Heike Philp, CEO of let's talk online

The Technological Strand of the LANCELOT course

(Transcript continued) Heike Philp: Robin Good himself is an independent journalist in Rome and he is publishing a blog on New Media, he is an absolute expert on any new media and he has been looking at tools for many years, always with the focus on cost-effectiveness so that people who are working with the Internet can actually use these tools from home without having to spend a lot of money and be able to run their own independent businesses. which Robin has successfully done.

For LANCELOT he has produced a number of Learning Units, we heard this expression now for a few times, he did in each Learning Unit look at the features he actually discussed, listed and described some 230 tools throughout the InLearn, which sounds a bit overwhelming.

I would like to give you an overview on how he went about, we looked at two different areas of tools that can be deployed in language learning, the one and foremost which is the synchronous communication tools, like the one we are using right now in Breeze, commonly called Web conferencing or we called it virtual classroom, such as being a full-featured system and yet we looked at also the individual part of virtual classroom solutions, looking at various types webtouring, also looking at dedicated tools of this particular type.

We also included in the synchronous tools Instant Messaging, as it is for us vital link between the students, whilst web conferencing in general is a solution that needs to be paid for, Instant Messaging is then free of charge so it has turned out that over the years that we use Instant Messaging to bridge the distance to our students and then to jointly enter a virtual classroom for the learning lesson.

So, these listed here on the board are actually Learning Units, I will give you a bit of a screenshot, share with you the InLearn on one of them, to give you an idea how they are being explained. Here just to list again the list of asynchronous tools it is important for any of the language teachers who are moving into the live online area which is very exciting as such but to also always keep in mind the host of facilities that the students enjoy for their self-learning experience. This is why we listed Learning Units also for Audio and Video Clip Playback tools, also Collaborative Writing Tools, Screen sharing/ recording, we asked the students to also create audio files, podcast, we asked them to create polls and surveys for evaluation for initial assessment or for course evaluation afterwards, grammar, fill-in blanks tasks. We looked at different tools that simply ease the live online language teacher when he tries to send a recording which is sometimes larger than email can cope. And of course due to the time zone element we also looked at tools that facilitated the meeting, the scheduling of events.

During the group sessions, we had a 3-month pilot, this is the course, so the first five weeks of our synchronous sessions, each week we met for our synchronous scenario, group session so the first five weeks we met what we called the central system, we used two different solutions, basically something the students went in and were familiar with in time,. Then after 5 weeks we decided to branch out and introduce our trainees to various solutions, we deployed a whole range of tools such as Flashmeeting, we experienced with Skype/Unyte, we even Second Life.
And Christian already mentioned that the peer-to-peer sessions have actually been very successful in a large retention rate of the students during the pilot test, which we commend everybody here, we've got quite a few joining us live online, Brigitte, Daniela, Dhafir, Lukas, Sabrina, who have been through the pilot during which we have asked quite a bit of the students and we are thankful that they went along with the experimental stage.

The tasks that we asked them to do, was first and foremost to get together between peers and test various tools, to create teaching and learning activities which they then presented in the group session. So the peer-to-peer time was simply to try and test out things. We asked them to record podcasts and audio recordings, we asked them to deploy certain asynchronous tools, create surveys, grammar tasks and polls on top of basically the main aim on testing tools for synchronous teaching.

So that brings me to the end of the session. I would like to show you that Learning Unit as I mentioned. For this I would like to start screen-sharing, allow me to set this up for a moment. Ok, as you see on the left hand side the Learning Units and I have decided to show you the Learning Unit on Web conferencing, which mentioned here the subchapters. First of all we looked at what is webconferencing and as mentioned the material has been produced by Robin Good, who with great abilities explained what the main system is all about and then explained in the tools, gave us a list of tools, so we are almost there, so there is quite a list of tools mentioned here. And always the tool is described with a small paragraph and when you scroll down you see screenshots, further description, quite a long list, for example in this section we have got some 20 tools described here. So, the question is how would you then go about getting to know them, we have here a great list, according to me a lot of work has gone into that, has produced checklists, in the checklist the tool is listed again, for example here iVocalize and then the feature against it, so in this case, for example iVocalize has a text chat, voice over IP but doesn't have screen-sharing facilities, so it goes on, then we have a really nice page that describes the features themselves, so here again, these features of the checklist are explained, sometimes with screen-shots, sometimes with simply describing what they are like. Here in the end we have a list of resources and what I particularily like is this custom news radar, when you click on this link you get a list of RSS feeds from the net, the topic webconferencing, everytime you click on this link you find the very latest information on the topic webconferencing. This has been created by Robin as a news radar. … I would like to extend again my thanks to Robin for his hard work in producing this material and thank you for listening. (End of Transcript)

Heike Philp

Robin Good

Michael A. Tighe

Moira Hunter