What is LectureTools 2.0?

Lecture Tools 2.0 is essentially a Course Management System that can be used as a forum for creating activities for students such as are offered in Hot Potatoes, Soft Chalk, and Blackboard. Although Lecture Tools states that it can be easily integrated with CMS's like Moodle or Blackboard, there do not appear to be many advantages to using Lecture Tools 2.0 over using the interactive activities that can be built within Blackboard itself unless it is being employed in a large lecture hall where all students have their own computers or have access to computers.

Pros and Cons of Using Lecture Tools 2.0

Pros

1. Checking Attendance:  Lecture Tools can be used as a tool to "Check Attendance" aka see who has visited the course site within a given time frame. This could be a useful tool for a distance learning course or a blended class with a given time frame for meeting because the professor can see who is logged on and who is not within a given time frame. Additionally, the page refreshes itself every few seconds, so the professor could potentially see who has recently logged in or out. Whereas, to my knowledge Blackboard does not offer such a feature. However, all of thee above presupposes that the students in the class have access to computers at the same time.
2. Voting: the voting option on Lecture Tools is similar to having a "clicker" system in place in the classroom. For example, some undergraduate classes with fifty or more students have the students purchase clickers that resemble remotes at the beginning of the semester. Students use these remotes to do things such as answer multiple choice test questions and to vote on topics that are raised in class. The results can then be transmitted into a pie chart or graph that can be displayed for the class to see a visual representation of the class' opinion without the embarrassment and inaccuracies associated with voting by having all the students raise their hands. 
3. Before and After Voting: voting can also be displayed to compare and contrast opinions on a topic at different points in the lecture, which can be a valuable feedback tool for the professor to gauge their impact upon the class. For example, the professor could pose an opinionnaire-type question at the beginning of class, and then ask the same question at the end of class to see whether opinions have changed or stayed the same.
4. Open-ended Questions:  Within the Lecture Tools asset system, the professor has the ability to pose open-ended questions to the students and then display the answers without displaying names of which student provided the answer. This is done asynchronously, so the professor has control over which responses are displayed. This option as three distinct advantages over using a tool like twitter to ask an open-ended questions: the first is that the students are not identified, so they do not have to feel embarrassment over providing an incorrect response; the second is that when using Twitter, all the students will have to "find" each other and follow each other in order to see and respond to each others' responses, and in Lecture Tools, the students will already be set to see each other's responses without spending any additional set up time; and the third is that Twitter is an synchronous feed, so the professor is unable to control the feed in terms of pace and what posts are displayed. 
5. Students Ask Questions: the students have the option of asking questions at the bottom of the slide shows without being identified. Once again, Lecture Tools has relieved the burden of being embarrassed to ask a question.
6. Indicate Confidence: students have the ability to indicate on a scale of 1-10 how confident they are with the material, which can help the professor gauge how slowly or quickly they should pace the course.
7. Slide Annotation: during a presentation, the professor has the ability to annotate and draw on slides, which can be useful if the professor wants to guide the students in note-taking, or if the foreign language class it is being used for uses a lot of diacritics--for example the Ancient Greek distance learning course. Additionally, the new material added to the slides can be saved and viewed later or printed off, which is more interactive than options available currently on Blackboard.
8. Podcast: the professor has the ability to upload podcasts of lectures or of supplemental material for the students to listen to in between class sessions.

Cons

1. Fees: while the site states that Lecture Tools will continue to be free for Instructors, it does caution that students will be assessed a fee for using the site starting as early as in August 2011. The website indicates that "starting in September 2011 Lecturetools will charge a modest subscription fee to student users and offer site licenses to departments and institutions." Therefore, if a professor was to adopt Lecture Tools right now to design a course for the fall, it is unclear exactly what students will be charged to use the site and if it will be reasonably priced.
2. Technologically Dependent: the use of Lecture Tools in the classroom presupposes that all students in the classroom have access to their own laptop or that the class is conducted in a space where all students have their own computer, which may not be a reasonable expectation for a professor to plan their class around. However, in large lecture halls more and more students do have access to netbooks, so it maybe dependent upon how fast computer literacy spreads with the falling price of computers. Another concern is that Lecture Tools has not yet been tested on a tablet, and many students are defaulting to tablets over netbooks. Therefore, compatibility could be an issue.
3. We've Been Burned Before: the UIC Language and Culture Learning Center has been burned before via Softchalk integration in the German blended learning courses. The department and German TAs had invested a considerable amount of time and dollars into creating blended learning materials based on the company's guarantee that Softchalk's SCORM files could effortlessly be integrated with both Blackboard and Moodle, only to find out a few months before introduction that in fact there were several problems with the Softchalk activities' ability to record scores correctly in Blackboard's Grade Center. Therefore, extensive testing should be done on any independent platform that says that it can be integrated with Blackboard. 
4. UIC is not on the "List": when registering with Lecture Tools to explore the platform more, UIC was not listed as an option as a school to register under. I had to register as an Instructor at NIU using my NIU email. Many schools were listed, so I'm not sure why UIC is not there. It may be an issue with just contacting Lecture Tools to get UIC added to the list of institutions. 
5. Power Point: because of the features that include allowing the professor to draw on a slide, the slides cannot be uploaded to Lecture Tools as a Power Point file; they must be uploaded as either JPG or PNG files, which takes away the capability of Power Point animations such as fly-in bullets and transitions between slides.

Summary
While all of these tools may have similar equivalents in Blackboard, this format may be more successful in engaging large groups of students in lecture halls where many have laptops out and might be browsing Facebook instead of paying attention. Therefore, this could be used to combat student inattention due to widespread technology, but it also presupposes that all students have access to a laptop in the class, which may not be true or could leave the class too dependent on technology.

Xtranormal and Language Learning

During the concluding weeks of the Fall 2010 semester, the LCLC looked into the program Xtranormal as a vehicle for language learning at UIC. Xtranormal boasts that "if you can type, you can make movies." The basic idea is that users generate scripts for avatars to then act out, which includes adding body motions, picking a setting, and other minute aspects of the avatars' appearances.

It sounds like an ideal software for helping students practice their language skills at home by simply typing conversations in to the website and then watching them magically acted out right before their eyes. If only this were a perfect world. When we were experimenting with the program, there were several things that created stumbling blocks:

1. Rendering: once everything is created, it can take A LONG TIME to create the video output. How long is a long time? We experienced delays of up to 20 minutes for a two avatar, six line exchange.
2. Prosody: as with almost all text to speech programming, it has a very long way to go before it is capable of carrying the same intonation, pacing, and emotion that native speakers have. 
3. Language: don't expect this software to be able to have two avatars speaking different languages. Even when selecting English as the primary language and creating a Spanish speaker through using the English phonetic spelling of words, the result was very messy, and when this is combined with the prosody problems mentioned above, forget about it! 

A bypass to the issues presented in 2 and 3 is having students record their own dialogue rather than using the text to speech option. However, then why would using this site be more advantageous than simply having your students create a skit and skipping all the rendering woes?

View one of our Xtranormal videos at:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7628421

Employing MIT's Cultura at UIC

Recently, UIC German classes used a Cultura-type model to practice their oral language skills with a classroom in Germany. Although there were a few technical difficulties, the students seemed to really enjoy interacting with a native speaker. They spent two fifty minutes periods interacting with the Germans. For the first part of their Skyping session, the students spoke in English, and for the second part, the students would speak in German. There was an marked difference between the German's capability to speak English compared to the UIC's students ability to speak German most likely due to the higher contact hours for the Germans with English.


The technical difficulties included issues with some of the students in Germany Skying in from their home computers, which made it difficult for both UIC and the host institution in Germany to aid the students in successfully connecting.

Exploring the Pros and Cons of MIT's Cultura Program

The Language and Culture Learning Center was given the task of exploring MIT's Cultura Program for a possible model for setting up international language exchanges at UIC. 


What is Cultura?
"Cultura is a Web-based, intercultural project situated in a language class, that connects American students with other students in different countries. Designed and created in 1997 by a team from the French Section at MIT (Gilberte Furstenberg, Sabine Levet and Shoggy Waryn), and developed thanks to an initial grant from the Consortium for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning and a subsequent one from the National Endowment for the Humanities, it was originally created as an exchange between American and French students. Cultura has since been adapted to other schools and languages, connecting students in the US with students in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia and Spain.

Cultura is not the only Web-based intercultural project of its kind, but it is particularly well-known for its pedagogically sound design, approach and methodology, allowing students from different cultures to gradually construct together, via a common Website and a computer-mediated exchange, a deeper understanding of each other’s cultural attitudes, beliefs and values."(http://cultura.mit.edu/)

What are the positive and negative aspects of employing Cultura?

1. Students produce their language so they receive input for listening and reading, but they don’t receive as much output practice in writing and speaking in the target language.
2. If students are going to test their “cultural hypothesis,” then they need to be exposed to multiple speakers ie. one native speaker in French cannot speak for all French people and their culture.
3. The conversations are directed and the students are involved in a lot of frontloading activities to help them direct their conversation, which is a plus because the conversation could potentially fizzle very fast if the students aren’t given enough material. Activities include things such as prompted discussions on culture class. Also, the site recommends taking about a week to prep students for the activity, which could turn into more time once you add in the time that students will need to dedicate towards learning the required software.
4. First Stage: It is very positive that the students engaged in the exchange have a task to complete (ie discussing differences between the two countries) whereas if the two students are just connected with nothing specific to talk about than the conversation could die out or become awkward very quickly.
5. First Stage: The cultura project also builds students cultural awareness by activating students schemata through prompting them to examine their preconceived notions or stereotypes regarding other cultures.
6. First Stage: Piliminary Activity 5-- This activity could aid students in examining what they bring to a text when they are interpreting it which is a useful reading strategy for building comprehension and could potentially transfer to the regular content of the course. For example, the instructor could draw attention to the idea that they are going to be thinking about how they are interpreting the text and changing how the text is presented to fit their expectations. Then the instructor should note to the students that they should be thinking in this metacognitive fashion when they approach all texts in the class. There are schema theories that suggest that a text doesn’t mean anything until a reader brings their prior knowledge and experiences to the text and then filters it through their lens, which means that it is highly unlikely that two people will interpret the same text in the same way. Drawing students’ attention to the idea that their impressions of the text matter or are valid can be a larger hurdle in engaging students with written texts.
7. Follow up in class activity: Vocabulary: This section of the lesson plans needs to be vastly increased from the students just saying words aloud to engaging the students in activities that will enable them to master the terms and use them as part of their lexicon, which will improve the quality of the students’ conversation because it will enhance their level of fluency.
1. Perhaps focusing on the vocabulary that students are learning in a particular section would be a better use of time, and then the conversation prompts for the next conversation could revolve around whatever theme associates vocabulary in the textbook (ie. transportation, food, etc). This once again would provide students with the opportunity to reuse terms that they need to learn for class.
2. Also, the students could create a self-generated vocabulary list based on what communication blocks they experienced during their conversation with the native speaker. Research on Vocabulary pedagogy has suggested that self-generated vocabulary lists often get a better response (as far as the students’ ability to master the terms and reuse them in their own speech) than the lists that the teacher or textbook has generated.
3. Another variation of this vocabulary activity could be having the native speaker generate a list of words that they think would be helpful for their partner to know based on the conversation that they have. Then, the native speaker could also gage their partner’s level of mastery of the concepts and their pronunciation based on future conversations. This would provide an authentic assessment of the students’ communicative competence as judged by an native speaker in the target language. Also, it would give the cultural exchange partners to continue their contact with one another and give the conversation sessions a purposeful connection to one another.
8. The project’s general commitment to adding an authentic cultural awareness back into the curriculum is impressive. Most of the foreign language classrooms I have been a part of include cultural facts that we were tested on, but there wasn’t any interaction with the culture. One way UIC could use this format in order to bring authentic culture in the classroom is to include more realia from the target culture so that the conversations in the target language revolve around specific cultural artifacts.
9. The cultural awareness factor may take a little more work than the website indicates because many students need help when it comes to metacognition. Also, students may need help articulating hypothesises in a respectful manner because talking about stereotypes or “cultural hypothesis” can sometimes lead into conversations that are inappropriate depending upon the teacher’s definition of appropriate. Hopefully, if students feel negatively about the culture, then those feelings can be reversed through the cultura experience.
10. Current Exchanges: on the Current Exchanges page, there doesn’t appear to be much activity (Every month on average there are about 2 exchanges and usually one of the partners is MIT). This could be problematic because the level of commitment on both sides needs to be high if the instructors are going to be able to create a meaningful exchange. For example, if a teacher in France sets aside a lot of time to work with cultura in their syllabus and the teacher in the United States doesn’t display an equal amount of commitment, then the project could be detrimental to the French teacher’s lesson planning, and it may cause the teacher to avoid such projects in future semesters. Therefore, it is a good idea that teachers in both countries and a specific and shared understanding about how many hours a week they will be investing in this tool.

Language Exchange Partners

I've recently been researching ways to conduct language exchange either in person or over the internet. A language exchange is when two people or more people are proficient in two different languages that the other person wants to learn. So the partners meet as many times as agreed upon and speak half the time in one language and the other half of the time in the other language. It is a way for students to barter language learning opportunities they can provide one another with.

At the language symposium 2010, we learned about how to use a program called edmodo to allow two classrooms in different parts of the world correct each others work. One classroom was in Argentina and the other classroom was in the United States.

There are also several free websites that students can go to to search for a language partner.

Last CALL: Like 'em or Leave 'em?

Over the course of the past sixteen weeks, I have been bringing you my take on various technological tools that can be used in the classroom to enhance the learning environment. I have also been using a blog in my Materials class to use as a platform for my online portfolio. Prior to beginning this semester, I had little experience with blogs; I had only seen them as places where people divulge too much information about their personal lives, and I subsequently paid little attention to them. During the semester, many people had a wide range or reactions to keeping a blog. I heard everything from, "I really like to have a place online to reflect about my practices" to "These blogs are the bane of my existence, and they make me hate my life."I think there are many lessons to be learned from these reactions in my cohort.

First of all, people should not be made to blog on a regular basis if they find it to be tedious because written reflection should probably not be forced. It goes against the grain of the philosophy behind writing a reflection. Reflections should occur naturally and not be forced for that reason. Second, students who do not like to keep a blog maybe should be given an alternative assignment like perhaps creating or constructing something that they find to be more useful of their time for future professional tracks. Third, if an instructor wants to integrate blogs, he or she should be monitoring them as well as students should be monitoring each others' blogs. If the instructor is not watching the blogs, the students may pick up on it and become lazy especially if the responses tend to be forced. There should be an audience if students are expected to write to make the assignment more authentic. Forth, there needs to be clear guidelines for what the students are to blog about each week, how long the blogs should be, and how often the students should be checking their blogs and commenting on one another's postings.

Personally, I really like having my portfolio on wordpress.com because I know that it will be very useful for me when I am looking for a job next year. I am glad I now know more about the many ways a blog platform can be used. I will probably try to keep blogging in the future and make use of them in my teaching practices. However, I will keep in mind that there is the possibility for a lot of resistance and resentment from students who are opposed to having scheduled reflections every week.

I think the ability of a blog assignment to succeed with students depends a lot on structure in the assignments, a sound rationale behind assigning the tasks, and good reasoning behind using the blog platform. Without any one of these components the assignment may cause a lot of frustration, and students don't like to feel that they are engaging in busy work.

Wrapping up the Semester

A CALL tool that we have not investigated in class but that has been coming in handy for class collaborations towards the end of this semester has been Google Documents. I am enrolled in seventeen hours this semester of courses, and I work at UIC. It has been very challenging to meet with my fellow classmates to work on collaborative projects. In most cases, we have spent twenty minutes dividing up the work that needs to be done, and then we start a google document and add all group members as collaborators on the document. Next, each person is responsible for a section in the document, which they develop on their own according to the standards that the group sets in the initial meeting.

As long as guidelines can be agreed upon efficiently at the early stage of the project, the Google Document takes a lot of the issues regarding meeting times and typical group 'storming' behavior our of the equation because all members can work individually towards achieving group goals. All of the project presentations that I have had to do this semester using Google Documents this semester have run very smoothy, and they tend to keep strict organization to the flow of the presentation because everyone knows what his or her duty is. I have not encountered an experience where more than one person is attempting to edit the document at the same time, so I am not sure if there is a potential for loss of material etc. The ease of collaborating using Google Documents is probably also facilitated be the general cohesiveness of our cohort; we seem to get on the same wavelength easily and all want to take the fastest route towards meeting our program requirements, so these are probably also important factors to contribute to the successfulness of using Google Documents.