The Wireless Classroom

Using Linkedin for Language Instruction

The online journal CIO (Chief Information Officer) just published "LinkedIn Bible," an article that should go right into your adult ed/higher ed./workplace language instruction toolbox.

More and more of the international graduate and undergraduate students who come to my program at UIC (English for International Professionals) ask for some coverage of Linkedin in our courses.  Several of my program's courses have incorporated at least one class session to how to create (or improve) a LinkedIn account, with very positive responses.

It's a great idea because teaching adult students the nuts and bolts (and etiquette) of Linkedin helps them improve their reading, writing, vocabulary and general cultural awareness. It fits with language acquisition research that shows learners need to practice their skills in a real-world environment.  And, these days, the students, and group clients, who come to my program are not taking these classes for fun.  They are working on their language skills to reach some pretty high career goals, and using a site like Linkedin taps into this strong intrinsic motivation.

 

http://www.cio.com/article/495098/LinkedIn_Bible_Everything_You_Need_to_Know_About_the_Social_Network_for_Professionals

 

 

Educational Technology, G+, and This Blog

It has been 3 years since I last posted to this blog, and in that time I have moved away from using Twitter, Facebook, podcasts and blogs in the classroom, to exploring ways to leverage all the tools in Google and G+ for a more connected classroom experience.   

I once played with tools such as ooVoo to give students a better online experience, but now I see Google Hangouts as a much better tool. Add to that the fact that more and more of the international students I work with use Gmail for their personal email accounts, and G+ seems the obvious go-to app for my programs.

Why the change?  In part it just comes from changes in the nature of online tools, and in part it comes from changes in my own education and career.  I've since completed a second Masters -- this one in Education with a focus on E-Learning.  And I have moved from being an instructor at Columbia College Chicago to an Assistant Director at University of Illinois at Chicago -- in the Tutorium in Intensive English.  Both changes have helped me more deeply explore ways technology can improve the way adult students (higher education and workplace) strenghthen their language skills.

I will use this blog to record my various experiments and findings as I teach myself, and my staff, how to get the most out of G+ in the classroom, along with posting tips and tricks on any other technology that can be used in education.

--Terrie Byrne

Embedding ooVoo video chat room

This is a test to see if I can successfully embed an ooVoo video chat room in a blog, which according to ooVoo's claims should work.

(Note: the test worked, but I disabled the ooVoo embeded video chat room to allow this blog to load faster.)

Researching Web2.0 Online

Look in your library's traditional periodical databases, in JSTOR, in Wilson Select, in LexisNexis, and you'll have a hard time finding articles written on current social web tools (aka Web 2.0), and you'll find nothing, at least at the time of this posting, published on Twitter.  So, you take the same route all your students take and use Google, and there you find a site you can trust, according to all the criteria you have taught your students: The Chronicle of Education.  And the journey begins.

In the Jan. 28, 2008, issue of The Chronicle of Education's online publication Wired Campus, the article "A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom" (http://tinyurl.com/yp7fhz) reported on the experience of David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, in using Twitter in his college class. 

Much of what Wired Campus discussed in the article came from Parry's own Jan. 23, 2008, blog entry in Academichack (http://tinyurl.com/25u2cx).   Parry's blog, of course, refers to reading about Twitter in a Wired article by Clive Thompson, published June 26, 2007(http://tinyurl.com/2np4um).  At first it seems that the trail runs cold here because Thompson's article is a purely personal report on his own (noneducational) experience as a Twitter user (aka Twitterer, Twit, Tweeter) with no links to other articles.  But go back to Parry's blog and scroll down and there you'll find the research trail picks up.

In the comments section, Chris Lott very modestly states that he's written "a bit" on Twitter in his blog Ruminate (http://www.chrislott.org/tag/twitter/).  An understatement about a detailed, incredibly useful, discussion of the uses and misuses of Twitter.

Allen A. Lew lists his blog entry "Twitter Tweets for Higher Education" in his blog Web 2.0 Teaching Tools (http://tinyurl.com/yvpwn6).  A site worth going back to repeatedly (and subscribing to if you aren't already overloaded on rss feeds)

Further down in the comments posting, you find that this blog entry in AcademicHack has been linked to a blog entry in Creating Lifelong Learners called "Carnival of Education" http://tinyurl.com/yvpwn6, which turns out to be a list of links to sites on using the 'Net in the classroom.

And even further down there's a comment posted by Richard Byrne (no relation) on using Pownce in the classroom, a service similar to Twitter, and a link to an article he wrote in Free Technology for Teachers (http://tinyurl.com/ysfzzr).  In that article he links to another one he wrote Dec. 12, 2007, on Twitter titled "Get Kids Writing" (http://tinyurl.com/4vuj48). 

This is the way of research on the web....not from website to website, but from blog article to blog article....to blog article to blog article...     Now I need to log off and "tweet" about what I found.