I’m impatient and that personality trait extends into my teaching as well, so long-term tasks are not what I usually go for, unless the students need it to achieve better results. But with podcasting, I don’t necessarily think the goals are the priority, but rather the experience.
Sure, students learn most the material along the way, while scripting for the podcast, communicating in a group project and interacting using the target language, yet the task requires more than target language practice to be dealt with.
Students would need to learn how to use the software, spend a lot of time perfecting their recordings to make them presentable and would also need to come up with topics, situations and so on. All of these can be achieved in a more academic manner, through collaborative writing or single presentations.
On the other hand, listening to podcasts is a task I make sure I always have my syllabus full of, both as a homework task and in-class activity. Podcast listening can be done with students of any level, if you find the right podcast, of course. The channel would also need to match with the student’s interests, as in that case they are obviously more likely to listen to the podcast attentively and grab something from it, both language and content.

Use of collaborative writing spaces is a must when it comes to my students. The most recent example would be my group of low-intermediate level learners aged 12-14. I split them into groups of 4 and assigned a presentation. They had to find a conspiracy theory of their interest and present it along with their interpretations of the subject as well as any other information relevant to the story. In more teacher-terms, they had to make a presentation and write a script that they would follow, in the end, send both documents to me. A hint for them was to use collaborative spaces such as Google docs and slides, in which case I would have the opportunity to follow their work, help them along the way and there would be no need for them to send me emails with documents attached (I highly discouraged this approach for the assignment, it creates a logistical mess in my email and computer, and it’s a pathway to madness for any teacher). All of the groups decided to use the collaborative writing spaces, most of them enjoyed the experience, some of them hated it as there seemed to be a quarrel of some sort through software during their collaboration, one of them said “It’s like power point, but with friends, just like we used to play Delta force alone, but then with internet we got Delta force with friends”.

This kind of project would be great with promoting multi-literacy and digital literacy.

to be continued...

Sims is a great example for this purpose.
Activity idea: Tell students to decorate a sims room, give them a text about a description of a room, ask them to analyse the essay and create a similar room. When the room is finished, ask them to bring a screenshot of the room and present it to the class. Grade the student on the fact of including the details from the essays in their virtual rooms. For example, in the essay it says “...in the right corner I have a TV on a stand, with a couple of my favourite DVDs next to it...” the student would need to have a room that is similar to this, easy for the teacher to assess the vocabulary.
This should mostly work at lower levels of English proficiency.

And there’s nothing for parents to worry about, the only possible concern with the game is the scene of mild sexual encounter that some sims characters may have, which was rated PG-13.

One of the most outstanding advantages that the technology offers is the utter absence of limitations when it comes to creativity or expression, these are most common in the non-virtual environment, the real word, due to a lack of resources, funds, energy and even physical health, while in the virtual world, there is no heavy lifting, need for power or police. One can do whatever they would like to do, which brings us to the disadvantages.

The main one being that learners can be either accidentally or voluntarily exposed to virtual worlds and situations in them that both the parents and the teachers are trying to keep them away from, due to age, religion or any other factors.

However 3D worlds are still worth the try, in my opinion, growing up that’s what I wished my teacher would do.

A sample way to do this could be splitting the adult EFL learners into groups and sending them to a Minecraft builder to build a virtual world that best represents an essay they are about to write or a reading that they’ve done. The objective for these is that it allows the students create a bond between what they learn in class and the way it is applicable to the real world and real situations. In the virtual worlds they could create a set best describing their understanding of a recent play that they’ve read, which you plan to discuss later, this would be for higher levels of proficiency, of course.

Mobile assisted language learning is most notable for its effects on vocabulary learning and its retention, according to new studies. Thus an activity implementing MALL is easy to design for any level or age (assuming their old enough to own mobile devices).

A fun activity that I would try out with young or teenage learners at beginner or elementary level is the following:

At the end of the term/semester, just before the exam/midterm or progress test you might want your students to revise the vocabulary they learnt during the term, as you may not want to go back to it next term.

1. For this purpose, make a list of student’s names, next to it, make another list of all the topics of vocabulary you’ve covered (the ones you want them to revise, food, spelled numbers, colors, mood, clothes).
2. Print the list for each student and hand it out as homework.
3. Explain how to play the game.

• The first person on the list sends a WhatsApp message to the second person on the list.
• The message includes one word from the first topic
• The second person, as soon as they receive the message, sends another message to the third person, including all of the previous words and adding their own.
• As soon as there are no more words learnt from the topic, the student goes to the next one
• WhatsApp allows messages of up to 6000 characters, so you can ask your students to go for a couple of rounds, or add in more topics as they go (Use group message for this).

1. Make the first student send the first message right after you explain the task, this will serve as a model.
2. Ask students to finish the first topic in class in case they don’t follow your instruction.

Numerous papers are being written about the limitations of such technology while very few point out its achievements. This may be due to its unavailability to the "non-tech-savvy" demographic of teachers or to the fact that artificial intelligence and natural language processing are mechanisms that work in the background of a finalised product and/ or are usually not advertised as standalone application but rather integrated into such. One of the most notorious mentions when it comes to the limitations of AI and Speech Recognition is the argument that such software cannot produce valid and reliable results when prompted giving away its simplicity and inefficacy in TEFL contexts. An example of this would be when students try to talk to the bots and get the sense that the bots don't really respond to their individual or specific answers but rather provide predetermined key answers to certain triggers programmed to be recognised in the prompted query. While with chatbots this may be the case, I think we can all agree with the fact that most freely available chatbots are developed by a programmer working alone and are left without integration of machine learning, thus making them robotic in their answers (ironic).

The case with AI is debatable, but speech recognition, to me, should be ubiquitously integrated in EFL, especially at lower proficiency levels. There are many activities that can be designed with the semi-structure of using SR/actual text.

Example
Ask your students to find information about certain things only using Siri, they will not be able to look at the screen, only listen and ask further question. This is a great way to check listening comprehension, improve speaking and pronunciation. This would be great for 5+ in age and for proficiency levels below B2.

For educators in Armenia

This could provide crucial analysis of the needs of the students in relation to what they are actually getting from the educators.

In a way, providing the necessary look into what the students want to learn and most importantly how they want to do that. This could also serve as a tool of understanding any discrepancies that occur when students move from one school / university to another, this has been known to be a big issue in the Armenian educational system, where the same student known for good grades in one university, get the exact opposite in a different one after the transition.

For EFL professionals in Armenia

Big data could resolve issues with teaching English as a foreign language. The most notorious one being the choice of methods used in EFL classrooms and their effect on students.

This would help the professionals understand the demand that the Armenian educational market has, in terms of teaching, development and advancements in the settings created for the learners.

For me

Big data and analytics is a source of innovation, knowledge and occasional reference for late night debates with friends.

To me this is a reliable and valid dataset that provides unlimited information and insight into what is actually happening, instead of what is supposed to happen. It shows the effectiveness of a variety of systems currently used or even ones that are forgotten about.

This sort of design allow the convenience of having the best from both of the worlds, while the educators are free to set priorities to either face-to-face teaching as a traditional part of the process and technology integration for technology-facilitated instruction.

In my experience, not a lot of parents are worried about their child’s “digital-time” when the child is supervised by the teacher, and. of course, when they trust the teacher. Usually, they will only talk to the teacher when they are worried about privacy issues of their child, when it comes to the child accidentally uploading unwanted pictures of the family to the web. Some of the parents are also worried about the physical aspects of tech use, their concern is that it might cause bad eyesight or wrong posture.

Research shows that only a few short steps of limiting tech use at home can prevent any negative consequences that tech might have.

First of all, supervision. Every once in a while it’s important to take a look at the screen of your child’s device to understand what is it exactly that they’re up to. Having the TV, gaming consoles (Xbox or PlayStation) and the computers in an area where you can easily observe the behaviour is recommended. This can also help you limit the use of some of the unwanted content on the web. An hour or two should be the limit, try to come up with another activity that the child could do before you tell them that their daily two hours are done. Not having something to replace the technology with is usually what causes the child to think that everything else is boring.