Telecollaboration: Activities

E-mail, Listservs, & Threaded Discussions

IECC: Look at the section for the grade-level of your students to see what keypal projects people are suggesting. Are there any you would like to join? There is a separate section for surveys. (See more with free registration.)

Blogs and Wikis

Visit these sites to see blogs in action:
- Alaric's Blogging in Chinese as a Second Language - a language learner's blog - and now he has added an "audio blog" to his sites.
- Spanish Learning Blog - can you learn Spanish from a blog?
- group blog for language teachers - http://languageteachers.blog-city.com/ - login (free) to add your thoughts about blogging for language learning purposes.
- You can also try this one: http://www.schoolblogs.com/languageteachers/ - it's slow, be patient!
This site is setup for collaborative blogs - anyone can post an entry.

Go to Wikipedia and look around this famous wiki. Do a search on a topic and language of your choice and see what's there.  What if you want to add/change something?

Chat Rooms & Instant Messaging

Try out AIM Express to chat with a friend. You'll both need to sign up for AOL "screen names" and logins, but then you can chat for hours on end - with no phone bill!

Virtual Spaces

Schmooze University - this text-based world was built for - and by - ESL students.  Don't miss a visit to Moorie's Bar, and the Treasure Hunt.  When you arrive for the first time, follow the directions to get to the classroom to learn how to navigate around and talk to people.

Tapped-In (needs a free membership).  Built mostly for teachers, you can build your own office, have meetings with colleagues and students, etc.  Take a tour from the front page, or see if one of the hosts is around to guide you.

Adding Audio-Video

Duber, J. (n.d.). Cutting Edge CALL Demos. CALL @Chorus. http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/chorus/call/cuttingedge.html

You will need to have software to work with creating Audio-Video.  Here are some free applications and others that you will need to download and install:

Audacity – free, cross-platform (Mac, PC, Linux/Unix), able to produce sound files in multiple formats, including mp3 and edit sound files; available for download at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

iTunes – free, cross-platform (Mac, PC), good for importing audio files from a CD and exporting mp3 files; available for download at http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Other downloadable software:
Cool Edit (PC only) from http://www.syntrillium.com/
Quick Time Pro (Mac & PC) from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/buy/

Video Conferencing

Both Yahoo and MSN now have the capability of adding voice or video to their email, groups, and more.This one will need to have a camera connected and download software to try it out...

Podcasting

Partners in Excellence (PiE): A Scottish initiative for the promotion of
language learning and teaching using ICT. PiE are creating their own series
of PodCasts for languages learners, which they refer to as PiECasts:
http://www.pie.org.uk