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Learning technologies in EAP
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Fri, 03/13/2009 - 11:43
Pete,
You mentioned this as an interest of yours and it seemed to me to worth a thread all of its own. Are there some learning technologies which are particularly useful for EAP students, in your view?
Olwyn
Wed, 03/18/2009 - 13:05
#2
Tools that I love and which help me to keep up with and research information are;
For getting a managable amount of information, on topics that I'm interested in, coming to my desktop I use a feed reader. My favourite is Netvibes. I can also publish and share these pages:
This is one that feeds EdTech news straight to my home page:
http://www.netvibes.com/nikpeachey#Edtech-ELT
For sifting this I've tried a number of tools. Simplest one is Instapaper:
http://www.instapaper.com/ Which enbles you to store and annotate web based references, but my favourite at the moment is http://simplybox.com/ which also allows you to take screen shots of an image on the page / a quote on a page and classify these into different boxes.
This is a box that I publish on resources connected with e-safety as i work towards an article on that topic:
Public URL: http://simplybox.com/public/?id=19468
These can then be published, shared or you can even invite people to colaborate with you. This is a great way to build up your online bibliography.
I think developing students undertsanding and ability to use such tools is becoming a key digital study literacy in the 21st century.
Best
Nik
Hi Olwyn,
That's a great question, and also a big one, so I'll just mention a single application. Hopefully people will jump in with other ideas and we can build up a nice big list.
Reading on-line is rather different to reading printed materials. It's difficult to navigate and flick back to a passage you read earlier and much harder to annotate. These difficulties compound what is already quite a tricky task. Making students aware of this and encouraging them to print documents rather than read on line may be useful advice but realistically the cost of printing, the need to wait for a printer to be available, etc mean that students will do a lot of reading on screen. So anything that will help them with this has to be a good thing :-)
Google Notebook is a very simple tool that does seem to help students when reading / notetaking on line. They can clip information into a note book, annotate it and have a reference back to the original and all from the web browser. It's a simple tool that most students don't seem to be aware of yet it can make life just that little bit easier.
Pete