Miniproject #2

Here is my teaching philosophy for my miniproject #2!

Intercultural Communication

I am a huge supporter of intercultural communication. I think that it is very important for learners to get a good understanding of other cultures and just a better world view in general. Studying abroad personally, I saw first hand that you never fully understand a culture until you are immersed in it or even exposed to it. Learning about a new culture can really change a person's belief system. It helps them to see outside the box and to really analyze not only the new culture but their own culture as well.

Intercultural communication I think is especially important for language learners. One of the best ways to help a student understand and better appreciate the language is to expose them to that language's culture. For example, finding out cultural customs or beliefs might make the language a little more interesting to the student who is simply in the class to get the credit. The only risk I believe in the success of intercultural communication is that it definitely relies on the effective participation of both sides. Like we have seen in our readings, sometimes intercultural communication does not always yield positive results when there is a lack of teacher preparation or misscommunication between partners. Successful intercultural communication also relies on the fact that participants are sensitive to and know the "socio-pragmatic" rules for communicating with the other culture.

But like I said, I am still a huge fan of the benefits of intercultural communication. A lot of these benefits are as Byram mentioned, being more curious and open, getting an understanding of different social groups and practices, learning skills of relating and interaction, and just developing better cultural awareness in general.

Video Activities

I'll admit, having my future students use video cameras hasn't really crossed my mind. I think that for using technology in the classroom, I tend to want to stay with things like blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. Ya know, things that are easily accessible and most of the time convenient when the student has time for it. From practicing some with the Microsoft Movie Maker to do editing, I see that actually editing a movie and putting clips together is not as hard as it seems if you have to right tools. However, the actual process of getting and using the video cameras would be more complicated. One problem would definitely be if the school is not adequately stocked. Maybe they only have one or two cameras for the whole school to use or even worse not have any. Unless the students happen to have their own personal cameras, getting enough cameras could be costly and time consuming. If you wanted to just use the small number of available cameras, you would have to allow the students more time to complete the project. Another problem would be that the students checking out the cameras would have to work around the lab/school's schedule of when the cameras are available, and if they are doing an interview or something involving the participation of another person, they will also have to work around that person's schedule.

In spite of these disadvantages, I can see how the video cameras could possibly be useful when used in a language classroom. The most obvious ways I see are to expand cultural understandings. The following are some possible video camera activity ideas:

1) Interview with a native speaker (about a cultural topic or even to analyze grammatical points)
2) Documentation of a local cultural event
3) Interview of other language learners to get their view of a topic or event
4)Pretend fashion show with narration in the target language
5)Pretend news update given in target language
6)Pretend travel commercial advertising a country or place of the target language

I think any one of these ideas could be helpful in FLA, especially if they edit the movies because it gives them a feeling of self-ownership. I do think that it should be maybe a semester or month long process to allow enough time for the students to do a good job and be able to work around all scheduling kinks. I would definitely say, I think this is for upper level learners maybe middle school and up.

del.icio.us

So, I'm a little frustrated with del.icio.us . I wanted to check it out because honestly in the article we read about it, it had this really cool picture of all of a person's links in blue, different sizes, scattered, etc. I was like oh man that would be awesome if I could get all my links together on an attractive page like that and make it my homepage, I would be set!

Well, first I tried to register on a computer on campus but one of the steps is to download browser buttons, so I had to cancel and wait till I got home. I registered very easily and began to tag websites. I did my email first and that worked fine. Then every other website I tried to tag after that did not work with the simple "tag" button you have to download. I had to go back in the site and add the URL manually. And what made me REALLY mad is I can't figure out how to get to that cool link page that I saw in the article! I played around with the site for about half an hour and still can't figure it out!

The benefits I can see from the ideas we discussed in class, are that the tags allow you to link to other people with similar interests/sites, it is easy to register, and it is free, it is a good way to organize your favorite links (and would be even better if I could figure out how to not log in everytime I wanted my links). It also had a privacy setting about how much you wanted people to see of your network.

Of course the disadvantages include all the problems I mentioned before. I wish I could figure it out because I would love to use it now even for my personal homepage.

Anybody familiar with it and able to help me out??

Mini Project 1

Here is my mini-project #1! Click Here!