual class, but I'm not sure if that will suffice. 

The topics of the week were learner autonomy, one-computer classroom and mobile devices. Among a list of the readings, the first was an article What Is Learner Autonomy and How Can It Be Fostered? by Dimitrios Thanasoulas and it gave an insight in an essential component of a self-access center: a self-directed learner. The article and some other readings triggered quite interesting discussion in our Nicenet classroom. It was very useful to learn what are some factors that can enhance learner autonomy, but more importantly how can we as teachers guide our students to achieve it. 

What kept some of my attention was also an idea of learner autonomy achieved through online video games. I was lead to do some research asking not only my students about the games they have played, but also browsing the Net to read more about the topic. I came across the paper Learner Autonomy Development Through Digital Gameplay by Alice Chik that explores how gamers exercise learner autonomy by managing their gaming both as leisure and learning experience.

A valuable resource that I might use with my students is Trace Effects, an online 3D game for practicing English.

Another topic that has been fascinating to explore this week was MALL (mobile assisted language learning). Fortunately or not, most of the kids in my classes do have access to PCs, but not everyone has smart phones that they can use for language learning. In my opinion, those that do have them, would be motivated to use them, since mobiles are the gadgets they can't live without. When I introduced them the idea about using Edmodo platform, I told them that it is possible to get it as an app for mobiles (both Android and iOS). That piece of information seemed quite important to them.

I was thinking of some other apps that can be used for promoting MALL and I found My Word Book2. 

                                    

The app is designed as a dictionary that learners expand themselves  adding media such as recordings, pictures and word descriptions/translation. Therefore, I thought I could create an objective for one of my classes. Based on the text about transportation in Britain (Condition), a class of 29 intermediate students (Audience) will record entries for new vocabulary (Behavior) finding the word in the database and then adding an audio file and translation from L2 to L1 for 10 new words and/or expressions (Degree). This can be done in class, even as a pair work in case not all students have smart phones. It could be fairly easy to make an assessment telling students to submit their work through the 'Share' option, so that it can be available to the teacher and the rest of the class, or the students could simply read their new entries aloud.