18 December, 2002
Web Based Teaching Unit:
Basic Microsoft Word (MSword) and World Wide Web (www) Skills
Software used for design:
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Filemaker Pro, Macromedia Flash, Hot Potatoes, CaptureEze
Pro
Audience:
This web based teaching unit is specifically designed for first year composition
students in the Engl 104 or 101 course in order to guide them to use basic MSword
and www skills in their written assignments, but it could benefit other students
as well. The skills have been designed independently of any course syllabi for
the convenience of instructors to incorporate them in the teaching and learning
process. Students as well as instructors can use this unit to focus on selected
skills and work at their own pace in and/or out of class time.
Objectives:
i. Students can incorporate the skills learned into their daily assignments
ii. The skills taught are relevant to the needs of the 101/104 students
iii. Students will learn to retrieve knowledge/information from the www
iv. This unit will increase students’ confidence in using computers in
an academic setting
v. Encourages students to be independent learners
vi. Enhances critical and creative thinking skills
Hardware/Software Requirements:
In order to use this teaching unit, one must have the Flash Player and access
to the Internet.
Set-up of this teaching unit:
This is designed to be a self-study unit, although teachers may decide to incorporate
it into their classes, as well.
i. Pre-activity
This activity consists of two quizzes, an MSword skills quiz and a www skills
quiz, which will assess the students’ knowledge to determine if this site
can address their needs. If they score above 75% in any of those quizzes, they
can then refer to the Other Useful Sites Database which has links to other sites
on the www.
ii. Tutorials
There are two sets of different tutorials that give students step by step information
on how to use MSword tools and also different ways to use the www.
iii. Post-activity
This is an evaluation to see if the students have mastered the required skills.
It involves searching the www, formatting the information into a word document,
e-mailing it as an attachment to the instructor and filling in a database.
Rationale:
In the article, “Design Processes In CALL”, Hedberg points
out that a CALL design has to be in a constructivist framework by beginning
with a needs analysis to retrieve information about the target audience. Next,
the gathered information is used to prepare the strategies and instructional
presentation and lastly, an interaction structure should be formed. (93)
Similarly, our group sent out e-mails to friends and colleagues to get feedback
on the needs of computer skills in a first-year writing course. The response
was very encouraging as most of the first-year language instructors wanted their
students to at least master the basic computer skills which are required in
accomplishing the assignments. Next, we selected and compiled the information
to design our unit.
The unit begins with the use of the MacromediaFlash video and audio to capture
the learner’s interest. From here they are led to a Macromedia Dreamweaver
page to choose the type of quiz and/or the tutorials. Both the word and web
skills quizzes use Hot Potatoes with the “drag and drop” or “click
on the correct answer” functions. The tutorials are separately set in
Macromedia Dreamweaver frames with highlighted text for students to roll the
mouse over the text to get the intended meaning of the vocabulary. Finally,
learners are encouraged to do the post-activity using a data base, the www and
MSWord skills which will evaluate their mastery of all the skills learned .
According to Levy in the article, “Design Processes In
CALL”, there are three important features that influence a design in CALL:
i. designers must define the ‘potential users’ and the ‘learning
context’.
ii. design may change over time depending on the feedback from users or through
the process of development.
iii. the hardware and software tools have a great impact on the design itself.
(84)
Our potential users are Engl 101 and 104 academic writing students who will
need the knowledge of basic MSWord and www skills to do the assignments and
communicate with their instructors as well as peers via computer during and
after class hours. Our main goal is for these students to master those required
skills at their own pace and to employ them in their daily work without having
the instructor to spend a large amount of class time teaching them the dos and
don’ts of computer use. We also hope that this teaching unit will be further
developed over time to further cater to the needs of our students and the usage
of software in the market. Our design is greatly influenced by the accessibility
of the software at our department. The introductory page uses features from
Macromedia Flash because it is easier for us to prepare and edit the movie before
exporting it to Macromedia Dreamweaver. The readily available Hot Potatoes program
which is free encouraged us to frame our quizzes in it.
In the research article by De Ridder, “Visible or Invisible Links: Does the Highlighting of Hyperlinks Affect Incidental Vocabulary Learning, text Comprehension, and the Reading Process?”, she explains that foreign language learners will readily consult a gloss if it is highlighted although there is no increase of vocabulary learned incidentally. Nevertheless, we believe in providing our learners with glosses to make them aware of the differences in the use of certain vocabulary which they may have seen but not used in such a context, for example, “legitimate” and “credibility”. Research on SLA which is applied to CALL suggests “comprehensible input” is needed to help ESL learners comprehend and accomplish the task (25). Input that is modified through elaboration or simplification is considered “comprehensible”. Similarly, we have incorporated highlighted text in the www tutorials to help learners obtain the meaning of words by the “mouse over” function.
According to Chapelle, in article “CALL in the Year 2000: Still in Search of Research Paradigms?” , the character of non-linguistic form is one of the main features a researcher needs to focus on to describe L2 learning activities, “...CALL activities in which the computer acts as a participant are intended to rely on forms of communication other than the target language (e.g. icons and mouse clicks) to accomplish the task goal.” (Chapelle 24). Thus, in our web based teaching unit, L2 learners will need to “drag and drop” and “mouse click” to complete both the word and web quizzes. In this way, both the non-linguistic and linguistic input from the computer will help the students to complete the interaction.
We employ the communicative approach to teaching language which advocates collaborative
learning through the use of authentic tasks. At the end of this web based teaching
unit, learners are required to complete an activity to demonstrate their mastery
of MSWord and www skills. They begin by searching a favorite recipe on the web
and formatting it as an MSWord document before sending it to their friends and
instructor as an attachment through the e-mail. They also contribute the recipe
by filling in the Recipe Database. To further enhance collaborative learning,
the instructor can use the task of recipe contribution as a jump start for the
teaching of culture by focusing on the food topic which can be carried out with
class discussions, presentations and projects. In addition, students are encouraged
to search the web for other useful sites and add them to the database to benefit
future students. These activities promote the Communicative Model because learners
negotiate meaning with their peers and need to work together to complete a task.
Thus, learners have to master the basic computer skills which are used as tools
to improve their writing assignments and projects in the Engl 101 and 104 courses.
Difficulties:
We encountered a few difficulties while transferring our files from a Mac computer
to the PC that we were working on because the names of the files were capitalized
and some of the links were not working.
Usability Testing:
We carried out the usability test by inviting two 101 course students
to try out our web based teaching unit. These are the suggestions they made
which could be carried out in the future:
i. The instructions in the MSWord quiz should use the terms “Drag and
Drop” instead of “Match” as it was misleading to them.
ii. In the Copy and Paste tutorial, it would be helpful if examples of lines
or words that need to be copied are shown on the screen capture.
iii. Functions of the “Change all”, “Change” and “Ignore”
tabs in the Spell/Check tutorial are not fully explained.
iv. The tutorial for inserting images is not very clear as it does not specify
where to click before obtaining an image from the clip art.