Case study: Sharing the experience of webtools in Brazil

In this post, I'm going to comment on a creative task carried out using a webtool (Voki), by Ana Maria Menzes, an English teacher and teacher trainer from Brazil. This project was published in Innovations in learning technologies for English language teaching (2013), edited by Gary Motteram for the British Council.

Ana Maria Menzes designed an interesting weekly activity with a class of upper-intermediate students aged 15–16. Her objective was to provide the learners with extra writing, reading, listening and speaking practice at home, as she believes most teachers try to integrate technology in the classroom, but few encourage students to use it at home to develop their digital literacies. Each week one volunteer student created a short text (50 words) for a listening dictation with the content being chosen by the student from a previous lesson. The teacher corrected the text, and the student then recorded the text using a digital tool. Afterwards, he or she would share it with the rest of the class to do a dictation activity. Every week, a different student was in charge of the task.

Here's one of the texts created by one of her students, using Voki.

In my opinion, according to the SAMR model, this kind of technology integration would belong to the category of "Modification," since doing a dictation/listening comprehension activity with a recording is not new, but the task has been significantly redesigned by allowing the students to provide the material, and integrating writing practice, speaking practice and listening comprehension into the same task.

Moreover, Ana also redesigned the correction stage: "Originally, Ana thought she would have the learner write their first draft, which she would correct and give them back on paper, but she decided instead to record a screencast while she corrected the text, explaining the learner’s mistakes, at the same time providing a pronunciation model of how to read the text." The advantages to providing corrective feedback using this method are more than one: firstly, it saves time; secondly, it provides the student with a greater amount of information on mistakes and ways to improve his/her production; lastly, the teacher's recording would be extra listening practice for the student. I would say this kind of technology integration would be between the Augmentation and Modification stages, as the tool is replacing paper, but there is also functional improvement, since feedback is personalized.

There are many online tools we could use to upload and display feedback on our students work, such as Podomatic or Soundcloud. Anyway, we would need to download a free recording program to record it offline before uploading it, like Audacity.