So far, I have taken 4 classes in ‘Use of Multimedia
in ELT’ course. I think I have learned a lot within a very short period of
time. And I think it is very good that I get to write a review like this
because it will help me to remember things I learned much longer.
During the first week of the course, I
learned what is ‘CALL’; Computer Assisted Language Learning. It is a very
important terminology that generally includes all kinds of language learning
that involves computing and associated devices such as mobile phones. Since I
am in the generation which I grow up with the developing technology, I am very
much familiar with the use of those devices but not with using those as a
learning tool. In Korean educational context, they call it ‘Smart Learning’ in
order to describe an interactive learning experience with Information Technology
and they highlights expands and utilization of smart learning for this decade.
Since I want to be an English teacher in South Korea, I feel the necessity to
learn how to incorporate CALL into learning instruction. Knowing about this new
cutting-edge language teaching method definitely evokes my interests to
discover about CALL more.
As a beginning of the semester-long CALL introduction,
we created a blog which itself is a great tool for CALL and autonomy in
learning. I have already created one 4 years ago when I took an ‘ICT and
autonomy in learning’ course and decided to use it again, instead of creating a
new one. For the first step to decorate my blog, the professor introduced ‘Microsoft
Powerpoint’ as a powerful tool to make an illustrative work without such
professional tool like ‘Adobe Photoshop’. You can do lots of simple task with
this program and I will absolutely use it for my future photo works. Also, I
learned how to do a survey interaction using the website “http://www.polleverywhere.com“ This website is partially free for all and is very useful to
interact with a small number of people. It works simultaneously just if you are
connected to the Internet. It seemed like it is a pretty applicable voting
tool. 
During the second week of the course, we
finally started to go into more details in terms of teaching language through
CALL. The first topic is about teaching Vocabulary. As we learned the new
theories, terminologies and even some methodologies about vocabulary teaching, some
effective vocabulary teaching resources are introduced. In accordance with the
Lexical Approach that Michael Lewis introduced in 1993, the professor and I
looked through the websites that offers a variety of activities that involves
learning collocations and others. One of the best websites was British National
Corpus “http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/” Through
this website, I could easily check up the natural and native-like collocations
because it lists the search result by the frequency of usage. Visuwords Online “http://www.visuwords.com” was another
interesting website that offers online graphical dictionary. It gives you a
straightforward visual mind-map of the word that you type in. I think younger
kids will be a good target for this because they tend to learn visually.
Lastly, I also very liked the Wordsmyth. “http://www.wordsmyth.net/”
This site offers you a free glossary maker. I think I will use this website
with the top priority when I teach kids. Within a few clicks, you can print out
a glossary list that is essential tool to teach kids vocabulary in classrooms.
