Musser ESOL Tech Blog

I was intrigued by an article that came across in my Google alerts this week entitled, " Best language apps to help travellers click with locals" .  I'm often intrigued by the ways in which people attempt to learn various topics "in the real world" (language of course being one of them) as opposed to how they have been traditionally  approached in school.  I find that even tech-based teaching tools aimed at the same end goal (say, learning a new language) often vary in interesting ways based on whether or not they've been designed for the traditional educational setting or not.  Since I explored a new app being billed as a strong classroom language learning tool last week (Mondly) I thought this list might provide some interesting contrast. However, after reading the article I found that only the first app on the list, which I explain below, is solely designed for outside-of-the-classroom use, while the others are squarely at home inside the classroom.   T...

An interesting article that came across my Google Alerts this week from The Times Free Press entitled, "Greeting Cards Help to Preserve Family History,"  describes a scene wherein a family learns about the history of their grandparents' love through asking a simple question at the bedside of their dieing grandmother, an interaction which then caused entrepreneur Christopher Cummings to launch a new tech start up aimed at preserving our familial legacies. The company, greetingStory, is connected to Cummings' original digital storytelling company, PassItDown, but it relies on physical, "old-fashioned" greeting cards with images and prompts on them to gather handwritten information from older relatives, which can then be preserved and displayed digitally. The whole idea answers a question I've sometimes pondered over myself as I've watched our world grow increasingly digital and as a natural consequence shed many of its traditional physical artifacts....

An interesting article that came through via my google alerts this week was a rundown of the 2107 FBStarts Apps of they Year.  If you are unfamiliar, FBStart is Facebook's program for assisting promising new app developers in getting their ideas off the ground.  A number of the apps featured in the article tied right into the mobile learning theme of this week's unit.  The FBstart Global App of the Year is called, "SoloLearn," and is designed to help beginners learn how to code. I've already earmarked it as a potential gem for my district's coding initiative. The app is "gamified," in that its learning experiences are couched in a gaming environment.  Even more in-tune with our current focus though was the Europe, Middle East and Africa app of the Year winner: Mondly.  Mondly is a language-learning app (or rather, a whole suite of apps) that bills itself as, " the first company to launch a virtual reality experience for learning langu...

Personalization: It's the word on the tip of everyone's tongue in education right now, but honestly, how many of us know what it really looks like?  How often are we able to truly personalize instruction on the individual level?  I mean differentiating assignments for several different small groups of students within a class is challenging enough. How can we consistently tailor our teaching and assignments to each of our individual students, especially when we might see up to 120 of them everyday? I read an excellent article from Edweek.org this week entitled, " Defining Personalization: Students As Agents and Teachers As Coaches ," in which the author explores a number of key aspects of what it means to truly personalize instruction.  The author related personalization to differentiation and explained that in a truly personalized classroom, " students become active agents  involved in determining  what  they learn (content),  how and how fast  ...

The most interesting piece to come across my google alert digests this week was a Master's Thesis entitled, “Put it in your Story”: Digital Storytelling in Instagram and Snapchat Stories"  in which the author explores the narrative structure and patterns of digital stories created through Snapchat and Instagram.  The author identifies several typical story topics, including eating, animals, people, self-portraits, environment, interacting, and demonstrating emotions.  When I read through this list, I immediately thought of how these basic categories cover much of what constitutes an individual's culture, and as such reflect the societal culture in which the stories are created.  If this is true, then to my mind this paper lends even more credence to the idea of using digital storytelling in the L2 classroom, since it not only represents an effective way to explore cultural identity but one that is organic to the lifestyles of many of our socially-connected students. ...

An interesting piece that came across in my daily digests this week was an article by Laura Hamilton from Scotland's National Newspaper, The Scotsman, entitled " Brands and Storytelling in the Digital Age ."   I was struck by the second sentence in this piece, which states, " In our hyper-connected society, we consume information more quickly and vociferously than ever before but also increasingly in a more cynical and critical manner." Now, I am sure we've all heard truisms about how we're all suffering from information overload before, but the opening sentence of Hamilton's piece got me thinking about just how much information is out there, which led me to this interesting nugget from a TechCrunch article: We now create more information in 2 days times as we did from the dawn of civilization until the year 2003. ( https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/ ) Now that's a lot of data!   According to Hamilton, the way to break though all t...