OUGEO PRESENCE AT EUROCALL 2017

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Mehrasa (on site) and I (virtually due to three rounds of visa refusal, and I’ll blog the story and my virtual attendance very soon in detail) had two presentations at EUROCALL 2017.

Our first presentation focused on the iterative stages involved in designing and developing our EGAP (English for General Academic Purposes) blended course offered at Osaka University, titled Osaka University Global English Online (OUGEO), which was implemented in the spring semester of 2017 over a period of fifteen weeks. First, the basic Successive Approximation Model (SAM) was introduced as the guiding instructional design model upon which the course had been created. Afterward, the stages of design and development of the blended course were explicated with a focus upon assessing Japanese students’ English language needs and their e-learning readiness, determining the course overall goals and module learning objectives, optimizing course technologies and the availability of technical support, designing the course syllabus, materials, tasks, and activities, organizing team teaching, as well as managing formative and summative evaluation. Additionally, the way in which the iteration process allowed for the discovery of some possibilities and problems at the early phases of the blended course design and development, and the refinements which were made to benefit from the affordable opportunities and to mitigate the difficulties were discussed. The use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) were also expounded in the light of Copy Right issues, and the authoring tools utilized in digitizing the materials alongside their merits and demerits were described. Finally, the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric and its effectiveness in raising course quality assurance were reviewed.

Our second presentation was about the results of the use of an AR application, called BlippAR, to augment poster carousel tasks in our blended course. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through a usage experience questionnaire, an open-ended feedback form, and observations. The implemented AR application was described, and the overall positive user experience was reported, along with displaying the samples of collaborative student-generated AR work. The rewards and challenges of having students design AR content were also discussed. Moreover, the implications of AR for English language teaching and learning, the pedagogical potentials afforded by this technology, and recommendations for further research were provided.

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Tech Tools from EUROCALL 2017

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Inspired by Paul Raine’s Tech Tips blog posts, I’ve decided to list the tech tools which are going to be introduced at EUROCALL 2017 mainly based on the abstract book, because my UK visa was denied three times for illogical reasons and I cannot attend the conference. Fortunately, I’ll take part virtually via Virtually Connecting.

I am very much interested to know:

(1) the “five iPad apps to encourage active learning”, which will be introduced at Pecha Kucha MALL SIG symposium,

(2) the dictionary and tablet apps used in Toshiko Koyama’s study, titled “Bigger Is Better?: Smartphone Dictionary Apps vs. Tablet Dictionary Apps”, and

(3) the free mobile application that Selwood and Lyddon will ask the visitors of their poster, titled “Back to the Future: Re-mediating Postmillennial Posters in the Digital Age”, to download to have access to some digital data. (I asked Jaime Selwood about the app online on Twitter and added the app to the list)

I’d be grateful if you could help me complete the list.

1. VEO – Video Enhanced Observation: A technological tool, available for iPads and iPad minis, which aims to promote teachers’ professional development by allowing educators to capture teaching practices for reflection.
2. Linguacuisine (forthcoming): Free downloadable smartphone and tablet apps (Android and Apple) for learning European languages and cuisines.
3. StratApp (forthcoming): A game-based app which aims to improve the English academic reading skills of university students, in various disciplines at A2/B1-B2/C1 CEFR level.
4. busuu: A language learning app with over 60 million registered users to learn, practice and improve Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Chinese, Russian, Arabic or Turkish.
5. Italki: A social networking site for tandem language learning.
6. BlippAR: A visual discovery app, using Augmented Reality (AR), machine learning and artificial intelligence to bring the physical world to life through smartphones and wearables.
7. Book Creator: An app for making ebooks on iPad.
8. Kahoot: A web-based program that allows students to take part in multiple-choice quizzes online through their smartphones, with instant results provided through a teacher-controlled screen displayed on the classroom  projector.
9. Edmodo: An app to share videos and manage the students’ learning process.
10. uTalk: An app to learn across 130+ languages.
11. Padlet: A digital canvas to create projects that are easy to share and collaborate on.
12. WordBricks (not sure about the link): A language independent MALL resource that enables learners to construct grammatically correct sentences.
13. HelloTalk: A social networking app for language learning.
14. Quality Time: An app that helps its users understand their digital diet and be more productive.
15. PeerEval: A free app that is intended to be used by students in order to evaluate the presentations of the other class members.
16. TELL-OP: A language learning app.
17. SKELL: A simple tool for students and teachers of English to easily check whether or how a particular phrase or a word is used by real speakers of English.
18. AntConc: A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.
19. COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English): The largest freely-available corpus of English.
20. Just the Word: A website that gives a detailed description of the company a word keeps in modern-day English.
21. G Suite for Education: A suite of free productivity tools for classroom collaboration.
22. #Lancsbox: A new software package for the analysis of language data and corpora.
23. English Central: Online English lessons with tutors.
24. MReader: A browser-based version of the Moodle “Reader” module and therefore can be utilized by those not having the Moodle LMS on campus.
25. Xreading: A Learner Management System (LMS), designed specifically for Extensive Reading (ER), which also offers access to a digital library of graded readers, supplementing the classroom and school libraries of traditional, paper-based graded readers.
26. Wordiser: A custom-built English language teaching and learning platform.
27. Check your Smile (CYS): A free platform that is entirely devoted to English for Specific Purposes (LSP).
28. edX: A massive open online course provider.
29. FutureLearn: A digital education platform that offers free online courses from top universities and specialist organisations.
30. Diigo: A social bookmarking website.
31. PBworks: A commercial real-time collaborative editing system.
32. CTAP (Common Text Analysis Platform): A set of tools that helps the students manage their text corpus and automatically analyze them for various purposes.
33. Moodle: A learning management system (LMS).
34. ThingLink: A tool to animate images and videos. EUROCALL2017 digital poster sample: https://www.thinglink.com/scene/954984913965154306
35. Socialbakers: A social media analytics platform.
36. Klout: A website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rate its users according to online social influence.
37. Facebook Insights:  A tool for tracking user interaction on Facebook.
38. TweetStats: A tool for tracking user interaction on Twitter.
39. Amazon Echo: A smart speaker developed by Amazon.com.
40. Amazon Alexa: A speech recognizer
41. Sakai: A fully customizable, open source learning management system.

The following tools are still used and researched in the classroom:

Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, WhatsApp, WeChat, and WordPress.