Did 2nd in-class support with E2 ESOL group today using Tumblr. It took a while for them to access their accounts due to the age old problems with passwords and remembering email addresses but we got there eventually!
We set the ‘Where I live’ task up – to write a bit and then upload a photo of their area. i was pleased to see some typing straight on to the tumblr post even tho i had mentioned the option of practising first on ye olde piece of paper. They seemed to like the idea of taking a photo with their mobile and then upload that rather than going thro google.
I think tumblr has a place on a low level ESOL course – to be used as a means to store useful links and only for little self-contained tasks like the one they did this morning. This was not an out of the ordinary task – teachers do this kind of thing all the time in class but hopefully working with this web2 application may make it more memorable/appealing for sts…
The next habit I think sts should be encouraged to get into is responding to each other’s posts – though unlike twitter there is no direct message facilty on tumblr.
As with Twitter, if you are following 15 people then the update page is very hard to wade through…especially I would say for Entry 2 sts.
That is one of the biggest problems for non native learners when working on webquests/internet page research tasks – not knowing where to look and what to filter out (actually its probably the same for most sts who have to get thro lots of text - making teh right choices about what to include in essays etc)
twitter Blog entry
It’s easier to follow these kind of streams if you subscribe to the feed, rather than read the actual page – you can subscribe to twitter as well, it gives you the option of following just the user or the user and their friends. It can seem a bit of a bind having to subscribe to all these different things – but once you’ve got used to a reader it really does become easy – one place to go and see everyones updates.
By: rdsc on January 22, 2008
at 12:25 pm
Richard, but what if there’s a class of 15 sts and 1 teacher who are being encouraged to make updates pretty regularly?
That’s what seemed to work in the ESOL classroom – the fact that they can see what the otehrs are up to and therefore practise reading without getting too overwhelmed!
I had fed twitter into my tumblelog but low level students who were following me in tumblr couldn’t (and didn’t really want to) see my PET project ramblings!! so I removed them when I was demonstrating another tumblr task.
By: lizboyden on January 22, 2008
at 2:23 pm
Cool – I looked at your class handout on tumblr – didn’t realise you could filter the dashboard view!
By: rdsc on January 23, 2008
at 12:25 pm
There is debugging still to be done how to operate this stuff in real classrooms.
It is possible that multimedia appeals more to students than I realised (uploading photo’s seems to get many excited)
Maybe the students could work in “communities” groups of 4 or something and follow their commmunity in twitter – blog comments etc.
Hopefully I can pop down next week and see some of this next week
By: martinking on January 25, 2008
at 9:25 pm