Viki Davis, a teacher in rural Georgia, "uses every kind of technology to connect her students to the world".
According to Ms. Davis, every child can learn, and computer-based projects have the advantage that they enable all students to succeed, unlike pen and paper based education. The variety of activities on the web allows for customization: students can share their interests, create wikis, blogs, participate in diverse online collaborating projects, write something that will be read by many people and therefore learn to be active members of an online community.
The use of digital media help students to learn, in the way that the internet provides them most of the tools they will need for their instruction. Whenever they do not understand a word, they can look it up; they have the responsibility to understand what the teacher says, and they have to participate in different projects, for which they need to do research.
Students are therefore "empowered"; the teacher is just here to guide them and facilitate their learning, and they can explore, go further; they can even discover new tools and show their teachers what they have learnt. The fact that they can actually know more than the teacher himself on some topics empowers them.
I think that collaboration amongst students from different cultures is beneficial. It does not necessarily need to be with students from all around the world; some projects might only involve schools from the same country (schools from poor areas and regular public schools, for example) and yet be as beneficial as international exchanges. The most important thing is that students learn to communicate and cooperate with other young people from different backgrounds. In an ESL context, I think that it is a necessity to have our students exchange with native speakers; it could be with other Canadians, British or US citizens, the most important thing is to have them discover their target language and culture.
As an ESL teacher, I will probably use the Tandem Agency service; I also like the idea of having students create their own blogs and wikis, maybe by dividing the class into groups of common interests and having them share their thoughts about a specific topic.
I agree that introducing students to different cultures is beneficial as well as have the bloggers talk or comment in their native language. You have brought up a good point, I think that having students from different schools in the same country could be an interesting approach. This way, students could see how different the environments of schools(either rich or poor) have an impact on either the mentality, values or effective work methods. If you were to start such a research or project I would not only support, but greatly appreciate participating.
ReplyDelete