Author: tokyokevin

TED is an annual conference of the best thinkers of our time. It has been going for 18 years and getting more and more popular. It has a famous deadline: no speech can be over 20 minutes. Here is what they say about TED at the website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

People like Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Bill Gates, Tim Burners-Lee have all talked at TED. (a few did get more than 20 minutes). Recently, videos of these presentations have all been put on line.

So you have a wonderful resource of the smartes people on the planet putting as much information as they can into a 20-minute presentation, and making it understandable to a world-wide audience. How do you teach with this?

Some teachers have pooled their ideas into a wiki (see Tool #58) to use this wonderful resource in class most effectively. Mostly to create discussion topics that are very relevant to our students today, TeachingWithTed can give you materials as well as ideas for particular presentations made at TED.

I use Google Translator for school memos, and it is good enough to get the gist of the meaning. But if you really want a good translation, you still need a human. Cucumis applies the Web 2.0 idea of people helping people. When you sign up, you can translate other people’s documents into your own language. Then you can ask them to translate your documents into their language. You get points that allow you to measure the amount of work. No money is exchanged. I will be really curious to see if this works out (a kind of economics experiment). But for language learners, this a  great way to practice translation and see if they are capable of satisfying their peer’s requirements.

This is so frustrating. XLife is exactly what I am looking for. But it is not really available in Japan.

A simulation is a type of computer application that simulates real life. The first simulators were for airline pilots to learn how to fly without endangering the passengers. Will Wright’s SimCity and the offshoots are probably the best-known examples of this genre.

XLife was developed by an Iranian/US developer and paid for by the US State department. The idea is to give middle easterners a chance to experience and learn about American culture. This PR effort targets cell phones because more than twice as many people in the mideast own them than computers (53% vs. 24%). Details available in the Wall Street Journal (may be blocked behind paywall.)

XLife is a series of different lives you can act out, all of which take you to the US to live and learn. You get points for knowledge of the US and points for making the right decisions, all on your cell phone.

Unfortunately, right now, the game only works with some Nokia phones and a few Ericson phones, neither of which are very popular here. I’m going to try it out on my daughter’s phone and see how that works, but I am not optimistic. I’m a bit frustrated. I think this is the direction for the future of language learning. Simulations, games and cell-phone access.

Knowing how students and teachers are using technology in the classroom in the US is important knowledge for any advanced country. In some ways Japan is far ahead of the US. In infrastructure like fiber optic web connections, and price of Internet connections. The number of blog posts is higher here in Japan than the US.

But other areas Japan is behind. Primarily in the use of technology. It is not very intensive, and most people experience technology through their cell phones. Computer use in class is still very rudimentary, so we can learn a lot through these statistics. Note especially how the student are more tech-savvy than their teachers.

Using Adobe Flash as a software for making online activities is really hard. You have to buy the software, learn how to use it, and then think of kinds of activities. Fortunately, classtools.net helps you by offering an authoring tool. You can create flash activities for your web site, all without knowing flash. You use templates and add your own content to the activity types. The first one is the hardest, and after that they are easy. If you are a little bit of a geek, you will like this.