Future Classrooms?

I recently came across this article, which discussed the great success Dardanelle School District, a school in Texas, was having with their ELL program. Their success was contributed to a program called Imagine Learning English. This type of classroom set up is vastly different that the type of classroom I had in school. In my school experience, computer time was rare and limited. This article made me think of how much schools have evolved in the past few years. Hopefully soon, many more schools will experience the success that Dardanelle School District had by using technology in the classroom.

What do you think future classrooms will look like? Technology is rapidly changing the way our school system works, what do you think is in store next? The new white board is a new technology expected to be seen in classrooms soon and ipads are starting to pop up in classrooms more often. But what else have you see or heard about that may soon transform how the typical classroom looks and operates? What is your opinion of the wave of new technologies that are now a part of everyday classrooms? In your teaching experience have you had trouble adapting to the changes being made or do you embrace them?

The new white board!

Ipads in the classroom.

Google as a Language Corpus?

Guoquan Sha of Sichuan Economic Management College in Chengdu, China, wrote an interesting article at the end of 2010.

His main idea is that corpora has changed language learning and language applications over the past years. But aside from this remark, he mentions one of the most common tools available on the internet- Google.

Sha argues that Google has become a great platform or springboard tool for many university students in China that are learning languages. They utilize Google first as a method to solve their language learning or writing difficulties. He also mentions that in comparison with the British National Corpus, Google has different advantages. It provides spelling checks and has far more search results than this specific corpus.

This semester, I know we have discussed a variety of different technological aspects that should be considered in language learning. What about Google? How does this serve a function in light of language learning? Sha describes how it is used easily by students for working on translations or working with writing. How do you see this applicable in your own language teaching? Would you support using a tool like this in the language classroom? Do you find it comparable to other corpora out there?

Sha, G. (2010). Using Google as a super corpus to drive written language learning: a comparison with the British National Corpus. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 23(5), 377 — 393.

How do you develop discipline plans for online misbehavior?

Click on the image below to hear this week's blog topic:



It's been observed that when learners feel a sense of anonymity, sometimes their comments are just awkward, and at worst can be very unwelcomed. In the article "Virtual Harassment", by Ferganchick-Neufang (1998) the challenges of online educators are explored with some possible solutions.

So, how do you enforce the limits of socially acceptable behavior to prevent students from offending you and others in chat rooms, or on Facebook, and other sites? Additionally, if you had a Blackboard site (with a discussion board) and a student started posting complaints against you, what actions would you take?