Ahhh...finally

I was finally able to access the week two readings and now my life is complete. Ok, maybe not, but I was able to synthesize some material - in my head if nowhere else.

I will say that after our first face to face, (or should I say F2F?…see how much I’m learning:), meeting, I felt more at ease with BAW. However, that is not to say more efficient or effective in the BAW, um, classroom?

What struck me after class on Monday was how much I enjoyed the interaction with real people. After floating around in a cyber universe for a couple of weeks, it was nice to put real faces to names as well as commiserate about the BAW experience. Commiserate. That sounds more negative than I intend. I guess what I’m getting at is that it was good to know that other people realized and felt a steep learning curve and had some uncertain feelings about BAW in general.

However, that being said, there are some things that I really enjoy about the BAW. For me, BAW provides interesting suggestions about how to incorporate technology into the classroom and provides a sort of an “introduction for dummies” of different programs that I hope to explore at further length later in the week.

Incorporating chats into or outside of the classroom allows students the possibility to interact with others in a more or less sheltered environment depending on the needs and skills of the students. Something that came to mind when reading about the incorporation of chats into the language classroom is the need for awareness on the students’ behalf of the abbreviations and colloquialisms used by native speakers of the English language. It would also require the teacher to be savvy to the terminology, as it changes regularly. Except for lol. That seems to be a staple that crosses linguistic borders.

Also highlighted was the possibility of inviting a guest speaker into the chat session. It is great to have the students prepare questions and be able to interact. However, the mediation/pace of such a chat can be difficult, as we saw on Monday :)

Another idea I appreciated were virtual office hours. How great to be able to answer questions from the comfort of your home.

I think chat interaction has the potential to be very beneficial to students, but I also think that it depends upon the student body and how receptive they are to virtual interaction. Something that I think some would miss during such interaction is the actual physical presence and synergy that occurs within a classroom.