Teach languages with web 2.0

Virtual worlds

Virtual worlds such as Second Life make language learning a much more social experience. They are very versatile and can be used for formal teaching as well as informal, independent learning.

Second Life and other virtual worlds allow students to use a foreign language in a social space with other learners and native speakers. Language learners can communicate using a voice system or with text chat. This means that students can now talk with native speakers around the world, just as if we were in the same room.

There are many virtual worlds besides Second Life such as There, Twinity and Entropia Universe.

Ways to use Second Life

How do you want to use Second Life?

Private Spaces:

educators can have their own land to teach on. This allows greater control over what happens and who is present. It allows the educator to have specific themes, activities and content.

Public Spaces:

educators can take students to public spaces. This allows a more social experience, which is especially appropriate for language learning.

Public and Private Combination:

moving between locations only takes a couple of seconds, so lessons can easily move between public and private spaces.

SurReal Quests

Avatar Languages has adapted Bernie Dodge's WebQuest to Second Life. This approach is an inquiry based activity where students gain information from researching both on the internet and interviewing people in Second Life. An article in the Australian publication The Knowledge Tree explains more about using Second Life for WebQuests. You may also listen to this article as a podcast.

Google Docs

Google Docs offers online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint that allow simultaneous collaboration. Several users can work on the same document at the same time and also see any changes made by the others.

Google Docs can be used to collaboratively correct a student?s piece of work or it can be used to share a pre-prepared text. The teacher can highlight text as it is read aloud by the student using a colour code eg red for pronunciation, green for grammar, blue for spelling and yellow for use of vocabulary.

Voice and Text chat

Instant messengers such as Skype, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk are widely used in e-education. These tools offer excellent call quality and the flexibility of text and file sharing which is hard to beat for a basic communication between students and teacher. Calls can be easily recorded, so students can make an audio copy of their lessons.

Whiteboard Meeting

Online whiteboards allow teachers and students to share the same workspace to draw, write and move items around. They are especially good for working with images and texts in a free and flexible way. They are also useful for easily matching words with meanings or images that represent those meanings.

Whiteboard Meeting is an extra available for Skype, and there are other whiteboards available ? either independently or combined with a messenger tool. A whiteboard is different from Google Docs because nothing is ordered into lines, paragraphs or pages.

More Online Learning Tools

• Google Maps
• Google Earth
• YouTube
• TeacherTube
• ESLvideo

Visit our online wiki-based library for links to other sites and applications and take a look at the blog for more suggestions.

Personal Learning Environments

At Avatar Languages we have brought these tools together to enable Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) for our students. A PLE brings together a collection of online tools to allow students to manage the learning process and its content in order to achieve their own goals.

A PLE is different from a Virtual Learning Environment, because the focus is on the student rather than the educator.

You can read more about PLEs on Wikipedia and there are many interesting presentations on slideshare.net.

Further Resources

You will find other articles and resources on the press page and, of course, in the online school library.