“How can blogs, wikis and delicious be used in the Saudi EFL context?”

 

 

Technology becomes an important thing in our daily life especially in teaching and learning. There are many websites such as blogs, wikis, delicious and yahoo group which can help the students to improve their knowledge and their English language skills ( reading, writing, speaking and listening). I would likely to use blogs, wikis and delicious with my EFL students through the lesson. The using of these websites in teaching can be a powerful and effective technology tool for students and teachers

 

Blogs

Is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. Blog is one of the very good and useful tools for students

In my opinion, using blog is useful for improving students' writing and reading skills, how?. For writing skills, teacher can give students some of the home-works that require them to post in their blogs like, express their opinions and ideas by writing in some topics that are chosen by the teacher. For reading, teacher may used for this skill by posting articles and asks them to read and reflect, so the teacher will know if they understand what they read or not

 

 

Wiki

Wikis are excellent website for collaboration. It's help the students to communicate and collaborate with each others. Teacher can use wiki to ask students to upload their works in it, like: PowerPoint presentations. Teacher can used it too to upload a beneficial materials, assignments and students' grades. It's a very useful tool for students to interact with their teacher and with their classmates

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delicious

A social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks

This website is fantastic. The teacher can post a good online materials, like: links, videos, activities and games that help the students to understand and learn some lessons. The teacher can also used it to ask the students to share useful links that are related to their lessons. Delicious will definitely be a helping tool inside and outside the classroom to expose students to the language

Finally

These websites can improve the teaching quality and the students' achievement. Technology really help developing and enhancing the learning process

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky

Here is an image of a mind map created to show the differences between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.

 

 

Digital Immigrant teachers are the person who were born before the digital world but have at some later point in our lives. 

 

Digital Native students are the people who are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

There are many differences between digital immigrant teachers and digital native students:

Digital Immigrants teachers typically have very little appreciation for these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice. The skills are almost totally foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned – and so choose to teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously.

Digital Natives students are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite, and they prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards .They prefer games to “serious” work.

 

 

The “digital immigrant accent” can be used to turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it.

The Examples of the digital immigrant accent they include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you – an even “thicker” accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). My own favorite example is the “Did you get my email?” phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our “accent.”

 

The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. This is obvious to the Digital Natives – school often feels pretty much as if we've brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They often can't understand what the Immigrants are saying.

I prefer the second choice, the digital immigrants learn the new way because today's learners are difference. They are no longer like the teachers when they were students. Kids born into any new culture learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don't know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in the “old country.”

 There should be some improvement:

 First, our methodology. Today's teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students.

 Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital “singularity” there are now two kinds of content:

“Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and “Future” content.

So we have to invent, but not necessarily from scratch. Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully.

For example:

In math, the debate must no longer be about whether to use calculators and computers . They are a part of the Digital Natives world . But rather how to use them to instill the things that are useful to have internalized, from key skills and concepts to the multiplication tables. We should be focusing on "future math" approximation, statistics, binary thinking.

We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us. The process has already begun I know college professors inventing games for teaching subjects ranging from math to engineering to the Spanish Inquisition. We need to find ways of publicizing and spreading their successes.

 

The Possiblity of Reaching Bax’s Normilasation in our Saudi context: Why is it possible?When is it possible/reached/achieved?How will it be reached?

In the article of Stephan Bax we found that he discussed the development of the CALL through the past, present and future. Also, we found the three phases of CALL which divided previously by Mark Warschauer. These phases are structural, communicative, integrative.Bax said that call will reach the stage of normalization when computers are used every day in our classrooms of learning language by students and teachers.Also, CALL will reach this state when teachers and students well trained how to use it without fear.

Normalization means to integrate CALL ( computer assisted language learning ) in education in a way that learners and teachers do not recognize it as a technology but as an integral part of language teaching.

This article seeks answers to three questions: where has Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) been, where is it now and where is it going?

He suggested to plan for this normalized state and then move towards it.

1- The first step is to identify the criteria factors which normalization requires.

2- The second is to audit the practice of each teaching context in the light of these criteria.

3- The final step is to adjust our current practice in each aspect so as to encourage normalization.

Finally, he mentioned the seven stages of normalization in CALL from early adaptors, ignorance/skepticism, try once, try again, fear/awe, normalizing, until we finally reach normalization.

In Saudi Arabia most of the schools and universities follow the traditional way of teaching, but nowadays with all these development, many schools and universities improved their educational system, they started to use computers, smart boards and projectors in the classroom. To achieve normalization in Saudi Arabia, we need to educate the students and parents about technology and how useful it can be in classrooms or anywhere else. Also, teachers need to be encourage and motivated to use it, and above of all, to believe in its benefits. It is not difficult to achieve normalization in Saudi Arabia; we just need time, knowledge and changes in our educational system.

WELCOME....

 

Welcome Everyone, to my blog

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Hi every one

It is my first time to use the blogger and I am a little bit confusing about it
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Alslamo alikom

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My name is Reem AL-Sobhi