Trends in TESOL (part 3)

Leveraging Microsoft Office?

Tom Justice of North Shore Community College in Danvers, Mass. showcased Turning Point clickers that requires and enhances PowerPoint. In an advanced L/S class, for example, he first gives a multimedia PowerPoint presentation, and then moves to the practice and assessment phases by having the students use the clickers. In this way, he not only gets his students engaged, but is capable of assessing a large number of students quickly.

Elizabeth Visedo of the University of South Florida shared how she uses free online tools for all stages of the writing process:

1. a mind-mapping tool for pre-writing
2. Open Office for drafting and revising
3. Google Docs for collaboration and feedback
4. Blogger for publishing the finished product

Of these non-Microsoft tools, Google Docs is her favorite because there is no need to download or save anything anymore. If you want to bring your writing class into the Web 2.0 cloud computing era, every class member can conveniently have a gmail account and the enormous Google-provided storage. Then, a student can invite and give full-collaboration authorization to a teacher, a peer, or a tutor to go in, read, and edit his/her paper right on the Internet. Also, with Google Docs, when two people work on the same document, they can easily see the action of each participant, which is a unique feature only offered by Google. Elizabeth claimed she now has no more weekend waste of time grading papers. Instead, she schedules simultaneous collaborations with each student at 10-minute intervals. She even couples Google Docs with Skype to give audio feedback/conferencing at the same time. With this additional method, she can meet her students once a week for 18 minutes to go over their papers, which are done outside of class.

Elizabeth has developed a "Tech-Tools for Writers Tutorial" for everyone. To download this self-access tutorial, follow these steps:

1. Click here to go to her website
2. Click on Files on the left-hand side menu
3. Right-click on the "Tech-Tools for Writers Tutorial" link and save it to an appropriate folder on your computer
4. Find the file where you saved it and open it

Elizabeth says that trying to open the file by clicking on the "Tech-Tools for Writers Tutorial" link directly will cause the Tutorial to malfunction, so you should open only the file you saved. She also says that she welcomes everyone's feedback. She can be reached at elizabeth.visedo@gmail.com.

Incidentally, PBWiki was mentioned during Elizabeth's session as something better than the sequential PowerPoint slides.

Ben McMurry of Brigham Young University led an Electronic Village session on how to use the free Google Sites to create a class website. He claimed that you can make your own class website in just a few minutes with the still add-free Google Sites and add a blog, maps, videos, calendars, web documents, and quizzes with only a few clicks. He has assembled a few video tutorials on his website at http://tutorials.benmcmurry.com.

(To be continued.)