Week 15: Panultimate

     Time is nearing end in this CALL course and in this M.A. TESL graduate degree program. The CALL course has opened my eyes to the ways of teaching ESL and other foreign languages online and through computer programs. It has been an exciting and fun course. I feel as though I have learned a lot and that it is useful. It is a great base for me; as I interview with universities abroad, they ask about my experience in teaching Computer-Assisted Language Learning. I am able to speak on the websites and programs that came from this course as well as the three software programs I use in my ESL course at PIE (Understanding and Using English Grammar, Longman English Interactive, and Connected Speech). This course was a great and positive experience, overall. I have enjoyed this course and hope to learn more about CALL in teaching as I continue in my teaching career.


MOOC: Massive Open Online Course
Have been in development over the last decade. Recent pilot MOOCs at Stanford and MIT.
Basically, it is great scholars in certain fields giving courses online. Thousands enroll and perhaps tens of thousands pass the  course on.

Controversy with MOOCs:
Reduces the teacher-student relationship
Too learner-centered
Grouping is not entirely possible
It's free, and some people have an issue with that.

Big names and prestigious universities are what attracts enrollments of tens of thousands of people.
- Stanford University Math Professor

Making a MOOC is like making a movie. The lecture must be scripted, as well as recorded.

Online Chat-type Websites
Mixxer
Busuu
Palabea
VoxSwap
MyLanguage Exchange
LiveMocha
ITalki
Lang-8
My Happy Planet
xLingo 
Duolingo 

     Hongbo and I visited Mixxer. Here we created an account and found some friends who spoke Japanese. Hongbo can read Japanese and so I can I. We found someone from Japan and e-mailed him on Mixxer. His blog greeting was "Ohayou Gozaimasu" which mean "Good Morning!" in Japanese. I also found a native English speaker who desired to learn Spanish and I e-mailed him saying that I want to learn his language, not realizing that his native language is actually English. Mixxer seems like a great website to create a blog and begin the process of making online penpals from across the world.