Benefits of Technology for Enhancing Student-Student Communication
As an ESL composition instructor, one of my top priorities is to give students opportunities to practice English with one another during each class period and also outside of class. I am a big fan of using technology to promote student-student communication. In particular, I have gained a lot experience introducing discussion activities with PowerPoint and also designing online forum environments.
I have explored the potentials of five technologies in particular:
- WordPress (using the sites.psu.edu platform)
- Microsoft Office (PowerPoint, SmartArt, and diagrams)
- Google Docs/Spreadsheets (for activities and conference scheduling)
- Projector Technology (for videos, PowerPoints, etc.)
- Angel Course Management System
During the 2014-2016 school years, I regularly used PowerPoint slides to convey my instructions for various small-group discussion activities in ESL 015. When I first started teaching ESL composition the fall of 2014, I tended to make instructions that were somewhat too complex for my students, and I often had to re-explain them. As the months went by, I became more skilled at improving my activities and conveying the instructions as concisely as possible. Please click the links below to contrast how I improved my PowerPoints over time.
Example of an Ineffective PowerPoint/Activity from Week 3 of Fall 2014
–>Too much text, not an engaging activity
Example of an Effective PowerPoint/Activity from Week 4 of Spring 2015
–>More concise instructions on slide 3, the accompanying activity was more engaging
In the spring of 2016, I devised a group writing activity where students spent two days to work together to type up a sample annotated bibliography, and they could share their work with other groups using drop boxes on Angel. The topic of the annotated bibliography was technology in the classroom, so the general content they were summarizing helped them to become aware of advantages and disadvantages of using smart phones and laptops in the classroom. For an online course in Applied Linguistics, I actually created a reflective, annotated lesson plan in order to justify all of my teaching decisions for this activity. In class, I used a PowerPoint with instructions for this group writing activity, which was very successful. Here is one of the annotated bibliographies (which I revised and edited) that my class composed. I even sent out this bibliography as a sample that they could imitate when they were composing their own annotated bibliographies. This use of technology in the classroom gave my students a sense of accomplishment and also helped me to clarify my specific expectations for the Annotated Bibliography assignment they were individually working on.
In addition to improving the clarity of my instructions in my PowerPoints, I have also applied technology in order to customize my own online forum environment so my students could practice their English through journal and reading responses. In the past four semester, I have placed each student in a group of three or four students, and almost every week my students were required to post their journals or reading responses and then they had to read and reply to their group members’ posts. I believe writing for an actual audience, such as their classmates, raises the stakes of the assignments, to motivate students to come up with interesting ideas and to edit their grammar carefully.
My choice to design my own blog using sites.psu.edu was one of my best pedagocial innovations in 2014. As Penn State instructors, we have the option of using the Angel discussion board application, but the format seems impersonal and not very user friendly (e.g., the text is too small and the columns are too wide.) When I took several online Applied Linguistics courses in summer 2014, I enjoyed using sites.psu.edu to interact with my classmates, since it was much more user friendly than the Angel discussion board. Therefore, I decided to create similar environments for my own ESL students when I taught in the fall and spring semesters. As a result of having a well-designed online environment, my students engaged in very interesting discussions on controversial subjects, as showcased in my portfolio of teaching examples.
Lessons Learned about the Limitations of Teaching with Technology
Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”
Both from my teaching experience and from the digital pedagogy training provided by the Department of English, I have learned the importance of “thinking like an engineer” when implementing digital technologies in the classroom. In other words, teachers need to anticipate problems beforehand and be prepared to search for solutions. It is pretty much assumed that technology is highly beneficial for college teaching, so I think it is more important for teachers to develop a critical awareness of issues that can crop up when we use technology.
The Need for Flexibility and Patience
Have you ever gone through the awkward experience of watching a presenter or professor fumbling with some kind of audio-visual system? The more frustrated the teacher becomes, the more awkward it becomes for the students. The lesson here is that when technology does not work as expected, teachers need to stay calm, patient, and even stoical. Both students and teachers will undoubtedly face technological glitches on a regular basis, so it is important for teachers to model the right kind of attitude toward these glitches. By “thinking like an engineer” and recognizing that there is a usually a logical cause for a technological problem, a teacher can face the issue with flexibility and patience.
Better yet, when a technological tool quits working, just relax and turn the situation into a joke, or show off your technical prowess by actually solving the problem or executing a backup lesson plan smoothly and efficiently. Lesson learned: be flexible. If it something can go wrong, it probably will at some point, so be prepared with a backup plan, and don’t be impatient, especially in front of students!
Preparation for Lagging and Errors
As a novice teacher back in 2011, sometimes I had the embarrassing experience while teaching of not being able to access teaching materials that I had uploaded to Penn State’s Angel Course Management System. I learned that I needed to also email my teaching materials to myself just in case the Penn State internet had a problem. Angel has actually been highly stable in the last two years, but it was not as reliable during my first semester teaching (Fall 2011). One area I want to work on as a teacher is being able to maintain a smooth lesson plan even on a day when a classroom A/V system fails. If initially I plan class activities that are clear and feasible, I should be able to communicate the instructions using the chalkboard in lieu of a PowerPoint.
Whenever technology does fail in the classroom, I think teachers should be prepared to share a few words of wisdom as well. For example, when I was teaching Technical Writing in a computer lab classroom in April 2014, the Penn State personal web space platform sites.psu.edu was seriously lagging, but by the second or third day, I came up with a few solutions. The plan was to use sites.psu.edu, but instead I ended up showing the students how to use Weebly as an alternative platform, and several students opted to use Wix as well.
On one of those days, I also attempted to make a lesson out of the situation, to historicize the problem of slow technology and glitches. Think back to older inventions, long before computers. Did automobiles work perfectly when they were first invented? How about other inventions? Similarly, it just takes time for them to be developed, and the personal computers is still a very new form of technology, if you put it in perspective of the history of technological development since ancient times. Many technologies we use are extremely new, so there are likely to be problems since there has not been enough time to solve them. In the future, we might start having even smaller devices that can fit inside glasses or even contact lenses, but when they first come out, we should be prepared for them to have lagging problems and glitches. On one of those difficult days when sites.psu.edu was lagging, I shared some of these musings just to help my students try to be more patient about technological glitches—they are a normal part of the history of engineering and there is no need to let your blood pressure get too high over them. Just relax and focus on finding a logical solution!
Usability Issues
Students today have practically grown up surrounded by computers, so they should be pretty proficient in using computers already, right? Surprisingly, no, they aren’t. Just because students typically know how to use social media, surf the web, and download music does not imply that students can organize their files on their computer or use technology to communicate professionally. Students are definitely not “digital natives,” and using technology is often very difficult for them. Teachers need to be aware that each technical skill still has to be learned one-by-one. While it is good pedagogy to consider what skills students bring into the classroom, we cannot assume they are all the same. Students have different strengths, and I have heard more than one student say that he or she is “not a technical person.”
Teachers definitely need to be aware of usability issues related to programs such as Microsoft Word. I cannot even count the number of papers I have received that were not in the proper format. The wrong font, the wrong margins, no indentations, the wrong spacing—I have even received papers where the student hit ENTER for every single line! Unbelievable. In my experience, it can be difficult to help students to use Microsoft Word to format their papers appropriately, so over the years I have created screencast videos to explain, both orally and visually, how to use the formatting tools in Microsoft Word. In addition, I also send out a lot of links to students of YouTube instructional videos about how to use different features of Microsoft Word.
Similarly, even Angel CMS might be confusing for students, so I have tried to use a clean format for my course websites and blogs, and on Angel I even hide the tabs we do not need, in order to keep students from becoming confused. I have to pay extra attention as well to the language and vocabulary I use on the course blog site, in order for the activities to be clear for my ESL Students.
The Bane of Technical Writing: Too Much Text
I wish I had learned earlier in my teaching career that PowerPoints should be simple. After all, it is called PowerPoint, not PowerParagraph! From teaching English 202C: Technical Writing, I learned to think more carefully about how to use technical communication principles to design more effective PowerPoints. This past semester, I often used PowerPoints in class to list instructions on the screen for various small group activities in my ESL classes. I have learned that in order for an activity to be successful, I need to keep the PowerPoint simple and easy-to-read, especially for my ESL students. Advanced technologies in the classroom make it very easy to bombard students with too much text, so it is very important for teachers to use text concisely in digital formats.
