Friday 28 January 2011

Good practices emerging

We anticipated many of the things that have now been confirmed as good practices. For instance, we already knew from the beginning that students need time to learn to master the different social media tools, but what was surprising was the great amount of time that was needed. Also, you have to tell and show several times, what the students are expected to do, how and to what purpose we use the tools and where to look for help. We gave them written instructions on each tool, which is a good practice, but not all found them on the blog. Peer tutoring worked fairly well, though, but only if you asked for help. Here we concluded: especially in the beginning take little steps, give time and don´t introduce too many tools.

What was surprising, was that they didn´t find using the Google-documents as their own work space for group work as rewarding as we would have expected. This might be partly due to different level of commitment in some students, partly to unclear perception of the role of the Google-document, but also to the assignments given. For later assignments we decided to narrow the topics of assignments down. Then, on the other hand, students have written really long good texts..

The Google- documents were intended for writing which was then commented on a language learning perspective. Inserting the comments proved to be the clearest and the least time consuming way to do this. Deadlines were given, but out of the teachers point of view they should also be keptJ

All in all, students enjoyed using the blog, and even with the little voluntary practice on using the Skype, that proved to be a success with the students who managed to use it.

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