PCI-97: CyberESL and Beyond
Classroom Applications
Ron Corio
Contents
- Introduction: The Computer-connected
Classroom
In the computer-connected classroom, students and the teacher are
connected with computer accounts on a computer network. This
connection enables the class to employ the Internet tools that
have been described earlier as learning tools. In this segment
you will learn about ways to apply electronic mail, netnews, ftp,
and gopher as learning tools in the classroom.
Computer resources, hardware and software, are needed in order to
use these Internet tools. Teachers are dependent on their educational
institutions for these resources. The first step, then, is to
determine what computer resources are available to you and your
students. A visit with the computer systems administrator is the
starting point to a computer-connected class.
Tell the systems administrator what it is that you would like to
do with computers in your classroom. You might begin by saying that
you would like to connect your class on a computer network by giving
each student a class or personal computer account. You and your
students might want to do one or more of the following things:
electronic mail, ftp, gopher, library searches, word processing,
netnews. The systems administrator can tell you if this is possible
and what steps to take to connect your class.
You are halfway home in your goal to establish a computer-
connected class, if you get positive answers to your requests. There
is one more critical need you must fill--computer classrooms (labs).
You and your students need to have convenient and timely access to
terminals that are connected to the network. Lack of a sufficient
number of computer labs and a scarcity of computer classrooms is a
problem. You will be competing with other teachers who are looking
for network access for their classes.
Two types of network access are needed: classroom and open labs.
Computer classrooms are needed in order to provide students with
instructions in the various Internet activities they will be using,
e.g. electronic mail, netnews, ftp, gopher, and World- Wide-Web.
Computer classroom time is needed for doing writing workshops, reading
and responding to email, and doing information retrieval projects.
Likewise, students need to have access to open computer labs for
assignments that are done outside of the classroom. The computer
systems administrator can answer your questions about network access.
If you have the hardware and software resources and the access to the
network, you are ready for the computer-connected classroom.
- Electronic Mail (email)
Classroom applications for email are limited only by the
imagination of the teacher. Email requires writing, thus is an
excellent tool for improving written communications. A description of
some language classroom activities that use email follows.
- General Announcements
Class and program announcements, the variety that a teacher
usually makes at the beginning of class can be sent to the
students via email. This can reinforce and shorten what is
announced in the classroom and is available for students who are
absent on the day of the announcement.
- Email Journal
The teacher in the computer-connected classroom can have students
maintain an electronic journal. The teacher can give journal
assignments that can be collected and responded to via email.
Lower-level language students can be asked to send a weekly email
message to the teacher who can reply via email. The teacher can
save journal entries for and responses for use as grammar
exercises and for future printing for student portfolios.
- Pen Pals
Pen pal projects are an easy and interesting way to introduce
students to email. The global reach of the Internet and the
speed of the communication gives email dimensions that are not
available in traditional letter writing pen pals. Finding
teachers and classes that are interested in pen pal exchanges is
not hard. Some places to look for other teachers interested in a
pen pal project are:
TESL-L, a computer discussion list for ESL/EFL. To join TESL-L
send the following email message to
subscribe TESL-L Your Name
- International EFL/ESL Email Student Discussion Lists
The Student Lists provide a forum for cross-cultural discussion
and writing practice for college and university students of
English as a foreign or second language:
CHAT-SL Student EFL/ESL General Discussion List (Low level)
DISCUSS-SL Student EFL/ESL General Discussion List (High level)
ENGL-SL Student EFL/ESL Discussion List on Learning English
EVENT-SL Student EFL/ESL Discussion List on Current Events
MOVIE-SL Student EFL/ESL Discussion List on the Cinema
MUSIC-SL Student EFL/ESL Discussion List on Music
SPORT-SL Student EFL/ESL Discussion List on Sports
For further information please send a blank message to:
announce-sl@latrobe.edu.au
- Project-based instruction
Many teachers who begin with email pen pal exchanges have found
that they have limited staying power, that is, in keeping
students interested beyond the initial point of meeting and
getting to know a little about their email pen pal.
To extend interest in and use of email many teachers, language
and other, have moved to project-based email activities. These
may be intraclass or interclass.
- Intraclass Email Projects
In intraclass email projects, students within a class are grouped
and given an assignment that requires written collaboration, e.g.
a research project and/or paper. Students use email to
communicate with members of their group as they assemble,
analyze, and synthesize information on their topic. This can be
particularly helpful for students who for reasons of time or
location find it difficult to attend group meetings outside of
class.
- Interclass Email projects
Email interclass projects has been one response to the problem of
maintaining interest in email communication over the period of a
school term. Typically, in these projects students from
different classes around the globe form interclass groups that
work on a project with and end result or product. Collaboration
is done via email. How do you find teachers to collaborate with
in an interclass project? Here are some suggestions:
Subscribe to the TESLCA-L, the CALL (computer-assisted language
learning) branch of TESL-L (see 2.3). You must be a member of
TESL-L in order to join TESLCA-L. After you have subscribed to
TESL-L, send the following message to
subscribe TESLCA-L Your Name
There will be numerous sessions during TESOL '95 on email
projects. You may attend some of these to meet other teachers
who are interested in email interclass projects. There will be a
Discussion Group on Email Interclass Projects on Friday, March 31
from 7:30 a.m. to 8:15 a.m. in Convention Center (N)ew, Room 203,
Section B.
- Delivery of Didactic Materials
Email, newsgroups, and customized programs make it possible for
the teacher to deliver much of the teaching material to the
student over a computer network. Some advantages to this type of
delivery are that it speeds up delivery, reduces teacher time in
printing and copying materials, and delivers to all students at
the same time (absent students also receive them). Once these
materials are in electronic form they are easily saved and ready
for reuse. The network account thus becomes a filing place for
all materials the teacher has developed.
Some examples of materials that can be delivered over the network
are: lecture notes, handouts, lesson plans, assignments, online
handbook material.
- Collecting and Returning Assignments
Email can be used to collect and return assignments. Students
can complete assignments that are structured, e.g. in an email or
paper worksheet given to the student, or open ended, e.g. journal
entry, short answer question, or writing prompt. The teacher can
return corrected assignments via email and save copies for the
students work folder or portfolio.
- Mentoring (advising and guiding students)
Online Office Hours
When students can access the teacher by email, they have, in
effect 24-hour access (of course they usually can't get to a
computer terminal 24 hours a day). With online office hours,
students don't have to make an appointment or wait in line.
Likewise, teachers are not as bound to their offices, waiting for
students to walk-in or keep an appointment.
Requests for information or assistance are in writing, as are the
teacher's response, a convenient paper trail of student-teacher
exchanges.
- Online Student-teacher Conferences
Most computer systems have a feature that permits realtime
(synchronous), communications. Using this feature, students and
teachers can communicate whenever both are logged in to the
network. Student-teacher conferences could be planned at a
designated time or they may occur when both are connected to the
net and one has the need to talk to the other. It is not
uncommon for students to "dial-up" their teacher on the "net."
- Peer Review
Email and custom network programs can be used for the exchange of
peer review comments, e.g. peer review of writing. Likewise, it
can be used for peer review of individual tasks in a group
project.
- Guest Lecturing
In a class that is connected to the Internet, the teacher can
arrange for guest lectures, presentations, or commentaries from
specialists in any part of the globe. Teachers who belong to
computer mail lists, e.g. TESL-L, are regularly in contact with
other professionals in their field, with whom they can
collaborate in guest exchanges with each others' students.
- NETNEWS (USENET)
USENET, or NETNEWS, is a collection of discussion groups
organized under a set of broad headings called "newsgroups."
These newsgroups are presented in an orderly way through a menu
system, e.g. a menu of classical music discussions, followed by a
menu of pencil collecting discussions, followed by a menu of
chemical engineering discussions, etc (Krol 127). Inside each
newsgroup there are multiple discussions presented in the form of
articles that have been posted by Internet users.
Public Newsgroups
Users may browse newsgroups looking for articles on topics that
interest them. In addition to reading these articles, users can
post a follow-up (response) to a particular article. The follow-
up is then available for reading by all users of USENET.
Additionally, users may send an email response to the writer of a
newsgroup article, write and post their own article, and print or
save to disk copies of newsgroup articles.
Newsgroups provide a resource for teachers for designing
assignments that require doing any one or combination of the
following tasks: reading, writing, and research.
For example, students may be asked to select a newsgroup or topic
to monitor and report on to the class. Or, they may be asked to
write (post) an article to a newsgroup after they have become
familiar with the interests and knowledge of the others who post
to that group. A popular activity in this regard is to ask
students to write a question to the newsgroup in order to gather
information for a class project, paper, or presentation.
- Class Newsgroups
A class newsgroup is one that is accessible only by the members
of that class or a combination of classes. A class newsgroup is,
in effect, a class electronic bulletin board. Thought of in
these terms, class newsgroups are good for posting assignments,
lesson plans, class discussions, study questions, grades and
class or program announcements.
- Retrieval of Information
In this section you will find an overview of Internet research
tools. The possibility for classroom applications of these tools
in limited only by the imagination of teachers to design learning
tasks that involve research.
- Libraries
Many computer networks include access to local, national, and
international libraries. This enables the user to do research
from a terminal in the classroom or in an open computer lab.
Library databases are available at all times, even when the
library is closed.
- Databases
Databases, such as ERIC, can be accessed through computer
networks giving students and teachers improved access to
information that may be used for learning and research tasks.
- FTP
FTP, stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is a system that
moves files from one computer to another (Krol 59). You can
find anything from legal opinions to recipes to software in any
number of publicly available databases, or archives that can be
accessed through FTP. FTP is an advanced network technique, but
it can be easily learned and used by teachers and students to
gather information for solving learning tasks.
- Gopher
Gopher is another Internet research tool. It's name comes from
the mascot of the University of Minnesota, where Gopher was
developed. Gopher is a more user-friendly system for finding
information on the Internet because the user follows menus to
search for information. Like Netnews and FTP, this tool provides
a means for students and teachers to locate information.
- World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is the newest information service to arrive on
the Internet (Krol 227). The Web is based on technology called
hypertext, which allows users to follow "buttons" in the text in
order to get background or supplementary information to the main
text. The Web is a multi-media tool that permits the user to
retrieve photographs and audio files. This is the cutting edge
in Internet research and information exchange. Hardware and
software for utilizing the WWW is changing rapidly.
Works Cited
Krol, Ed. 1992. _The whole Internet: Users guide and catalog_.
Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates Inc.
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Ron Corio, rcorio@vcu.edu