October 2016 – Jordan Smith

This week, we investigated a few social media sites for language teaching and learning. In this post, I will quickly share one of the most important things I learned while doing this investigation: Give the user valuable content where they are now—directly on the social platform. Don’t make users click unnecessarily to find the content you’re trying to deliver.

This played out in the two accounts we investigated on Twitter. One (@slowgerman) did a fine job of providing useful content on Twitter, while the other (@radiolingua) did not. Admittedly, providing useful content on Twitter can be a challenge because the number of characters per post (tweet) is so limited. The strategy of @radiolingua seems to be to provide content and products for sale on a website while using its Twitter account to just link to that content. This is OK, but it’s not nearly as effective, in my opinion, as finding a way to share useful teaching and learning content directly with users on the platform they find themselves.

The Twitter account for @slowgerman seemed to get around this problem nicely. This organization uses its Twitter account mostly for providing information that helps users learn German. Occasionally, they’ll tweet a link to some resource or information on their main website, but their followers are primarily getting useful information that helps users learn German vocabulary.

So that’s the main takeaway: Do everything you can to provide useful content directly on the social media site your audience is already using. Don’t force them to navigate away from it to find the content they want.

The most recent assignment we completed for our English 510 class was a multimedia tutorial. Our task was to select an online language-learning tool, investigate its features, and create a narrated tutorial that briefly describes the tool and how it can be used in a language learning context.

I chose Quizlet for my tutorial. While I was familiar with the concept of digital flashcards, I had never used them before. So I was glad to have the chance to get familiar with Quizlet and think about how I might use it myself.

Here’s how my tutorial ended up:

I created my tutorial using Camtasia. This was my first time using Camtasia, and I was impressed with it overall. I found it easy to learn and feature rich. When I’ve needed to create screencasts before, I’ve used QuickTime. QuickTime has the bare minimum in terms of capability, so it’s incredibly easy to use, but it doesn’t offer a lot of tools to help in postproduction. Not so with Camtasia. It was fun to play with different zooms, transitions, and call-outs as I edited my screencast footage, and I think it definitely made the final product seem more polished and user-friendly. Doing all that postproduction was time consuming, though, so I imagine if I were in a situation where I had to, say, provide video feedback for all students in a writing class, I’d likely stick with QuickTime and not worry about doing any postproduction.

As of now, my video has five whole views! It’s likely that all of those views are mine and Jim’s, but hopefully a few more people might stumble on it and find something in it that’s useful.

Month: October 2016

Social Media for Language Teaching and Learning

Multimedia Tutorial