Month: December 2017

Special Collection on Migrants, Education and Technologies

Jones, A., Kukulska-Hulme, A. & Brasher, A., (2017). Editorial Special Collection on Migrants, Education and Technologies. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. 2017(1), p.5. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.441

This special collection of articles includes these themes:

  • Social integration and language learning
  • Contextually sensitive learning for migrants
  • Smart Cities’ support for migrants
  • Overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers
  • Informal learning
  • Learning in different contexts – inside and outside the classroom

The editorial heading up the special collection acknowledges that smartphones have saturated society, that they represent new possibilities as  mobile language learning tools, but also that the Internet can be expensive and isn’t always accessible. One of the featured reports looks at a project that supports language development in daily life – without access to the Internet as learners are on the move. You can also read the blog from this project: SALSA.

Other articles in the collection include refugee experiences learning language in Canada, Australia, England and Sweden.

https://www-jime.open.ac.uk/articles/10.5334/jime.441/

SALSA: Smart cities and language learning

The SALSA blog postings  from August 2014 to March 2017 on the site below describe a project involving a group of English language learners who used 27 beacons in their town to trigger different language learning scenarios. The results of the project are described in the post “Fitting in versus learning”.

The beacon activities were designed to motivate students and help them continue their learning between face to face classroom sessions.

Retrievable from: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/salsa/

Teacher Training and Professional Development in Mobile Pedagogy for English Language Teaching

 

Norris, L., & Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2017). Teacher training and professional development in mobile pedagogy for English language teaching. In R. Power,  M. Ally, D. Cristol, & A. Palalas (Eds.), IAmLearning: Mobilizing and supporting educator practice. [e-Book]. International Association for Mobile Learning. https://iamlearning.pressbooks.com/part/ch-4-teacher-training-and-pd-in-mobile-pedagogy-for-english-language-teaching/

The chapter describes the four pillars of the authors’ Pedagogical Framework and how they highlight the teacher’s role using mobile devices for language teaching and learning. The Framework considers teacher wisdom, device features, learner mobilities and language dynamics. The authors describe using the Framework in professional development workshops in Europe for teachers from several countries. They faced both resistance and enthusiasm from participants and they describe the anxiety teachers felt as they used technology in the workshops.

Retrievable from: http://oro.open.ac.uk/52264/7/52264.pdf