Foreign Language: Technology

Teachers and students... Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants... How to overcome the gap? What language should we speak to be understood and understand? It should be the same but isn’t English enough?

Technology became the language in which teachers should become proficient in order to communicate educational content and expect to be heard and understood.

What does it take to master a foreign language? Teachers of Modern Languages and from ELL department know it better than anyone else! Commitment, determination, and practice are the factors that lead to success. Your foreign accent and lack of fluency will always betray you as a foreigner and be areas to bring to perfection through the whole life, but we can do something about it.

Why do we need to bother? Technology does not replace the instruction. Web 2.0 tools are just new delivery mechanisms that are used to present the instruction to the individual learner! The reason is that technology is a part of students' life, the language they speak, and the environment they live in. Technology helps us find the way to conduct educational content that students enjoy and be gladly engaged to studying the subject. Why not to use it?

Technology integrators, once also being beginners and intermediate, threw themselves into the ocean of technology and immigrated to Second Life.
They have built some sites that connect us with others who decided to learn more about technology in education:
Classroom 2.0 - an online network of those who are interested in using digital tools in education;
The Educator's PLN (The Personal Learning Network for Educators) - a ning that encourages teachers to communicate with others and get an update on technology tools;
ISTE Community Ning  comprises a number of group that can be of your interest (like Moodle group,  1-to-1, etc.)
Don't ignore our local connections as well - we try our best to let you exercise your new skills and learn new vocabulary words:
WBAIS Staff ning (WebCafe group), Library Buzz blog,  and MBtoolbox wiki. Feel free to add your tools and participate in professional discussions.

Social Bookmarking and Networking

Some time ago, with a YouTube movie Social Media Revolution Rebecca reminded us that teaching generation Y and Z should include social networking, online assignments, Web 2.0 widgets. The world of media cannot be ignored when we work on unit plans and standards and benchmarks.

Integration of technology into education led to the appearance of new vocabulary and caused to revise Bloom's Taxonomy. Andrew Churches introduces Bloom's digital taxonomy map with new objectives and new digital verbs for each element of thinking skills in his article(Churches, A. Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally. Technology & Learning, April 1, 2008).

Here is a list of new words included in each level of thinking:

Remembering - bullet pointing, highlighting, bookmarking, social networking, social bookmarking, searching, googling;

Understanding - advanced searches, Boolean searches, blog journal-ing, annotating, subscribing, twittering;

Applying - running, loading, playing, operating, uploading, sharing, editing;

Analyzing - comparing, organizing, outlining, integrating, structuring, linking, tagging;

Evaluating - testing (of applications), blog/vlog commenting and reflecting, posting, moderating, collaborating, networking;

Creating - programming, filming, animating, mixing, mashing-up, blogging, wiki-ing, publishing.

Recently social bookmarking and social networking were in focus of one of the professional development sessions. The verb that describes collecting and saving websites online rather than on a local computer falls into the category "remembering". However, further processes connected with social bookmarking involve all other thinking skills: understanding (classifying and subscribing), applying (sharing and using), analyzing (tagging and organizing), and evaluating and creating (mixing and blogging).

One of the social bookmarking tools is del.icio.us.com. For those of you who could not come to the presentation or didn't have enough time to finish a set-up of the account I suggest to watch delicious.com in Plain English. The movie describes all benefits of social bookmarking and reminds us three steps we need to follow when using the new tool: to open the account, to assign tags to the favorite sites, and to share - put your knowledge into practice - become social! After having signed into Del.icio.us.com you will be able to find links to the websites that other professionals found and shared with other educators. Web sites of the same subject tagged by other educators can be seen as well.

Highlighting, filtering, annotating, creating a personal collection of notes, researching and sharing knowledge make Diigo.com more powerful tool than just a social bookmarking. This tool is great for collaboration. Your research can be shared with friends and colleagues. It's designed to collect, annotate, organize and discover information and share it with others. As the sites that you will be working with are annotated by other users, you will be able to also gain insights from other users.

Find friends and classmates, meet new people, stay in touch, listen to free music and build play-lists, share photos and watch videos - that's what MySpace, Facebook, ning, and other social networking tools allow their members to do. Social Media in Plain English
explains how these tools can be used for sharing personal and professional information.

To learn more what nings can do, I invite you to visit Ning for NESA Librarians that was created for sharing professional ideas and projects among NESA school librarians. You can also view a list of the nings that I've joined by clicking a tag "ning" on my del.icio.us collection that you see on the right side of the blog.