Reading Prompt 3

*LEVY – Ch. 8. Technology
*BLACKBOARD - Soares, D. d.A. (2008). Understanding class blogs as a tool for language development. Language Teaching Research, 12(4), 517–533.
What challenges did Soares face when using blogs with her ESL students, and what lessons did she learn? How does she feel about using blogs with students in the future? Levy describes several types of technologies Choose one of them and describe how you might want to use it (or have used it), and discuss some of considerations that need to be taken when using this technology with ESL students

Soares' article on using a class blog with her pre-intermediate EFL students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil describes some of the challenges she faced. Soares observed that her students were excited to get the blog started and showed interest in class, but demonstrated lower than expected participation in posting information and comments from home. She set out to gain some insight to her students' motivations and attitudes by engaging her students in some learning activities and distributing a survey to other professionals in the field (in varied countries) involved in blogging activities.

Due to unfamiliarity with blog platforms, Soares encountered some technical problems. Additionally, she learned that technical difficulties had a negative impact on some of her students, which may be minimized in the future through some tutorial training. The survey helped Soares realize that some of the trends she saw with her students, such as being more interested in reading blogs than commenting on them, occurred in other contexts as well.

I think one of Soares' great insights came as a result of her second learning activity. She observed great collaborative efforts from her students when she gave them directed blog activities during class time. Not only were her students involved in "learning" through the blog assignment, but they were relying on each other for feedback and correction in their writing. Soares also discerned that her student seemed more comfortable using their English skills through the class blog with an identifiable audience rather than with "strangers". I think this is an important point to consider with ESL classrooms, especially with beginning-level language learners.

In regards to Soares' attitude about using blogs with future students, I'd say she is optimistic. I think she will use the knowledge she's gained so far to develop and improve her blog practices. Additionally, she uses her own blog to continue collaboration with other practitioners regarding this technology in education contexts.

Of the technologies described by Levy, I am most familiar with authoring software and learning management systems (LMS), such as BlackBoard. While teaching at a local language school, I used some language learning software called English Beat, which is geared towards children. As I received no proper instruction in how to use this program though, I can attest to Debski and Gruba's argument (1999) that this sort of "unfamiliarity with advanced technologies can lead to uncertainty towards using them" (p220). This experience did indeed make me a bit hesitant about using new technology in the classroom. However, I can certainly see the value of using authoring tools in language teaching and, in the future, will not likely introduce a new technology into the classroom until I am certain of how to use it to achieve specific curricular goals.

An authoring software, such as Hot Potatoes, offers flexibility to the instructor in terms of using it teach specific concepts and gives immediate feedback to the learner, which seems helpful. It takes longer, though, to get these details to the teacher and with corrective feedback as an important component to L2 learning, this is an area of concern. However, with continued developments and improvements in technology, such as the ability to link information across platforms through hybridization, this appears to be less problematic in the future. A second drawback is that that while the simple scripting in Hot Potatoes allows for fairly easy compatibility with a database, it may also pose security concerns for testing purposes. Levy suggests that computer savvy students may cheat by locating source codes for tests with the correct answers. These concerns may be overcome though by strict supervision during testing periods. In sum, I think the benefits of using authoring software with ESL students outweigh the negative aspects. I can see myself using this technology with my ESL students, preferably in combination with an LMS or database.