What’s all this twittering about?

I love it when I get pleasantly surprised.

I was very nonplussed about Twitter.   I was actually very “anti” it, refusing to join for a long time and only really joining because I am doing this course.  I still haven’t figured it out.  I don’t really know how to send a message to  our home page with that whole hash tag thing.  But I will eventually work it out and I will make the effort to learn it because I have now completely changed my mind.  I think it has great potential for me to use  in my class.

That maths lesson was amazing and I  got a lot of ideas from the Twitter assessment post as well (although I would have said activities and not assessment.)

I was so impressed that I’ve been looking around.

I’ve found these great sites for using Twitter in ELT

Twitter as concordancer

and

Twitter for teachers wiki

and

blog efl twitter

and

Twitter for teachers

In my last post I mentioned time and the lack of it, I don’t have the time now but I really would like to try to set something up  in one of  my classes with Twitter.  I see it more as getting Tweets in to the class after a question that I tweet out rather than my students tweeting each other (for the same reasons as social networking, I may have a problem with permissions).

I was so impressed that I have done the other part of week 6’s task  and joined a new network.  This time I have joined ELT tweet.com.  I think in the future for me this could be a really useful tool.

VLEs and me.

Sorry to go back to week 4 but I have been really busy training for work within a VLE.  Hands on practice as it were.  A couple of years ago I had never heard of a VLE and today I am both a teacher and student on one.

I am part time distance learning student and this gives me the freedom to study alongside my usual work / life whereas  I most probably would have found it almost impossible to study as a full time student in Manchester.  I really appreciate the flexibility to allow me to study what I want,  relatively speaking, when I want.  Blackboard is one tool that makes this possible for me although in all honesty I probably only use about 25% of  what I could use on blackboard.  Generally I only use E-mail and look at course content.  I do like the fact though that everything is in one place and I only have one place to log on to to find all my information.  VLEs usually work well and are a good substitute (and for me it is a substitute, I would personally prefer F2F) for F2F, technical hitches aside, but I do find the actual interface very aesthetically unappealing.

When I first came into contact with Blackboard I was surprised by the time factor that it involved.  It takes an awful of time to work within a VLE (Stefania’s blog).  It is a different way of working and a different way of organising your work schedule.  It is also a different way of dealing with students and teachers.  From a teachers point of view on a VLE  I think it is really important to,

• Keep a constant presence within the VLE
• Keep instructions for activities as clear and precise as possible
• Monitor all the activity.

Working as a student or a teacher in a VLE needs regular input.  I was recently ill.  5 days of hideous flu like stuff.  When I finally logged on to Blackboard as a student there were 260 odd messages waiting for me.  That was  really overwhelming.

I am not sure about all the wonderful claims from politicians and BECTA in the UK about the need for VLEs in state schools.  Schools have them here in Spain but to be honest from what I have seen they  look like glorified versions of Microsoft Outlook.  There are regular arguments that politicians in the UK use to effect changes in the education system and these arguments  usually involve the “parents”.  Who are these mythical parents? The ones that want to look at everything their child has done in school? I have only met a few of these rare creatures.  Quite often than not parents are tired.  Usually  both of them have to work  (and work hard) to support the family.  School is school and as far as they are concerned it is the school’s responsibility to educate.  “Have you done your homework?” “Yes.”  Maybe I’m wrong but I think in a lot of instances that’s a far as it gets every evening in most homes (unless there is a problem and also that is if you’re lucky and your parents are actually taking an interest in your school life).  I’m not saying that VLEs don’t have a very useful place within schools, but I am wary of the spin.

However I don’t live in the UK and I am working in a different field.  There is definitely a growth market in online distance education.  Having recently come into contact with VLEs though I have noticed something that hasn’t really been mentioned within the wiki.  How do you monitor what is a student’s real work or not.  Plagiarism and, in my case as a language instructor, online translator tools, are something that you have to be very conscious of.  In a F2F class you can easily see that the work being done is genuine.  This is harder to accomplish within in a VLE.  Over time you do get a sense of someone’s real voice in a VLE but it is a really different environment to F2F in this respect. To help overcome this I think it’s better to have a VLE that uses some kind of voice thread / wimba room component where there is some degree of F2F contact with the student, albeit at a distance!