Using the Internet in Teaching: Preparing and Activating the Learner
Preparing.
The use of Internet texts has both advantages and drawbacks. The advantages are
•that the learners are exposed a wide variety of texts on a wide variety of subjects
•that they have a greater choice of texts and are therefore more likely to find something they really want to read. This is especially true if the general subject matter has been agreed in advance and if groups or individuals have chosen specific areas of that general area to research on the net.
The drawbacks are that
•there is a huge amount of material of very varying quality,
• the sheer length of texts
•the level of difficulty if the texts we are using are not specifically graded for learners.
All this means that careful preparation of the learners is important in terms of quality control and in terms of training them to deal with longer and more difficult texts than they are used to. The question of text quality control is discussed in the section on choosing and evaluating texts.
When it comes to dealing with longer complex texts, we have found it useful, for example, to practice skim-reading skills using paper texts before letting the learners loose on the net/web. Most learners have been conditioned to read texts slowly and for detail, and while this may be a useful activity if one is studying particular language points, it is a great drawback in dealing with longer texts where one does not need to understand every word in order to understand the meaning of the text.
We have found some of the following approaches and activities useful:
•discussion of the subject matter in advance
•skim reading using paper texts before progressing to web texts
•summarizing texts
•discussing content
We also of course need to be aware that texts on the net are often shorter than printed texts and can therefore be more attractive to learners who are not skilled at coping with complex longer texts
Activating/Activity Guidelines
We feel it is important to give the learners specific websites and specific tasks to begin with and to give them specific questions which require thought rather than ones which simply allow copying and pasting.
In an example from Høgskolen i Sør Trøndelag, a group of student teachers were given the website Britkids. This site was originally intended for pupils in Britain to stimulate discussion on cultural differences and racism, but we asked these students to evaluate its potential use in a Norwegian ungdomsskole. They were not given specific questions to answer, but simply asked for an evaluation. They came up with a variety of ideas:
The first idea that came to me when I explored the "britkid" site, was that it's a perfect tool to combine different subjects in the education. The pupils will read a lot and learn new words in english, and they will learn about different religions and cultures within Great Britain. The subjects "English", "KRL" and "Social Science could be included in "temabasert undervisning".
I noticed that Britkid has directories for teachers giving advice about how to use the site and further work that can be done with the topics presented on the site. For subjects such as Social science, KRL and English, and "den sosiale læreplan" these are topics that you can focus on all the time and that will be relevant in most situations. Especially in the multicultural Norway pupils could have some of the same experiences as the Britkids.
Organising the Material
Apart from carefully worded questions, the learners may also find it useful to use a program like Web Quest
for organizing their work .
Clarity of Purpose in both processes and products
The teacher also needs in advance to have a plan for the processes which the learners will go through and the end product of their searching on/use of the net. Many of the processes will be those we have discussed earlier in this website: chat, emails, forum discussions, shared writing, and of course, face to face discussions in class. The products may be longer pieces of shared or individual writing, PowerPoint presentations, web pages.
Go on to Choosing and Evaluating websites
