Reflection of Another Week in CALL

This week I have had a lot of ideas and thoughts flit through my mind about CALL activities. I have only limited teaching experience myself and sometimes I find it hard to see how an activity might work in a classroom and/or what problems my future students might have with them. I have also been looking at the websites we have been using in the classroom and trying to decide what I think about them and how I might integrate them into a future class. 

This Monday we worked with two different websites: Socrative and Grockit. These two sites have very differing purposes and probably would not be used in the same classroom on the same day. Socrative is a website that the teacher would mainly use and the students would only interact with while taking quizzes or playing the space race game. I think this site is helpful for a teacher to use because he/she can easily get the results from test sent to them after the quiz and the space races can be fun and motivating for the students. I would caution any teacher using the site though not to just use it for comprehension quizzes or make it the sole way to test the students in the classroom because I don't think you would get a very good idea of what each student has learned nor would you be incorporating different learning styles of your students into the classroom. Another problem is that you would have to make sure that each student has a smart phone/tablet/computer in the classroom and that they bring it on the day of the test. The students would have to make sure that their electronics are charged enough and reliable enough not to crash in the middle of the quiz or turn off due to low battery. I believe that many classrooms will have some students who do not have any usable electronics so in that case the teacher would be unable to use Socrative or would have to bring extra electronics to the classroom which would be expensive and there is always the possibility of them getting broken or stolen.

Grockit on the other hand has a few more uses and I believe can lead to other activities. Grockit uses youtube videos to teach students. The teacher can add questions to a video and send the link to the students who then can watch it and answer the questions. Or the students in groups could find a video and ask questions for other's in class to answer as a sort of task or project the teacher gives them. The questions can be anything you want them to be, but it seems like they will mostly end up being comprehension questions about the video because otherwise you wouldn't need to ask the questions during the video. I believe this is a good site to use as a beginning activity that could lead to a more in-depth discussion of a topic or another task that uses some of the information they learned in the video. On the other hand, as a stand-alone activity I don't think it is all that worth it to use because it is very basic and only lends itself to listening comprehension of the videos and wouldn't be very productive for a class by itself.

Upon these reflections, I have started thinking about my future classes, where in the world I might want to teach and the technology that may be available. There are many unknowns at this point so it is good to be able to be introduced to so many of the resources before I actually start teaching so that I have a lot to draw on when I teach a class of my own.