So… this is my new blog, specifically created for a grad school class on CALL. It feels weird to have my reflections for this class shared so publicly; but here we go! ^^

This week in class, we read a couple of overviews of CALL: what it includes, what the future holds, etc. Unfortunately, both articles were from 2009; and while they were great overviews, they also felt a little dated already. For example, one article by Mike Levy (2009) included explanations of tech tools that are pretty mainstream today, such as podcasts, SMS (text messages), wikis, and blogs. This elaboration would be very helpful to someone like my mother (who--no kidding--didn't realize the triangle button on her DVD player meant "play"), but I suspect most teachers today are familiar with these terms. The studies it referenced also felt out of date; for example, in citing a 2007 study on student use of either cell phones or computers to complete vocabulary learning tasks, Levy notes, "[T]the student access log data clearly showed a preference for the computer over the phone" (772). This preference probably depends a lot on the kind of information being accessed and the tasks performed; but overall, I'd expect that students today would show a marked preference for their phones over computers. I suppose this just goes to show that even cutting-edge articles on tech tools will soon be out of date in the ever-evolving world of technology! The author of the other article, Philip Hubbard (2009), wouldn't be surprised by this; he, himself, writes, "[E]ven the newest material in the volumes in this set will be in a sense obsolete by the time readers encounter it" (15). Indeed! We students of edtech will have to keep on our toes.

I did enjoy the articles, however. I especially appreciated Levy's insight that "writing" now encompasses a wide variety of media: "[T]he sense in which [writing, as a skill,] is understood has broadened, reflecting contemporary thinking in multiliteracies and the combination of the word and the image in the creation of multimodal texts" (773). This, to me, is one amazing way in which tech tools are key to this game-changing reconceptualization. There is no longer one way to be "literate"; there are many new ways in which to "write"; and tech tools can provide the brilliant ink for students' metaphorical new pens. 

In the language classroom, it's very easy to integrate writing without belaboring it as such. For example, my advanced English conversation students last term created "Wanted" posters using Smore (www.smore.com) and used Animoto (animoto.com) to create advertisements for tours they had designed. This use of tech tools to integrate images and words enlists a variety higher-order thinking skills and provides students with an excuse to use language in an authentic manner--both for discussion about the project and in the project, itself.

Hubbard's article, meanwhile, identified a multitude of ways in which CALL can lead to improvement--perhaps not to "improving language directly . . . but rather to improving the learning conditions in some fashion" (2). A few areas that might be improved by CALL, he writes, include learning efficiency and effectiveness (learners acquire language knowledge more easily or quickly, and retain it longer), access, convenience, motivation, and institutional efficiency. 

I love this way of looking at it. It expands the definition of improvement beyond levels that are concrete and that can be assessed, to include elements that are more amorphous and difficult to measure but that nonetheless are vital to learning. This might not satisfy administrators who are looking for solid numbers to justify tech integration in schools, but I appreciate Hubbard's recognition that "improvement" goes beyond the obvious to include a wide variety of possibilities.

It also speaks to my experiences integrating tech tools into a conversation class last fall: though my students' test scores weren't noticeably higher than previous years' students, their motivation seemed higher; some of them used tech tools such as Facebook, Twitter, or Animoto to practice English in their spare time; and Google Docs made it much easier for me to share feedback and keep track of how much time they spent practicing English outside of class. Their long-term retention, meanwhile, is something that might be worth investigating in the future.