New Media Tools

In the first two weeks of the semester we tried out several different tools that can be used in teaching foreign language education. A basis for the organization of this work is the personal learning environment (PLE). It consists of devices that help to organize and keep track of what you work on when doing research on the web and provide you with easy access to online-resources.

Already after two weeks it seems quite hard to keep track of what websites and tools we have been working with. Of course the standard way of remembering what websites we have visited is simply to bookmark them in the webbrowser. Still almost everybody who has ever done research on the web has learned that you end up with big mess of arbitrary bookmarks, which makes it very hard to remember what these websites were all about. Ultimately you have to skip through all the pages again and so you lose time and sometimes your nerve.

The first web tool we learned about provides a remedy to this problem. Delicious (www.delicous.com) is basically a web based bookmark organizing system which can be accessed from every computer. The websites that are stored can be made public, so other people can see them and benefit from your research. At the same time it solves the bookmark-chaos-problem by enabling the user to put tags into every website that he stores. So afterwards it is easy to find the information you are looking for.

Both functions are very practical for sharing links, not only among teachers but also with students. It saves handing out lists with a lot of links on it that might eventually be lost. Also this means that the students can share bookmarks among each other. School today tends towards autonomous and independent work for pupils. This tool can definitely help students keep track of important resources on the web and offers the possibility that research can be shared in class.

Speaking about communication, Twitter (www.twitter.de) is another tool which allows for communication in class among students and also among teachers on the web. It is a micro-blogging service via which short messages can be published. Everyone with a Twitter account can write and read messages. The idea of Followers is basic to this function. When a user follows another user, he subscribes to all short blog messages that user publishes. The messages of all users he follow will be displayed on his starting page.

This can save a lot of time because if for example a student wants to share a short piece of information with the class, say a link to an interesting website, he can save writing an e-mail to everyone he deems interested. He simply posts it on Twitter and all his followers can read it. At the same time teachers can create a network among each other via which they can share teaching ideas or material.

Now we have Delicous to keep track of all interesting websites and Twitter to stay in touch and share what we found. Of course there are a lot more webpages we visit on a daily basis, be it our favorite newspaper or the website of the football team we root for. But who has the time to visit all these pages every day to find out if anything is new?

This problem can be solved with Netvibes (www.netvibes.com), which is a tool that allows you to create a personalized starting page, which can contain your Twitter messages, the news headlines from your paper, the weather etc. All of these are organized in little gadgets which are essentially little boxes on your starting pages that display information from another website in a compressed form (e.g. only the titles of the newest tweets).  This helps to access interesting information immediately without having to visit all of one’s favorite pages and that saves time.

The second type of tools we tried out fit into the category text processing. So we skip from communication and information storage to productivity. Working with the new media offers new ways of approaching texts. One of them is the so called word cloud. Basically this means that a text processors scans through the text and displays those words that come up the most in a text.

Wordle (www.wordle.net)is an example for such a tool that creates very basic word clouds. Other programs like Tagul (www.tagul.com) have more function like putting the clouds into a specific shape and making the process omit certain words (for example the articles). Also there are text processors like ABCya! (www.abcya.com) which in their ways of illustrating the texts are more aimed at kids. These can be used to work with younger students.

All in all these are good means to use in teaching. The first category of tools helps to create a network with your class. Today almost all children use the internet in some way and often now their way around a lot better than their teachers. Using this knowledge can make teaching and learning more productive. There is only one thing that all the tools described here have in common. They should not be used for their own sake but in a suitable context. This is a danger in working with the new media. Networking via Twitter and Delicious is mainly helpful in a course that works with research just as word clouding should not replace standard ways of analyzing a text but rather complement them.  They are all new practical tools but they only work in the context of good teaching.