TELL ELI

Inside this issue:

Students Creating Hot Potatoes

by A. Mohammed

Strategies & Nicenet

by A. Miranda

Fun with Authentic Sites: Getting Real

by S. Redfern

Writing your own HTML to make Nicenet nicer

by R. Cepko

The Why, How, and What Not To Do Of Yahoo Messenger

by D. Mitchell


Need an interactive activity

Don't forget...

Links mentioned

Tips

Tips and hints:

A handout on accessing Hot Potatoes from the student screen in the lab is available in the Elective binder in the workroom. Otherwise, Hot Potatoes can be found on your office computers (Start>Programs>Hot Potatoes 5). You can also download them at home. Remember, you must register in order to use the full version -- and it's free!

A collection of CALL lesson plans from various classes are available in the breakroom and on the z:// drive from your office computers.

Click here for a quick cheat sheet on HTML created by Ray Cepko.

Links mentioned/ recommended

A simple guide to HTML:
http://www.alphalink.com.au/

McDonald's:
http://www.mcdonalds.com

NY city
http://www.nyctourist.com

Las Vegas
http://www.vegas.com

http://www.ci.las-vegas.nv.us/index.html

Hot Potatoes
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/

Click here for a quick handout, "Getting Started with Yahoo Messenger Conferencing" by Debbie Mitchell

ELI's Creative Faculty
by Annmarie Zoran
Yet again, ELI instructors have shown their creativity! Throughout the semester, you have been supportive, collaborative and creative in your uses of technology in the classroom. As such, this newsletter will focus on the wide range of activities that have been used within the classes from Hot Potatoes to HTML & Nicenet to Yahoo Messenger.
I would like to thank everyone for submitting their lesson plans and taking part in developing constructive and resourceful material for colleagues to use in the future and for participating in creating the beginnings of a CALL curriculum. It is important that collectively we work on buidling a CALL curriculum that reflects the objectives set out to enhance our students' learning. It is my hope, that in the future we will be able to have a curriculum designed that will also include technology enhanced language learning.
Finally, I would like to express my thanks to each and every one of you. These two semesters have been a wonderful learning experience for me, as the CALL consultant of ELI. I have learned a lot from each and everyone and I would like to express my gratitude for taking time out to learn more about technology. Also, special thanks goes out to Amna, Ariadne, Scott, Debbie and Ray for contributing to this newsletter and sharing their ideas with all of us...Great job!

Students creating Hot Potatoes
by Amna Mohammed

Students in the GRE Test Prep elective are familiar with a variety of strategies to practice using the new, and often, very difficult vocabulary that they have learnt in class. In tasks where vocabulary is the objective and the instrument of the exercise, strategies are often meshed with others to elicit a higher order of language use. The complexity of the task therefore increases. Allowing students to create questions using the new vocabulary takes them to this level of complexity of language use and provides a context for them to understand and internalize, and use the new words in a way that elicits more than surface knowledge.
In addition to knowing the synonym, the antonym, the class of each word, this exercise forces them to provide linguistic contexts and clues to guide the reader. Students have to provide the valid distracters as well as the one correct answer for each multiple-choice question. To practice these kinds of tasks, we used Hot Potatoes. Once students had gotten over the initial strangeness of using a new program they developed facility. In one lesson, students wrote a cloze exercise using the vocabulary we had learnt in class. I first gave them a handout with instructions on how to access the program and what the specific task was to be. They each wrote two sets of questions and saved them in a file with their names. The program asks the students to type in the correct answer for each question but actually leaves a blank space as a part of the cloze exercise. After I had checked their work, they closed their files, and were told to open the file of another student and answer the cloze questions that that student had written. Because the correct answers had already been typed in, Hot Potatoes gave them immediate feedback on the answers they had provided. They were able to complete as many as they could out of a total of 80 questions.
Students loved doing this exercise on Hot Potatoes as they got an opportunity to use the vocabulary in a novel, creative and challenging way. Moreover, they were given immediate feedback on their answers to the questions they had answered.

Strategies & Nicenet
by Ariadne Miranda

One of my goals this semester was to incorporate the use of computers and the Internet into my lessons. I am currently teaching two Strategies for Learning classes that meet in the lab once a week. Nicenet has proven to be beneficial when teaching this class for various reasons. First, Nicenet is very convenient and easy to use. It takes the teacher a few minutes to learn how to use it, and students can become familiar with the program in no time at all. In both of my classes, once students signed, they all knew that assignments were prepared for them every week. This means that students do not have to wait for the instructor to tell them what to do. Instructions can be clearly given and any necessary links to websites can also be made available. Students learn to work independently, and time in the lab is used very efficiently. Second, Nicenet gives students an opportunity to work at their own pace. Normally students do not finish their lab assignments during the lab hour. Since Nicenet can be accessed from any computer, students can complete their assignments from home or the computer lab. This flexibility enables students to complete their work more thoroughly. Finally, Nicenet gives me a chance to find interesting websites with authentic reading materials for my class. For instance, the students in my Strategies for Learning classes visited the Literacy Organization website and read about foster adoptions. Not only did they learn about foster families, but they also had access to authentic visual and audio material. Nicenet is a great tool that makes "anytime, any place" learning possible. It is a great addition to any class and provides the students with many opportunities for learning.

Fun with Authentic Sites: Getting Real
by Scott Redfern

The Culture I class had the pleasure of many short readings covering a wide variety of cultural topics. Using the content areas of these readings, I found using authentic materials in the lab to be very useful.
The general approach was quite simple. First, I searched a variety of sites that had materials relating to the content area. Next, I scanned the site taking notes on possible questions to put on the worksheet. I tried to keep the questions within the range of the student's grammatical and lexical needs. Then I went about making the worksheet. I put a copy of the worksheet on Nicenet, but I also handed out a hard copy in lab. Students were required to turn in the hard copy at the end of the lab. Because these lab activities were based on the readings from the class, the debriefing during regular class time enhanced the flow of the class. Also, I was able to incorporate the material from these lab worksheets into the chapter quizzes.
I found using authentic materials to be effective and fun. They generated a natural interest. The scanning involved to complete the worksheets was in itself a good language exercise for the students. The navigation of authentic sites was challenging and tricky, but they were equally interesting.
The four worksheets (click link) were constructed this semester based on the readings from the culture I book. Three of these worksheets were done in pairs. Only the McDonalds worksheet was done completely solo. Students enjoyed working with a partner, and in many of the worksheets I included decision-making questions as a catalyst for discussion. Some the activities required a conferencing topic to be posted on Nicenet in order to meet the language objectives more effectively.

Writing Your Own HTML to Make Nicenet Nicer
by Raymond Cepko

I don't know about you, but I find that the text I write in Nicenet comes out looking bland and cluttered. If I have problems reading it, I can imagine what the students think.
One option is to write the text in Microsoft Word. Then save it as a Web Page. Next, click View/Markup. After this, copy and paste the Microsoft HTML code into Nicenet. Wow! That's a lot of steps for only a few lines of text. What do you made a mistake? Say, Oops! And start over. Don't bother to try to find the errors in the code, because you might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack with all of the extra code that Microsoft writes.
There is another option, and all it requires is a few extra key strokes when you are typing the text or a handy cheat sheet of basic HTML code to copy and paste from. See the hints section.
Before you start using HTML, there are a few things you need to know.

° All pages need HTML, HEAD, TITLE, and BODY tags which should be arranged like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>NAME OF PAGE< /TITLE >
</ HEAD>
<BODY>
This is where your text goes.
</BODY>
</HTML>
° Tags are used to tell the browser how the page should appear.
° All tags need to be inside of <angle brackets>.
° Tag text can be in upper or lower case letters; although, it is easier to identify tags if you use UPPER CASE. For example, , and will all do the same thing.
° Most tags come in pairs - there is an opening tag inside of the angle brackets <TAG>, and a closing tag which is usually the same except it must begin with a forward slash </TAG>. (Most problems occur when tags are not closed.)
° Whatever text appears between the tags will have the attributes of the tags. bold would be viewed as bold.
° Just like any function string in math, all tags must be opened and closed in the same order. Writing Your Own HTML to Make Nicenet Nicer (This is the article title code. Notice, I do not need a . This is explained in the hints section).
° Extra blank spaces in typing will not show up in your document. If you want to add more blank spaces, you need to use the non-breaking space code or   for each blank space you want. (Notice, this code is not set off by angle brackets.) That's it!
It may appear daunting at first, but with a little practice you too will become a professional. In the hints section, you will find all of the HTML codes you need to add all of these things into your page as well as the code for creating an 'Ordered List" and two ways of linking to another Webpage from your documents page or assignments page. More to come in future issues.

The Why, How and What Not To Do Of Yahoo Messenger
by Debbie Mitchell
No one disputes the fact that small group work promotes language production, but how can one ESL teacher provide sufficient feedback to each of five or more simultaneous discussions?

With the ability to print the text from a Yahoo Messenger conference, a teacher can review the informal conversation and write comments not only on the quality of the language produced, but also on the quantity. By tracking the quantity, the teacher can assess both fluency and comprehension of the assigned topic. Concerning accuracy, the teacher can provide feed back in several ways: 1) underline grammar errors so the students correct their mistakes; 2) provide new expressions or idioms; or 3) comment on pragmatics such as turn-taking, disagreeing, or bringing the conversation back on topic.
Another benefit to using Yahoo Messenger is that the dialogue is synchronous, causing immediate negotiation among students. On the contrary, asynchronous dialogue, such as that used with Nicenet message boards, causes a much longer delay in student response and limits the amount of production as the topic may soon be forgotten.
If you are new to Messenger and want to plan a lesson, please consider a few CAVEATS, learned from first-hand experience.
      1) Plan an entire lab session for getting set up-registering for Messenger, exchanging ID's, adding names, editing             names, and experimenting with sending and replying to messages.
      2) Tell them to go to START and then click on the big, red "Y" near the top of the list. This is important! If they go to            Messenger from the Internet, they will be asked to download Messenger. This is a waste of time and space as all lab       computers are already equipped with it.
      3) Also important . . . . When logging in, make sure that both the "Remember my ID & Password" and the "Login under       invisible mode" boxes are NOT checked. If they are checked, the next student to use Yahoo will be logged in as the       previous student, and if "invisible," the classmates will not be able to send him/her messages.
      4) Plan a topic that naturally stimulates conversation-solving a mystery, debating a controversy, comparing cultures.
      5) Choose a strong conference leader and allow only him/her to invite the other students. If the other members choose       "invite," they will end up with several conference windows open at the same time. The other reason for having a strong       leader is to keep them on topic.

Need an interactive activity
Are you looking for free esl/efl sets of cards to print? Are you looking for a free tool to create you own web-based flashcards? Go to http://www.teachingfish.com/, specifically designed for ESL/EFL teachers to use for their classrooms or have your students try out the interactive multi-media version online.

Don't forget...
...to log into Nicenet's class "ELI SPRING '03" to view new links that have been posted. Please feel free to add your favorite links!

E-mail CALL consultant: gorenczo@helios.acomp.usf.edu
This newsletter is also on the web at www.cas.usf.edu/eliteacher or helios.acomp.usf.edu/~gorenczo/issue2.htm
Copyright © 2003, University of South Florida.

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