Activity 6: Using social online networks in teaching and/or professional development
Create a blog post where you critically discuss the use of social media in teaching and/or in professional development in relation to the two following questions:
- What are some key features of social media that are beneficial for teaching and learning? Why?
- What social media platform do you feel best supports engagement with your professional development? Why?
Using social online networks for learning has become the normal
environment for many school children. It may be fraught with dangers as well as
troves of information, it may be disputed whether in fact it is distracting
(the guardian 28 July 2015) rather than enhancing of students' learning, but it
is indisputably here to stay. While digital tools reach across disciplines,
countries and ages of learners, it is yet to be seen if longer term, the early
uptake of phones and tablets by very young children is productive or damaging.
Silicon Valley parents don't seem to think it’s good during the day, banning
technology from their schools and out of the lives of some youngsters until
they are 14.
There is some evidence in cerebral development that might support this position (Wallis, 2014).
www.radionz.co.nz/.../what-3-to-7-year-olds-need-to-learn-nathan-mikaere-wallis
12:00 pm on 8 May 2014
Nathan Mikaere Wallis is part of the Brain Wave Trust, and X Factor Education, Christchurch. He has been a lecturer at the Christchurch College of Education, lecturing in human development, brain development, language and communication and risk and resilience. Nathan has a background of working with children in counselling settings relating to domestic violence, sexual abuse and childhood trauma.
But there is one area of education that may reap
benefits from digital tools more than any others and that is language learning.
Signal theory and statistical models show us the
early language acquisition is a number crunching business that relies on
vibrations and other characteristics of speech that we cannot consciously hear.
We have never been able to manipulate this data for the benefit of language
learners. Yet the possibility is now there with the level of accuracy reached by
speech-to-text databases. Applications designed to lift the power of databases
into cerebrally designed programmes for language learners may bring major
disruption to the way we go about acquiring other languages.
Technology companies like Samsung have developed
databases whose performance is far in excess of anything we have seen earlier.
Speech recognition and translation to the written word includes complex
variables that can be seen in the number of choices the phone will give when
decoding speech. Language teachers, app makers and game developers
world-wide have yet to understand what we have in hand.
It may take time before the embedded interests of
linguistics departments and other traditional language stakeholders are ready
to move towards dealing with a subconscious system of weighted connections that
forms the early stage of language learning. And which may provide the best key
yet for adult or mature second language learners' easy path to mastery.
Language learners however have grasped a totally different aspect of
online communicating. And to a modest extent, teachers have too. That is social
apps.
My class uses kakao for its online media. It's a robust reliable free
Korean app that appears to have no qualms about uploading large videos or
storing massive amounts of data on your page. Unlike VLN - Virtual Learning Network - which suffers, notwithstanding the endorsement of
Whether teachers use whatsApp, Line, kakao or others has little bearing
on the extremely positive push that casual relaxed chatting brings to the
language learning domain.
Universally students of language dislike writing and it is a task
greeted often by groans. Yet online in social media platforms, they see
themselves in a different non-judgmental, non -assessed space.
Already for native speakers the culture of texting, emails and chats is
that mistakes are overlooked, as long as the message is still
there. It is this environment that gives to language students the freedom to
plunge into conversations without much care about grammar. Thousands of
non-native speakers world-wide now do not hesitate to share their opinions and
information in whatever kind of English they can manage. And generally their
postings are accepted in the same vein. This is
very advantageous environment for students who have been brought up in a
heavily standardised, competitive, silo version of learning.
The online social media is here - chatterers throughout the internet are
practising their English at rates of about ten to fifty times more than before
I would estimate. Thanks Facebook and the other apps. You've provided a great
learning media for language learners.
References
Melhuish, K.(2013). Online social networking and its impact on New Zealand educators’professional learning. Master Thesis. The University of Waikato. Retrieved on 05 May, 2015 from http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/han...
Wallis, N. (2014). "What 3 to 7 year olds need to learn." National Radio New Zealand. 8 May 2014.
Appendix:
Uses of online social media. Examples from kakao.
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