Last Friday was my students' turn to present their assignment on 'life story' which they must interview foreigners to know their cultures, stories of their lives, and even their habits or daily life. Some students presented their interview results in various ways. Those who interviewed using chat rooms (Yahoo Messenger and Facebook, or Skype) presented the interviewee by reporting the results of the conversation on their life story, their culture, and places where they are from by showing some short movies on certain cultures, habits, and places. But students who managed to meet the foreigners face-to-face presented the results by using recorded voice and videos when the interview took place.
What I want to say here is that technology in any forms can be used in our classes. In my CCU class, my students made use of power-point slides and pictures to explain the findings, showing movies to give more elaborative backgrounds of the foreigners, and they recorded the interview using their cell-phones either in voice or video mode. When looking at the results, for me, they are so amazing as they only use a very simple device such as cell-phones having features to record voice and video. If students can make use of the device optimally, they are able to create something that is interesting as well as elaborative presentation. Of course it depends also on their creativity and motivation to show something that can attract their teachers:)) and other members of theclass.
Thinking about using cell-phones for creating videos and then showing them in front of the class, I have a belief that although the technology used is very simple but if we can get the most out of it, it will give us advantages. I am also thinking about Blackberry phone that most of my students have can accommodate them in enhancing their speaking abilities when used to chat with foreigners in English via BBM (Blackberry Messenger), Google Talk,or even Yahoo Messenger installed in this smart phone.
Well, that's all my share today. Thanks for reading.
Malang, 20 October 2010
Hello Mengenai (am I correct with your name?)
BalasHapusI like your idea of interviewing foreigners. I had to work with "Cultural Awareness" with my eleventh graders and asked them to google the differences and similarities between British, American and Latin American cultures. My question is whether your students have the possibility to interview foreingers in your country. That is begining to happen in mine but it is not the usual thing. However you have made me think that is one of the uses we can give to technology. How did your students find contacts abroad?
Hi Yudi,
BalasHapusI too loved the idea of interviewing foreigners. I think it is very important to show students the differences and the similarities in each of us. I live in a country that is very divided by beliefs, cultures and politiques and it is so important to show that there is no one truth and one way of life. There is so much we can learn from one another (as we see in our course) that it's a shame to waste it.
Nourit
Hi Andrea and Nourit,
BalasHapusThanks for the comments. For Andrea, my name is Yudi not Mengenai :))
Yes, the idea of interviewing is to get understanding between cultures so that the differences can be overcome with open-minded view and do not just highlighted ourselves that we are the only one and the best.
In my countries, there are some foreigners living and working here so that it is easy for us to meet them, and I also allowed my students to interview using chat rooms with the Internet so that there won't be reasons that students do not have the resources for interview.
Well, that's all my share. Thank you for your attention.
Cheers,
Yudi