These tools are internet tools that allow the user to go beyond just receiving information through the web. The user is expected to interact and to create content with others. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are examples of Web 2.0 tools. Web tools can be used to enhance teaching and collaboration among teachers and students as well as increase professional collaboration between educators.
Some free Web 2.0 type tools that can be used by teachers who are interested in using technology in language teaching. The tools presented here are just the tip of the iceberg and this should not be considered in any way conclusive or even the ʻbest ofʼ Web 2.0 tools.
Every time we have new tools to learn and emerging all the time, many not originally intended for education, but which can be put to good use by students and teachers alike to extend opportunities, enhance learning potential and develop the level of digital literacy that students will need for the 21st century.
How Web 2.0 came into Existence?
The name came into existence from a software Industry, where each new software program is named using some numeric value. Web 2.0 was coined out in the year 2004 by Darcy DiNucci; an information architecture consultant, in her article named – “Fragmented Future”, and was popularized by Tim O’Reilly and Media Live International.
Features of Web 2.0
Web 2.0 uses the approach of “guide on the Side” rather than implementing “top-down” approach i.e dynamically change or edit the content rather then simply reading.
It changed the concept of “mostly read only web” to “widely read and write” over web.
Web 2.0 provides a perfect platform base for effective user interaction that was not available before. It changed the idea from passive consumption and delivery of content, to actively participating in creation, sharing, and collaboration.
It is subjected to be a powerful lure for an Enterprise; that fetch more employees into accounts at a lower cost for greater participation in projects and idea sharing.
Moodle
Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.
Technology possesses an ever-changing nature and holds visible effects in the field of education as is the case with many other realms of life. Related with technology in language teaching and learning, it can be easily observed that some acronyms like TELL, CALL, and MALL are broadly used.
Out of these three, CALL turns out to be the most known as it has been a term in use as of 1960s and 70s. MALL is a quite novel and popular term and may be traced back to a decade ago, or two decades at most. TELL here can be regarded as an umbrella term for the use of technology in language learning in general.
Here I have discuss the following questions on the link between CALL and MALL:
Is MALL replacing CALL? Which term is more popular among researchers?
What are their pros and cons? Which one is more practical and advantageous for language learners?
Which one is more likely to be involved in the future of language learning and teaching?
Are CALL and MALL replacing the live language teacher?
By seeking satisfactory answers for the questions, we aim to shed light upon the dichotomy of CALL or MALL and contribute to the existing literature.
Warschauer (1996) divides the evolution of CALL into three phases:
Behaviouristic CALL (1960s-1970s)
Communicative CALL (1970s-1980s)
Integrative CALL (1990s-)
The phase valid today is Integrative CALL. It is mostly web-based and gives computers and the Internet a facilitator role. As Bax (2003) stresses, CALL has gone through considerable changes over time. With the transfer of computer functions to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, a new dimension emerged in the field of language teaching and learning: MALL.
It can be briefly said that MALL “differs from CALL in its use of personal, portable devices that enable new ways of learning, emphasising continuity or spontaneity of access across different contexts of use” (Kukulska-Hulme & Shields, 2008, p. 273). In the past, mobile devices included casette players, MP3/4 players, etc. Their functions were rather limited with no internet access. However, with the advent of mobile devices with advanced functions, their broad use in language learning has become viable.
Mobile-assisted Language Learning (MALL).
MALL encompasses the use of mobile devices like cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones, pads, and pods for language learning purposes. Especially with the advent of smartphones and interactive mobile 2.0 technologies MALL began to gain a remarkable momentum. It makes a clear comment as to the borders of MALL by stating: “computer assisted mobile learning uses lightweight devices such as personal digital assistant (PDA), cellular mobile phones, and so on”. This elaboration obviously excludes even laptops from the coverage of MALL. Accordingly, such developments have led to a CALL Participatory Educational Research.
Video 6: David Crystal: The Effect of New Technologies on English:
It is true that technology has the ability to change and create new languages and develop the way in which we speak. Crystal mentions how we speak differently when we text rather than speak, as the shortage of characters we are given, for example on twitter means that we have to be more creative in the way we talk to each other to get our message across which is why we use abbreviations and non standard english.
He also puts forward that when twitter first began it urged people to tweet in first person by posing the question "what are you doing?" and later changed it to "what is happening?" which changes the language to third person. This is a clear example of how technology and especially twitter has changed the way we speak and talk to each other in real life and online and I personally think it is a good thing that we have technology that gives us the ability to change the english language and make it more exciting.
Crystal's observations about the influence on language of a particular technological medium are very interesting, and also the idea of how a very minor change in a question, or sentence expecting a response, can so very dramatically influence the response itself and the language used.
It is also noteworthy what Crystal says about the timescale of observing the influence of technologies like the internet, and how it will take a very long time for us to actually see any prominent changes to the structure of the language- that it could be a relatively temporary phenomenon, but that we will not know for certain for a long time.
Video 7: David Crystal: The Biggest Challenge for English Language Teachers in the times of Internet:
The English as a foreign language should be taught as a consequence of English becoming a global language and its being spoken in different parts of the world. David Crystal’s statement that the ‘the greatest challenge for the teachers’ is that ‘they must keep pace with the language change, given that languages change so fast’, it is studied and used everywhere in the world, and the need to eliminate the mismatch between the language taught in the classroom and the language spoken by natives or in professional environments. The present study is focused on the discussion of textbooks, the variety of English to be taught, cultural background, and pronunciation issues.
David Crystal recognized that even the best teaching materials provide learners with texts which are far from the real, informal kind of English, which is used very much more than any other during a normal speaking lifetime.
This is the greatest challenge faced by teachers as they must ’keep pace with it and expose the learners to it’. According to Crystal, the fast language change is the result of two reasons: the first reason is represented by the internet, which is fostering new varieties of language and experiences, thus exposing the learners to language varieties which are more frequently used or which the learners prefer. These varieties are not controlled by any grammatical correctness filter and thus generate new word forms or uses which may not necessarily conform to accepted grammar rules.
The second reason which accounts for the fast language change is the globalization of English. This phenomenon has also had many effects on language teaching. Thus, amid this phenomenon the teachers may be confused and overwhelmed and the question they may ask themselves is ‘What is the language variety that should be taught?’ The answer to the question was given by Crystal in his speech on ‘English as a global language’.
Video 8: David Crystal: Texting is 'Good' for English Language
Human Intelligence is Richer and More Dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education.
-Ken Robinson
Changing Education Paradigms is a narrative from Sir Ken Robinson that provides an inspirational insight and overview of the current worldwide education structure, the effects that it is having on our school kids and society, and an invitation to consider what it would take to shift the current industrial concept of schooling to a more sustainable one.
Reforming Public Education
There are two reasons for it. For that
Economic
Cultural
Economic
The first of them is economic. People are trying to work out
“How do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century”?
How do we do that, given that we can’t anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week as the recent turmoil is demonstrating?
How do we do that?
Cultural
The second, though, is cultural. Every country on earth is trying to figure out
How do we educate our children so they have a sense of cultural identity and so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process of globalization?
How do we square that circle?
The problem is, they’re trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past, like any one has done their schooling. They have better opportunities to got Collage degree.
Problem of Education system
The system was was designed and conceived and constructed for a different age.It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. They think that "They’re incapable of learning to read and write, and why are we spending time on this?”
Twin pillars: economic and intellectual
This model has caused chaos in many people’s lives. It’s been great for some and most people have not. it’s as fictitious: this is the plague of ADHD. Now this is a map of the instance of ADHD in America or prescriptions for ADHD.
Therefore he first talked about to think differently about human capacity. We have to get over this old conception of academic, non-academic, abstract, theoretical, vocational… and see it for what it is, a myth.
Second is that we have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups, that collaboration is the stuff of growth and separate them and judge them separately, we should have disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.
Thirdly it’s crucially about the culture of our institutions, the habits of institution and the habitats that they occupy.
Video 2:Sugata Mitra: School in the cloud- SOLE
He starts with the question like What is going to be the future of learning? To look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from. It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must know three things:
They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten
They must be able to read and multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head.
They must be so identical
They're there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully, multiply numbers,or read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.
How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?
He talked about an experiment of Delhi into a really remote village There was no place to stay, he stuck his computer in, when he came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. "We want a faster processor and a better mouse."
"How on Earth do you know all this?"
"You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." that he had heard the word "teach ourselves".
"Hole in the wall film - 1999"
An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is, and said, "There's a processor inside."
He started experimenting with other subjects, There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs. He has given text to write and "Keep talking into it until it types what you say." They did that. He has elaborated ideas about different languages and different places, how the students are using different methods of learning and actually they are learning through technology very fast.
Video 3: Sugata Mitra: Future of Learning
He started with the question : What is the future of learning? The teacher as the “Sage on the Stage” and the book as the ultimate authority was how the world should be. The teacher is the fount of all knowledge. Now students are more involved in setting the course and pace of their learning. Some examples of this are project based learning programs and inquiry based learning programs.
The above mentioned teaching and learning models: they emphasize reaching beyond the classroom and giving students more control to develop their innate curiosity, creativity and find the answers themselves. Mitra’s premise is that schools are still operating on a 19th century factory model designed to spit out workers with the same skills. He encourages teachers and parents to break free of that model and do a better job at sparking children’s curiosity and agency.Mitra has launched a SOLE toolkit to help parents and teachers do that.
Video 4:Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education
In this TEDTalk Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, talks about the need to create alternative access to classroom content and how videos can be used to flip a classroom. While showing the power of interactive exercises, Salman argues for a change in the teaching paradigm: Using technology to "humanize" the classroom by flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher as a facilitator, coach and mentor.
Video 5: Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
As proclaimed by Prensky, people who were not born in the digital era and later adopted the new technology are named as “digital immigrants” whereas people who were born during or after the digital era are dubbed “digital natives”. Digital era begins in 1980. As such, based on Prensky’s definition, the adults aged 40 and above were categorised as “digital immigrants”.
He said that “Is it just that I’m getting older? I find myself having trouble keeping up with technology… I have been swamped with the choice and variety of technology.” They possibly learn it all. Sometimes we can’t even learn the ones that might actually be helpful to us. Middle-aged adults are digital immigrants. The way they perceive technology is different from a digital native. How different they are? Because there is the difference.
Video 6: David Crystal: The Effect of New Technologies on English:
Video 7: David Crystal: The Biggest Challenge for English Language Teachers in the times of Internet:
Video 8: David Crystal: Texting is 'Good' for English Language
“We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.”
– David Warlick
Hello Friends,
Warmly welcome to my blog. Here I have described how technology has played a vital role in Education. Before the Covid19 some of the people were using technology for the learning and teaching process. But nowadays people are well familiar with the use of technology and how it is useful for teachers as well as students. For more information you can visit the blog of Dr.Dilip Barad to
Yes, technology is useful in the field of Education. The use of technology has become an important part of the learning process in and out of the class. Every language class usually uses some form of technology. Technology has been used to both help and improve language learning. Technology enables teachers to adapt classroom activities, thus enhancing the language learning process. Technology continues to grow in importance as a tool to help teachers facilitate language learning for their learners. This study of technology and education will focus on the role of using new technologies in learning English as a second/foreign language.
It discussed different attitudes which support English language learners to increase their learning skills through using technologies. Here I have defined the term technology and technology integration, explained the use of technology in language classrooms, reviewed previous studies on using technologies in improving language learning skills, and stated certain recommendations for the better use of these technologies, which assist learners in improving their learning skills. The literature review indicated that the effective use of new technologies improves learners’ language learning skills.
Use of Technology in English Language Class
Technology is an effective tool for learners. Learners must use technology as a significant part of their learning process. Teachers should model the use of technology to support the curriculum so that learners can increase the true use of technology in learning their language skills. Learners’ cooperation can be increased through technology. Cooperation is one of the important tools for learning. Learners cooperatively work together to create tasks and learn from each other through reading their peers’ work.
The use of computer technology leads to the improvement of teachers’ teaching and learners’ learning in the classes. The use of computer technology helps teachers meet their learners’ educational needs.
Dawson, Cavanaugh, and Ritzhaupt (2008) and Pourhosein Gilakjani (2014) maintained that using technology can create a learning atmosphere centered around the learner rather than the teacher that in turn creates positive changes. They emphasized that by using computer technology, language class becomes an active place full of meaningful tasks where the learners are responsible for their learning.
Technology and Education
In this given video you can find how technology helps students to learn everything from anyone and anywhere. Some of the good online learning platforms are provided by the Government like Swayam and other online courses, study apps, E-Material etc. More important thing is that now students have their own devices and wifi network to expand their learning skills as well as to engage with expert Professors and Teachers . Although, you watch the advertisement which focuses on the now time to turn towards the use of technology in learning and explores the way in the terms of job and business. So They can easily learn anything from anywhere. If anybody is living in remote areas still those students don't have to stop learning they can use technology to learn more without any restrictions.
Use of Technology and Technology integration
When we talk about technology integration in the classroom we are talking about a planned and highly structured and purposeful use of technology with students whose ultimate goal is to engage students and help them develop new thinking skills. Using technology, on the other hand, is a random and sporadic process whose main goal is to instruct students on content not to engage them with content. The below given chart offers a more detailed explanation of the difference between Using Technology and Integrating Technology. For more details go through the chart.
What shall teachers do so they are not replaceable by technology?
The word “future”, you hear “robots”. Artificial intelligence is rapidly growing, and that fear of losing your job to technology has become very real. Technology is merely an augmentation to a teacher. It can help the process of learning, but it certainly cannot replace the role of the teacher.
Technology can make it easy to get educated by sitting at home but that education too is provided by a teacher. Even in online courses, we see that teachers are necessary to give lectures, whether in the form of videos, tutorials, Skype sessions, meet, zoom etc. Students still need to learn computers to operate those online sessions, which of course are taught by teachers.
A teacher also acts as a guide, a mentor and an inspiration for students, a role that cannot be replaced by technology of any kind. Taking critical skills into account like decision making, time management etc, a child needs a teacher as the technology cannot teach these human skills. Even the tech wizard himself, Steve Jobs, believed that
while technology can solve many societal problems, it’s not as simple as handing it over to a computer. At least not when it comes to teaching.
The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.
ICT
ICT stand for information and communication technologies and are defined, for the purposes of this primer, as a
“diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information.”
These technologies include computers, the Internet, broadcasting technologies.
Information and communication technologies (ICT) have some benefits for teaching and learning. First, learners play an active role, which can help them retain more information. Next, follow-up discussions involve more information where learners can become more independent. Finally, learners can process new learner-based educational materials and their language learning skills can increase.
CITATIONS
Dawson, K., Cavanaugh, C., & Ritzhaupt, A. (2008). Florida’s EETT Leveraging Laptops Initiative and its impact on teaching practices. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 41(2), 143-159. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2008.10782526
