Reading Prompt 3 reply

Soares discovered several challenges with her classroom blog. Students were motivated to read it in class but not outside the classroom. She questioned if they perceived it as a learning tool and if this was true of other students. Through Exploratory Practice and two PEPAs she was able to analyze issues and learn. Her first PEPA was a class discussion about the purpose and need of the blog. Answers indicated her students understood the blog was a learning tool to practice English and interact with other speakers. The motivation, however, was still not there and she found this to be true with other class blogs she visited. From her online survey with other teachers she was able to learn that levels of cognitive development and linguistic proficiency seem to be a factor, along with degree of student input. Student self-expression and interaction with real readers seem to trump linguistic accuracy. Reading posts versus commenting on them were preferred by most students. From her second PEPA of two tasks, Task 1 was a blogging activity involving the class blog and another random blog site. This task was teacher monitored, with some guidance and degree of student autonomy. A reflection activity of Task 1, Task 2 revealed the students were more apt to interact with their own blog vice an outside ‘stranger’ blog. Through these two activities motivation in blogging increased. Lessons learned for future use included trial blogs and understanding the technology involved before introducing one into the classroom, a tutorial and some hands-on demos’ of activities, recognizing there is diverse student blogging experience, and more in-class blogging to spur motivation beyond the classroom.
Without any expertise in this area, after reviewing all the technologies Levy describes, Nagata’s BONZAI is an ILTS I would want to explore for possible use. This AI seems to contain a multitude of language learning tools—lexicon, morphological generator, and a syntactic parser to name a few. Providing detailed feedback of errors made and that it contains a listening component are a couple features that make it holistic learning in a sense. I would use this program to compliment language learning in the classroom, perhaps as a progress check over the course duration. A major consideration would have to be the linguistic proficiency level of the learners, ideally intermediate to advanced learners. Also, their technology expertise level would play a role. Regarding the program itself, a consideration would have to be the cost balanced against its need in achieving learning objectives. Interesting reading for sure.