I had the opportunity to visit Dr Hamel‘s 400 level class on technologies for language learning, at the University of Ottawa.  Class was in English for students who are in the program of didactics.  The class focused on teaching grammar with technologies and a group of 5 students presented two scholarly articles before engaging us into an activity using mind-mapping as a tool to create an interactive storyline (we used Popplet).  The presentation skills and analytical level exhibited by these students were quite impressive.  The students were actively participating in all activities, commenting and asking a lot of questions.

In the last 30 minutes, I talked about the use of Twitter as an instrument for languaging, sharing and active participation (from receiving input to producing output) within an authentic context. We also discussed the limits of such a tool.  One student reminded us of the poll feature, one aspect of Twitter that can be of value to informally evaluate and prob students’ knowledge and/or opinion on a specific subject.

Presentation in notes format (PDF) can be found below

microblogs UOttawa_notes