e-poche.net

All the talk this week at our Weblogging in ESL/EFL group on adding sound and photos to blogs got me thinking about how I could go about incorporating these applications into my work with personal webpublishing in Japanese EFL classes. If students are already blogging, or at least reading and writing on blogs (not necessarily blogging!), then the addition of sound, photo, and video serves to enrich the communicative environment with the elements of sight, color, and sound; working the students’ speaking and listening skills and perhaps increasing the potential for more emotional responses. As Michael says, community building is cutting edge right now, but the missing link is voice.

For example, I love what Teresa Almeida Eca has done with sound. She set up an intercultural exchange between her students in Portugal and a classroom in Poland using voice emails - Handy Bits (annoying pop-up) - with corresponding text. I can imagine that my students would really dig the opportunity to interact with people from abroad in spoken English. Having the text to refer to would really be helpful too. Is there a way to have asynchronous voice discusssion lists other than with Wimba? Voice could be done via blogs too, only the discussion might be a bit more dispersed. It it’s one thing to keep track of text conversations via skimming, quite another with audio messages. See Audblog and Audioblog for getting started with this.

I also like Micheal’s idea of capitalizing on the oral traditions of students. We all have stories to tell and histories to relate that are meaningful to us. Photo stories, oral histories, and interviewing might be good ways to go about this.

I’m really interested in learning more about how to use mobile phone technology with my students, as everyone of them has a phone with digital camera, email capability, and most with limited internet access. Some quick ideas:

• I could record a ‘good morning message’ on Audacity and send it out to their mobile phones a few hours before class, seeding their minds with key vocab and questions to get them thinking. I could even give them the warm-up conversation exercise so that they are already speaking when I walk in the classroom.
• Using their mobile phones, students take a weekly picture according a given theme, record a 30 sec message describing the picture and why they took it, and have them post to their blogs via telephone. I could then aggregate weekly thematic posts via RSS, link to Flickr tags, and have students find and comment on similar photos. I can’t help but think of Rudolf’s EFL Flickr project when I write that.
• Once Skype gets hooked up on mobile phones, students could be assigned partners from abroad to chat with, completing some information gap type exercises, in addition to finding out more about cultural differences and similarities. Imagine free international telephone calls! We could even do real time scavenger hunts where the foriegn counterparts have all the clues and frequent telephone calls are necessary to complete the assignment. You could even get them using GPS technology. With the potential for free video streaming someday, perhaps our students can actually sit in their classrooms and walk into a real American diner and order a burger and fries….and not have to eat them!

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