“How would English language teachers use blogs, wikis and delicious with their students?”

Wiki:

 

A wiki is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor .Wikis are powered by wiki software. Most are created collaboratively.it is a great tool to use it while teaching English .I can divided the class into groups and give every group a task to do .For example ,to write a summary about what they understand on the lesson. The best summary of the lesson will get a prize.

 

Blogs:

 Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Actually I will use this tool with my student to check their writing skills and their grammars .for instance, after a grammar class I will ask them to answer questions related to what we done in the class also to write their comments about the lesson.

 

Delicious:

 Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. With this tool, I will ask my students to put URLs that related to the lesson .Also I will ask them to put links every week related to the subject.

 

The technology is  very useful ,but we should know how to use it.

The Possiblity of Reaching Bax’s Normilasation in our national contex

 

 

   Stephen Bax in his article " CALL—past, present and future" ,divided the progress of CALL into three parts in order to answer the questions. In part one " where has CALL been?",at this part he talked about the past of CALL and the three phases of CALL , the first, Behaviouristic CALL, is perhaps the most plausible and would attract most agreement. But the other two 'communicative "and "integrative" categories are far less satisfactory . In the second part " where is CALL now?",he talked about the role for CALL at the present time and how it looks like nowadays. In the third and final Part " where is CALL going? Integrated CALL and normalization" ,he argued that ,"Our aim should be to attain a state of `normalisation' in which the technology is invisible and truly integrated". In this he have the future view that we can come at a level of using technology as a part of our life and we cannot recognized it like a pen or anything else in our daily life. He suggests three ways to achieve normalisation which (a) we must identify the criteria factors, (b)we must review the practice of each teaching context and (c) we must encourage the normalisation by adjusting the existing practices .Also he suggests stages of normalisation in CALL: Early Adopters ,Ignorance/skepticism ,try once, Try again, ,Fear ,normalising ,and normalisation.

 

   Normalisation in our Saudi context is possible because KSA is developing very fast , you can see the difference between nowadays and before five years ,you will recognizes the big difference between them in the field of using technology. I think these days are the best time to change our minds also to change our believing in technology to reach Bax’s  Normilasation .I will suggest some ways to achieve it:

-They should give teachers  some courses on how to use technology in class rooms.

-They should reinforce schools with technology devices.

-Also they can give students courses on how to deal with technology.