During the EUROCALL conference I attended a number of presentations on oral interaction online. In one of them, Sake Jager from the University in Groningen, the Netherlands, focused on how teachers had chosen to work with oral communication in their own teaching practice. The platform they used was Horizon Wimba, where they get access to a number of different options for interaction through audio. The results from Sake
I have just attended the one and only presentation (at least from what I have seen glancing through the program) of this conference on blogging. Kerry Purmensky showed how they had used a group blog in their class of teacher trainees as a tool for collaborative reflection. The teacher trainees would go into classes with kids learning English as a foreign language once a week to implement what they had learnt in linguistics class, and then they wrote an entry each week reflecting on their practice. The blogs are then kept for future classes to have as a resource. I would very much have liked to have access to this type of tool in my own teachers training. Being able to share ones anxieties with others and give tips on things that have actually worked well, during the actual teacher training is a very good idea. I’m not so sure I would like to openly blog about these things, though, or if I would rather keep it more private in some type of forum to which only classmates and teachers would have access…
