By Aaron Campbell · February 07, 2006
The purpose of Dekita Exchange is to inform the public of “EFL/ESL courses that take a P2P approach in which students are encouraged to engage in conversations outside the class setting.” One of the main benefits of the Exchange is that teachers can locate classrooms in other countries with whom their students can immediately begin interacting, by commenting on their weblogs, Flickr accounts, 43 Things list, etc. The virtues of giving and receiving comments are perhaps best captured in a recent post by Anne Davis, who writes:
I’ve blogged before about comments. They make such a difference It’s the connector for our students. It also provides so many teachable moments. It provides “thinkable” moments for them. Some of our best classroom discussions emerge from comments. We share together. We talk about ones that make us soar, ones that make us pause and rethink and we just enjoy sharing those delightful morsels of learning that occur. You can construct lessons around them You get a chance to foster higher level thinking on the blogs. They read a comment. Then they may read a comment that comments on the comment. They get lots of short quick practices with writing that is directed to them and therein it is highly relevant. Then they have to construct a combined meaning that comes about from thinking about what has been written to them in response to what they wrote. It’s such a good way to begin the process of teaching reflective thinking. I like to see the progress the students make. They start off with statements such as “I like this blog.” We get to expand their thinking and they begin to take note of the the delight of language and then reasons for writing become more apparent. They have ownership.
Read more about the Dekita Exchange and how to join.
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Rudolf
wrote on February 08, 2006:
Why aren’t any of Anne’s classes listed on the Exchange?
I’m getting the impression that we mishandled the Exchange: as it is, it’s too complicated.
It should be something dead simple: we’d ask educators to create an info page with the relevant course info and to pass along the link, then we’d make sure it goes up on Dekita’s front page and is more prominently displayed than now—let’s say we clear out the left Dekita.org sidebar and put the the Exchange links there, starting right from the top. And, of course, the stuff should continue to be available as a feed.
The del.icio.ous tag meme may have looked like an interesting idea at the time, but it failed to take off and may have been extraneous to the Exchange idea all along. It may also have scared away educators who otherwise might have participated but who didn’t understand the del.icio.us part and felt intimidated by it . Maybe we should treat the del.ico.us bit as a mere appendage to the initiative rather than as its pulsing heart.
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Aaron Campbell
wrote on February 26, 2006:
Anne’s classes are not ESL classes. She blogs with elementary students in general, only a few of which are not native speakers.
I like the idea of making the exchange links more prominent. Your idea of simplfying the process by taking away the del.icio.us tag is also good. We can add tags ourselves; anyone can.
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