Online social media applications for language teaching and learning

Online social media applications for language teaching and learning

Social Media tools are tools that allow for social interaction and easy creation of content by users. Examples of popular Social Media tools are Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress and Pinterest. Social Media can be an effective tool for teaching and learning in higher education. It can help connect students to information.

There are social media that can be used as education apps with many functions, for instance:

1.       Edublogs (http://edublogs.org/)

An edublog is a blog created for educational purposes. Edublogs archive and support student and teacher learning by facilitating reflection, questioning by self and others, collaboration and by providing contexts for engaging in higher-order thinking.

2.       Edmodo (http://edmodo.com/)

Edmodo is an educational website that takes the ideas of a social network and refines them and makes it appropriate for a classroom. Using Edmodo, students and teachers can reach out to one another and connect by sharing ideas, problems, and helpful tips.

3.       Moodle (https://moodle.org/)

Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalized learning environments.

4.       Google form

A Google Form is a great way to gather information related to meetings or conferences. Andy Wolber explains how to make it work for you. Google Forms provide a fast way to create an online survey, with responses collected in an online spreadsheet. Create your survey and invite respondents by email.

So, using various kind of social media is important in teaching and learning. It can makes the learning process more fun, innovative and effective.

Blended learning

Blended learning is a term increasingly used to describe the way e-learning is being combined with traditional classroom methods and independent study to create a new, hybrid teaching methodology.

There is a general consensus among education innovators that blended learning has three primary components:

• In-person classroom activities facilitated by a trained educator.
• Online learning materials, often including pre-recorded lectures given by that same instructor.
• Structured independent study time guided by the material in the lectures and skills developed during the classroom experience.

In some situations, the move to blended learning has inspired educators to redefine traditional roles. The word “facilitator” has emerged as an alternative to “teacher,” bringing with it a slightly different focus. The facilitator places an emphasis on empowering students with the skills and knowledge required to make the most of the online material and independent study time, guiding students toward the most meaningful experience possible. Facilitators focus on four key areas:

• Development of online and offline course content.
• Facilitation of communication with and among students, including the pedagogy of communicating content online without the contextual clues students would get in person.
• Guiding the learning experience of individual students, and customizing material wherever possible to strengthen the learning experience.
• Assessment and grading, not unlike the expectations for teachers within the traditional framework.

By putting an emphasis on learning through supervised activities, blended learning has proven to be very adaptable to what some corporations are calling blended training. Trainers can shift their focus from the delivery of knowledge to its application, and companies spend less flying trainers around to oversee all instruction in person.