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Setting up a High-Tech Language School?
Bakerybob writes "My wife and I are currently setting up a small Japanese language school, and I am in charge of all of the technical aspects, with a small but not tiny budget. What would Slashdot recommend as technologies we could use to improve the student experience (and hopefully to interest more students in the school!)? We have the easy bases (free Wifi access for students, a stunningly poorly designed homepage, and a few cheap computers lying around for them to play on between classes) covered, but I'm sure there are a lot of better ideas out there. Has anyone used Moogle? What about online lessons via webcam? Give it your best shot, revolutionary thinkers!"
Give/rent the students iPaqs running Linux. They have a huge "awesome" factor, and are useful too :)
got sig?
How about a big disappointment booth for your students after they spend all that time and money learning Japanese and then they find out that Japanese companies don't want to hire them (they hire Japanese) and non-Japanese companies don't want to hire them (they'll hire Japanese)? (from bitter, bitter experience and many wasted years in college)
Make sure you instar rinux on arr the computars, kekekekekekeke
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You need to offer Extreme Language Courses.
What you do is give them a few hours of very basic vocabulary training, then drug them and transport them to a part of the world that predominantly speaks that langauge, and only that language (ie if it's Japanese, drop them off somewhere in backwoods Japan). Give them a few yen to get started, and leave them to their own resources.
When they show up at your door (possibly armed), a few months down the line, they will have a far greater command of the language in a short amount of time than they could ever have gotten under direct tutelage. THEN you collect your money, plus the yen you invested in them earlier.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Do yourself a favor. Dont waste your money on computer stuff for a LANGUAGE class. Most of the language programs out there simply wont help the kids do any better.
I know there has been this massive rush to get computers into everything-education, but its simply not needed.
The tech you need is a good language teacher, some dictionaries, and maybe a few textbooks/workbooks.
Maybe a japanese->english english->japanese dictionary could be useful, but even then it could make for some seriously lazy students. But I imagine those kids already know about babelfish.
Maybe I'm being shortsighted, but I feel that, in this specific case, computers would be more of a distraction then a benifit.
no
You're going to need a lot of fancy gadgets. They should be at least 1-2 years ahead of the gadgets you can get in the US.
Set this up as the home page.
set all of the computers to be their foreign langauge. So that when they go to use a computer it will always require them to use their knowlege. ;)
Computers are only tools, in school we have to learn how to use our mind as a usefull transparent tool By forcing the students to use their foreign language they will understand things better and quicker.
Don't hire a firm with a name like "Poodle Productions" to do your website.
Could probably make it interesting by getting some anime and manga to use for study.
I wonder what the educational value of hetai is..
Maybe you could set up Skype or other VoIP systems and find some real, native Japanese speakers to pratice with.
Set up a nice big TV with a DVD anime collection there. I took Japanese in HS but forgot most of it out of disuse and plain boredom. If I had access to that kind of stuff as a kid I would have been a LOT more motivated.
:-)
I'd also layer some artwork on top of various letters and let the kids make up their own stories for them.
ie: (That's Ku I think) drawn sort of like O and calling it a "Ku ku bird" makes the memorizing muuuch easier.
I'd also throw in some songs... my favorite was. Heh...
Hitori, futari, sannin INDIANS.
Yonin, gonin, rokunin INDIANS.
Nananin, hachinin, kiyuunin INDIANS.
Jiyuunin INDIAN BOOOOYS.
(Slightly non-PC)
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
How about a broadband connection to a computer in Japan where there are people in a similar age-group who are trying to learn English?
Microphones and webcams are pretty cheap. Yahoo Instant Messenger is probably more than adequate for your communication needs.
Have the Japanese-speaking people speak as much English as they can, and have the English-speaking people speak as much Japanese as they can.
Nothing beats talking to a real human.
Education is the silver bullet.
Good luck with your project.
You could check our Japan discussion and chat listings for some online help.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Robots. Tiny, round robots that brew coffee in their chests while teaching you Japanese. Get them started in on the culture early.
In order for this kind of venture to pull through, I'd suggest making sure that any faculty you hire in the future have lots of experience with the kind of technology required to keep the whole operation running. Specifically in the type of telecommunications you're talking about, because I'm sure that teaching classes via webcam would be much different than teaching in a traditional classroom. Too many things like this fail miserably due to teachers and staff that havn't the slightest clue how to use the tech given to them to it's full potential.
Is that a school in Japan, or a Japanese language school in the US (or elsewhere), or a school where all the classes are taught in Japanese?
I 'think' youre talking about a school where Japanese is taught as a second language (spoken? written?), but it's not entirely clear.
Define 'small'. 10 students? 50, 100?
small but not tiny budget
Define 'small' budget. $500, $500, $50,000?
What about online lessons via webcam?
What kind of classes? Some types work better, some don't. Teaching Japanese might fit into the "don't" category (resolution and frame rate).
It's not entirely clear what you are trying to teach, or what problem the 'high tech' solution is supposed to fix.
Sounds very interesting. I've been through a period of intensive language school before, albeit for French. In my personal experience, especially for beginners, your money would be best spent on small class-sized personal instruction. We did some technology work and it was not as effective - perhaps for an intermediate learner once the bases are covered, but I found it could really lead to problems. I did enjoy parts of the computer-based portion, but found other parts to be useless. My French accent was truly horrible, and that was partially a result of me speaking to a computer and checking my results myself - sounded fine to me, but apparently makes a native French-speaker cringe.
That being said, there are a few things that a good language program can have:
(1) If speaking, have an ability to hear your own voice to ensure that you have the right tone.
(2) If speaking, make sure the teacher can hear the tone, to ensure it is correct.
(3) If typing, make sure the computer isn't overly sensitive.
Not sure how you type in Japanse, but it could be hard with all the various characters - I have a friend taking Japanese right now and it is effective. Spent a while reading to him from his reader book, which was fun but probably could be a good use for a computer - preparing for a test. But once again, you really need a human being to pick up on the accent if your trying to produce fluid speakers.
Just my opinion. Good luck with your language school!
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Let them watch many japanese cartoons. I've been watching a Naruto fansub and I can already construct basic sentances...really fast way to learn a language (this also works with computer programming languages - ie lots of practical exposure).
Everyone knows the only reason to learn any language is to make money. I'm sure they're fleecing every one of their dedicated and greedily idealistic young pupils.
Are you insane? You opened up the door to an entire world of culture, literature, games, movies, and people, and you're saying you wasted your years? Also, I mean, come on, how much of those years did you actually spend studying japanese? About a fifth of each, right? One class out of five.
Check out the Hippo Family Club! No kidding... they're a radical group from Japan who learn 11-17 languages simultaneously. Their books on FFT and Quantum Mechanics are outstanding also.
Transnational College of LEX - Hippo Family Club
idealord music
Find a school in Japane that teaches English and setup video conferencing or VoIP with them. That way they can practice their English and your students can practice their Japanese. Being able to interact with native speakers is key to learning a language and actually retaining it.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
Maybe use some of the money to hire a consultant that might actually know something. I mean seriously, you have read slashdot before haven't you?
And you'll be able to do it all with OSS, if you like - PHP and Postgres or MySQL will get you most of what you need right there. Serve your study documents in someting everybody can read - PDFs of you don't want people changing things.
I use this program to successfuly teach history. The students can use this to develope their vocububaly skills and create mind maps of Japenese culture. But no program is a cure all, no method is a cure all, and anyone who tells you that they have the one and only one solution is a liar.
DAMN! Better go capture myself a Chocobo.
I've found that online discussion forums can help to supplement (but not replace) in-class education. Some people learn better when they are allowed to read, think, and write at their own pace. This could be especially useful in a language class -- just tell the students to talk about movies or sports or politics in the discussion forum.
On the other hand, if students use laptops during class, I'd be wary of offering free WiFi. The internet is great for a lot of things - but it is also a remarkable time-waster and distraction. (And I'm Exhibit A: reading Slashdot at work.)
Don't forget simple things like TV's and overhead projectors. Many of the language instruction stuff I've seen is still on VHS/DVD/CD, not computers.
If that is the case, have you thought about getting some movies in which are in Japanese. I don't know your class demographics, but many may enjoy Japanese Anime, or classical Japanese theater, or the many, many other Japanese movies that are out there. I have had four friends learn Japanese so they could better understand anime (no joke, most are very poorly translated, only the major films do a half decent job, but still lose a LOT of the context as well as censoring for cultural differences).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
One of the most effective uses I've seen of technology in similar situations is marketing. If people see flash webcams and the like, they may well be tempted to come even though you are making very little use of them in teaching. From this perspective, you should be looking for technology that has a real 'wow' factor about it. For instance, 'free' ipods with lessons and the like.
...) and from there software and hardware will naturally follow. However, if your goal is marketing then you'll end up with a totally different set of solutions.
An alternative goal is technology that actually helps with education. There's plenty in this regard to. For instance, my lab is developing a talking head where you can chat in the language being learned. Mistakes are automatically detected and personal profiles are developed. The system starts with a lesson plan and develops dialogues around it. This is for a fairly obscure language (Maori) and I would expect major languages to already have such tools out of the research labs.
But my point is that if you're looking for the technologies that are useful, then you need to start with a clear goal (improve pronunciation, improve grammar, improve lexicon,
Has anyone used Moogle?
Don't you mean Moodle, the online educational tool similar to Blackboard or WebCT? Moodle can be a great tool to assist the classroom experience; we're testing it out in my department and will hopefully deploy it throughout our private prep school for the next academic year.
Besides computers(hardware) you need to be looking into software as well to help students learn the language/s with the help of current technology. I have been trying to emulate, "state of the art" lab over @ Rice University, Houston, TX. Link : http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lrc/index_flash.html
First of all parent is right. And no, it has nothing to do with cache. Second of all, if this is 'off-topic' here, then where the fuck is it on-topic? This is not a fucking forum, you know. He has to post it somewhere!
I worked for the largest language school in the world for 5 years, during which we rolled out a series of e-learning applications. I can tell you the following things:
1) Technology should be used to supplement langauge lessons - never teach them. Distance learning can be done via webcam if absolutely necessary, and you can take advantage of existing technologies for that. Look into Placeware or more likely WebEx.
2) You can license existing e-learning platforms from companies like Auralog, they sell on a sliding scale.
3) Students love to be able to see schedules and homework assignments online. Computer software applications also make great supplements for at-home practice. Also consider setting up a community bulletin board for students to communicate with eachother in their non-native tongue.
I know none of this is revolutionary thinking - but it is sage advice for teaching language with technology. My company tried to teach through technology alone and it failed - the lesson learned was even eLearning needed to be a supplement - not the basis for learning.
Best Luck!
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
1. Come up with a very basic idea with no details.
2. Ask Slashdot for opinions.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Seriously, does he want us to write his business plan for him?
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
When I moved to the Big City after graduation, and I started sending my resume to places looking for Japanese language proficiency, I got a call from a lady who worked for a Japanese airline's local office. She asked if she could take me out to lunch. I was suprised and happy. Then she spent the entire hour telling me why I should look for some other kind of job because of how badly the Japanese bosses were going to treat me and how almost no American could take it. Then she paid for the lunch and left. I took her advice and got into the computer biz with no looking back. Still, I do think about all that time and energy I spent learning Japanese, living in Japan for a year, and I wonder if I could have spent it taking classes that would have been more useful for my present life.
Try the "TELL ME MORE" software by Auralog for foreign languages. I am aware thy offer ESL, french, SPanish, German, Arabic.
Streaming hentai
Having just the past four months learning a new language (six weeks of intensive Spanish course, then normal computer engineering college studies, all in Spain), I honestly can't think of anything that would beat the low-tech approach with small groups, many teachers, and lots of plain old-fashioned *speaking*. Of course some of this might not translate perfectly to a language like Japanese where the normal western student will have very few "hooks" in the form of similarities to their native language, but I don't see how these differences could mean there would be any *less* of a need for actual human communication in every part of the learning experience.
Really, if you have a tech budget, consider spending it on some basic internet-enabled terminals for your students to use in the breaks. The language schools I've seen are sorely underequipped in this area, leading to everyone spending their breaks queuing up just to get a chance to check their email for two minutes.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I'd presume that short video and audio clips would help teach language. That would make a more vivid impression than audio alone. I figured I learned a fair amount of English from TV as an infant (though not as fast as the Splash mermaid).
The New York Times had a recent article about how one foreign language department was using Apple's music player to record and play back language lab materials. I have found a grant proposal while looking for a link to the article. The Times article suggested the use of iPod voice recorders as well.
Of course you are looking for specific technology and technologies, as opposed to curriculum and methodologies but I have a dear friend who teaches the more advanced courses using a mix of history and the country's literature. I found his methods very good.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I spent a year at Waseda, and I studied Japanese for 4 years at a university prior to my year abroad. One thing is vital: watch movies in class. You should have students study text for only a year or two, but from there, go straight to media. By watching drama, you get to watch, listen, and read simultaneously (because they display captions on the screen). For Japanese, culture is just a part of the language as the vocabulary and grammar. So, when the students have grasped the fundamentals of Japanese, throw them in front of the screen. It's the closest they can get to being in Japan without going...and it will give them a glimpse of what they're in for if they go. This is important because westerners have NO idea what it's like to live alongside the Japanese. None. --My third-year professor would type out the scripts and we would go over about 20-second intervals of the film at a time. Great class. And let's not turn this into a Japan-bashing post everyone. I mean, hey, I'd love to leash out a little myself, but this isn't the place. This guy obviously wants to improve western relations with Japan. I say more power to him. http://www.forum.japantoday.com There you go. Bash away on their forum.
Has anyone used Moogle?
Kupo!
Your main concern would be to promote the cultural aspects of learning the language: arrange for some kind of e-mail exchange program with Japanese speakers, have som native guests once in a while come to the school, organize Bunka no Hi events (Culture Day)...
Oh, I like the idea of having a common media room for DVD movies and such... but don't restrain yourself to anime. Instead, show some live action movies (and I don't mean anime based live action!), "real" movies.
I've tried this out a bit here, beaming lectures to friends unable to attend classes (ie. still in their PJ's on a monday morning). It works remarkably well, and most importantly is free. The downside is that a few (16+) students connecting to one shoutcast server can start to hit the old bandwidth meter pretty hard.
Good luck,
Id
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, now would it?' -Albert Einstein-
Making the worst students ritually disembowel themselves could be a powerful motivational aid
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Seriously, some schools are using iPods.
Aside from the standard "My pencil is yellow" fare, you cold load them up with popular Japanese songs (and traditional ones.) Mini-immersion, if you will.
The iPods even have some PDA functionality, so you get that, too.
PLUS, for c. $250 per pupil, you can add some serious 'polish' to people's perception of your school. "You get an iPod? To keep?" You'll be amazed at what that does to their willingness to fork over the big dollars! (There's almost certainly a discount for schools, too.)
Heck, set up a 'podcast' exchange with a Japanese english school. (Podcasts are recordings meant to be downloaded for later listening in the iPod.) Have the Japanese students do three minutes of dialog in Japanese, and in exchange the Yanks do three minutes in American.
OR, distribute lessons in podcast format, and charge people for distance-learning! (OR, distribute them for free and charge for the testing!)
Good Luck!
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
With the right technology and connections learners of minority languages can help each other learn and maintain their skills when no one else is available.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
http://kanjialive.lib.uchicago.edu/
Use the computers to store speach by native speakers from various places. There is a trememdous variation in English accents and dialects across the world. One avenue could be audible books. Another could be a database of particular words spoken in a sentence by various speakers.
I think the ability to archive, search, and playback are the computer's best qualities for language instruction.
You might want to think about getting a few really good webcams, or possibly even one cheap video camera for each classroom. Tie each to a cheap system with a low-end capture card. Then, make each class available for download so students could review the daily lessons.
You could control bandwidth by limiting downloads for only one week after the class, then offering older classes burned to disc. Current codecs can allow a pretty long file with good video quality to fit onto a CD.
Just an idea. This might help people with shorter-than-normal attention spans. You just have to make sure it doesn't get abused by class-skippers or the unenrolled.
move 'zig'
for great justice.
Unfortunately, Japanese is about the slowest language to adopt computer based education. It is an "infrequently taught language" and thus, there's not a lot of budget behind development. Also, Japanese are notorious technophobes. Yeah, it makes no sense, but it's true in some areas, especially areas with long tradition like education, so computer J Lang training is extremely poorly developed. Believe me, I know from experience. Computer tools work better at higher levels, when students already have a fairly good level of language self-sufficiency, and just need more access to native language materials, like online texts, or streaming web newscasts, etc.
Let me just put the kibosh on one bad idea. Skip the web training via webcams. Most web conference software uses significant compression, reducing frequency response in the audio. Unfortunately, this makes it extremely difficult to discern the difference between high freq consonant sounds like chi/ji. So if you use low quality web conferencing, you'll be doing your students no favor, giving them a poor audio sample to emulate.
The most successful Japanese teaching programs focus on live interaction with native speakers. If you're spending big money on technology, you're wasting money you should have spent on native speakers as teachers. Language is a tool for communication between humans, not computers.
Take a look at PADict - open-source Palm OS Japanese dictionary with built-in Japanese fonts and handwriting recognizer.
(shameless plug) My company, Pleco Software makes a similar product for Chinese, and we've found that for a lot of people ready access to a character dictionary can greatly assist with their studies and their later word recall.
Agreed. Ever heard of http://forum.japantoday.com? Highly recommended.
Well, it seems you are getting lots of answers from people who think it's funny to laugh at you/your idea. It's usually a good idea to ignore them, but I'd sure like the [+1 moron] option some times. These are the same people posting in support of cheats in MMORPG a few hours ago. ;)
I actually speak a bit of Japanese ( Hajimemashite! ) and I work in the distance learning center of a community college in the SF bay area. I've got some ideas that might ACTUALLY be helpful for you.
Online Courses:
WebCT has pretty good support for foreign language, and we have some courses for both Chinese and Vietnamese. I know of at least one college using WebCT for beginning Japanese with fairly high success rates (in terms of retention at census and articulation). I've heard that MOODLE works alright, but if you want an open source solution, wait a few months and look for Sakai. It's a joint venture between quite a few schools that have a vested interest in online courses. At the moment, I do not have any information on whether sakai will support unicode characters, but if I *had* to guess, I would say it's likely.
Language Exchange Bonuses:
Try to get your students involoved with one of the chat groups that are Japanese/English chats. These are groups which are designed for English speakers who are learning Japanese and Japanese persons learning English. The idea is to trade off what your learning. Strictly speaking, you will not get much auditory bennifet out of this, but you WILL get the grammar and "conversation flow" practice.
Let me know if you want more suggestions, etc. I'd be happy to give more examples/ideas. HIH
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
Has anyone used Moogle?
That would be Moodle. The section on Moodle for Language Teaching has some interesting ideas and shows it is widely used for this purpose.
An essay on using Moodle has this comment:
The fact that Moodle has given some thought to email as an education tool is probably an indicator of the thought that has gone into other components.
one thing that has really helped is that the teacher has a high quality digital video camera which he uses to tape our oral assignments. Then when we listen to our conversations we pick up on our OWN flaws and consequently learn not to do that. There is no better learning that figuring what you did wrong ON YOUR OWN, because then we have to have done research of some form. One final comment, do not forget about teaching the culture. Bright students will begin to see the massive connection between the language and the culture, and learn connections and patterns that will make whatever follows easier.
Get the work environment right before buying toys.
A comfortable environment is critical to facilitate learning and working effectively, and is usually overlooked, especially in the USA for some reason. Focus on issues like lighting, furniture, decor, etc.
Many studies have proved that neon strip lighting (as still used in most offices and commercial places) is absolutely terrible for productivity/concentration and should be replaced at all costs. Natural light is best but incandescent bulb lighting should be used otherwise.
Furniture and workspace should be comfortable and informal. Think out of the box. Use padded chairs, have a sofa area etc. rather than a conventional classroom with stackable plastic chairs.
Decor: non-distracting, pleasing pastel colours only. Also place plenty of real plants around.
Oh, and the PC's at the school should be filled with open source software! I'm talking Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox & Thunderbird etc. etc.
labs.
At the risk of being redundenter again:
http://www.moodle.com/
and now back to the fallout shelter...
Haskell!
I went to a Japanese immersion high school, and we used our technology resources for two major things: multimedia production, and access to reference materials such as encyclopedias, Japanese/English dictionaries, etc.
Skills like desktop publishing, A/V creation and editing, and programming were not taught in seperate classes or even as subjects in their own right. Instead, students worked on quarterly projects that included research, design, and presentation of their finished product. That meant that we had to learn how to use the tools and techniques required for each project in context, not in the abstract.
That required that the basic equipment and software (Macs and PCs, audio and video recording gear, media editing software, word processors, programming tools) were left openly available to students, both during regular classes and outside of school. We had deadlines for the projects, and the help of teachers in finding basic reference materials, but it was up to us to figure out which tools we needed, and then to share or develop the knowledge needed to utilize them.
Second, and probably even more significantly, the teaching staff recognized their limited technical expertise, and actively encouraged students to train each other and learn from each others' experience. By integrating research, writing, media, and public performance into the projects, it was also possible to involve every student in the group's work -- techies like me could do media and Internet research, artistic kids could handle original art, costumes, etc., and the socially-gifted ones could be the public voice as actors or speakers.
In short, the smaller and more limited your resources, the more I think you gain by basically letting the kids just experiment with what's available. It requires trust to let a 14 year-old take a school-owned DV camera home for the weekend, or work in a computer lab for hours after school with only minimal supervision, but the results will astound you.
If you want a shopping list, get as much as possible of the following:
* PCs or Macs stuffed with media production tools (Linux boxes might be a good choice if your software budget is small)
* Solid video editing (think FCP Express, not iMovie) and audio editing and sequencing software
* Several decent video cameras, tripods, microphones, etc. (pref. with cases that put everything into a package a kid can take home)
* Projectors or large monitors with laptops, desktops on carts, or at least DVD players, for presentations
* Up-to-date CD-ROM or web-based encyclopedias and language dictionaries -- pay for these if you need to, as bad research info will mean bad conclusions
* CD burners for student projects, backups, and portfolios (the latter being very, very cool and motivating)
* High-level programming tools for media (Flash, SuperCard, iShell) and simulation (Stella, Swarm)
* Photoshop/Gimp, Illustrator/Inkscape, Frontpage/Bluefish, etc., etc.
In short, give the kids access to pro-grade (or at least searious amateur-level) tools, and they may well just produce some scarily professional work.
Seriously, make them use .jp sites. Want to check your mail? mail.yahoo.com wont work, but mail.yahoo.co.jp will. The most important part of learning a new language is USING the language. Maybe even give them some age-appropriate japenese language games. The computers aren't going to teach them the language, thats the instructor's job, but maybe you can get them to use the language and give them some motivation to learn.
If you can link extisting interests with japanese language, then kids are more likely to enjoy studying and will do it more often. How about taping japanese satelite TV (shows the kids would be interested to learn what people are saying) and have them study that with transcripts?
Buy DVDs, lots of cartoon DVDs and lend them out to the students.
DVDs because the multiple languages and subtitles are a great way to learn a new language. Cartoons because animation has simpler phrases.
Having just spent the past year studying Japanese at an intensive immersive program at Cornell University (FALCON), I might be able to provide some insight. First and foremost, your technology should support your teaching/training methodology. Develop your methodology first, then build your technology around it. Otherwise you may wind up spending your budget in ways that do not clearly contribute to your learning process.
For example, the methodology at Cornell is to build both understanding and automaticity with the language. Understanding is achieved using detailed textbooks (Eleanor Harz Jordan, which some students complain about for being too dry, but which I believe explain the details of the language more completely than any other series), and daily lectures that further explain aspects of the grammar that students may not have completely understood from reading. The technological contribution here is minimal.
Automaticity - the ability to speak Japanese correctly without thinking about it - is achieved by having students memorize lots of conversations and grammatical patterns during homework and study lab. Then, during 3 drill periods per day led by native Japanese speakers, students are challenged to use these conversations and grammatical patterns in new ways. Once students reach the point where they can instantly recall and apply various grammatical patterns to new conversational situations without much thought, then they have achieved automaticity with the language.
Technology is used to support achieving automaticity in several ways. Much of it is audio-based, and some of the audio is on language tapes, other is in quicktime audio on a website (http://lrc.cornell.edu), and other is audio/video in quicktime vids on the website. The most important aspect of the audio is that it is all spoken by native Japanese speakers, and in Cornell's case, by Tokyo-ites. If you do something similar, keep in mind that the goal should be to create an efficient method of accessing whatever audio your class uses.
For a little more detail, audio is used in several ways. First, on the course website are quicktime videos of native Japanese people in various everyday situations. Students watch the video and are required to 1) understand the situation and the cultural aspects of it, and 2) to memorize all sides of the converstation, and 3) to re-enact the conversation during drill class with the native Japanese teacher. The teacher will change things around and challenge the students to step out of the memorized comfort-zone and use the patterns, vocab, and newly acquired knowledge of Japanese culture to respond correctly to different situations.
A second use is something called "Eavesdroppings", in which students listen to quicktime audio files of conversations between native Japanese speakers, and must translate what was said. It tests listening and understanding ability.
Third, the Eleanor Harz Jordan books come with a CD-ROM companion program that's very good, although a bit dated (must run in Win95 compatibility mode on Win2k and WinXP). It contains all the Quicktime video and audio, along with breakdowns and eplanations of new vocab and grammar as it occurs. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/030 0075634/qid=1103321825/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xg l14/002-1361347-6472006?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)
Also, one thing that helped me was that I was able to convert all the Quicktime audio and video to MP3 files using Quicktime Pro and Audacity (http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/), and put them on my iPod, which let me carry around and listen to my Japanese wherever I was, or even when driving my car four hour
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
We installed a digital language lab two years ago to teach children in our high school their traditional (Canadian First Nations) language. We have 10 workstations running a software package called Genesis, which basically allows the teacher to distribute A/V content to the students. Features include: -Teacher can monitor each workstation both visually and audibly (hear what the student is saying). -Teacher can stream A/V content to any/all stations. Content can be live (from a camera) or prerecorded (CD, DVD, VCR, audio tape, etc.). -Teacher can remotely control the student's station. Applications can be activated/stopped/blocked. -Teacher can broadcast their desktop to any/all students for demonstration. -Teacher can broadcast a student's desktop to any/all students. Lesson plans can be made in advance and delivered to individuals or groups of students. -Teacher can monitor in real-time the students' progress on audio or written exams. -Teacher can perform real-time oral or written exams. There are many other features, but we don't use a lot of them. We just wanted to simulate our old cassette tape language lab with modern computers. This software is pricey, but you can get a demo that lets you have four workstations plus the teacher machine, and it's fully functional for as long as you want. We purchased it from a company in Utah called Linguatronics , and they provided excellent service and support. If you contact them, they will give you a demo to try it out. You do need to have pretty decent machines for this to work. I'd recommend at least a P4-class at 1.5Ghz or better, with a shwack of RAM. We discovered that a dedicated LAN is an absolute, and you need a top-drawer switch. Note: Since we installed this, they have changed their name to Genieve Software, and the product is called XClass Pro. . Good luck. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about our system.
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
"Talking Panda iLingo sets a new standard for language translation software. Designed for the iPod, it's stocked with over four hundred essential words and phrases of the language you want to speak, organized for instant access. Download and install the program right now and begin your adventure abroad. Virtual fluency available in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese."
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
Learning German at Princeton, one of the most beneficial things we did was reading German newspapers on the web, forcing us to translate them. If this is a native-speaking Japanese school, reading a sophisticated newspaper may be one of the best vocabulary and grammar builders around. I know the NYTimes is great for me. Or make them surf the web utilizing their Japanese skills, to do research projects or to price items.
As several people have already said, don't rely on the computers for the basic language instruction. What is far more important are good textbooks and good instructors. That said, there are two things for which computers are useful.
First, once the students have a sufficient grounding, computers can be used to provide them with opportunities to use Japanese outside the classroom. These range from reading Japanese websites through IM and email with Japanese speakers to videoconferencing, though this last seems kind of artificial to me - I'm not sure how well it will work.
Second, computers are terrific for learning to read and write. Kanji drill programs are really helpful for both beginners and advanced students who need a refresher. Looking things up in computer dictionaries is much faster than using paper dictionaries, especially when looking up kanji. There are tools that let you enter a chunk of text and look up the characters for you, such as this Japanese reading tool.
As a linguist who has studied a lot of languages and has had experience teaching languages, I'm not impressed by flashy technology. Much of it is just a distraction - there's no substitute for learning vocabulary, learning the grammar, and practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing. But as someone who learned Japanese before the personal computer, I know that tools like the ones I have mentioned would have saved me a great deal of time and frustration.
... I'd suggest you check out the open source rich media framework Xical for your e-learning needs. It's front line when it comes to dynamic rich-media e-learning applications (it's completely Flash based and GPLd) and is all you need on top of a self-made LMS. I recommend Zope/Plone/CMF for your own LMS. If your interessted in an open source based LMS you might want to ask the xical team (the mailaddress is on the .org website) - which I'm a part of - and we can get in contact. I work with various partners and each has their own LMS variant, yet all have in common that they are dirt cheap and front line. Naturaly as it's all open source people and OSS technology involved.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Seriously. If you want to get a lot of students you can do this by establishing a student-lifestyle. Then the kids will tell other kids about it. Because language is all about social interactions, get the experts: young female students. Your students will most probably tell you, when they want a new electronic gizmo, and if they ask they become involved and identify with your school.
People will folow people, not technology.
No, not CF, SD, etc. Hand-size pieces of cardboard with pictures and translations. They absolutely work, adults too. Or, some sort of whiz-bang flash card program, of course.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
a stunningly poorly designed homepage
I suggest you fix that for starters. The web can be an absolutely huge customer draw if you let it. The idea here is to become a (minor) authority on your subject in order to attract interest. If people Google for information on the Japanese language and culture, and your site provides it in detail and in a pleasing-to-the-eye manner, a percentage will translate into customers. Its a chance to demonstrate your style of teaching and gets word of mouth if done properly. This kind of marketing is a lot more effective than promotions or banner ads.
I'm reasonably certain I remember Penny Arcade mentioning a game that taught you Japanese as you went along. Look into that.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
I mean nothing helps better in learning a language than watching foreign films. Starting with subtitles turned in english (assuming thats the native language) then moving onto playing films with japanese subtitles and then eventually only in japanese. Films are fun-- people love movies, and the provide cultural information directly (by showing actual locations costumes and ceremonies) and indirectly by revealing the film maker's biases and cultural themes (for example in their portrayal of women or sexuality or violence). After all a language is only as good in as far as someone knows how to use. Oh and you need good sound for the students to hear the language properly. And may I recommend Akira Kurosawa's films? Seven Samurai?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I learn(ed) Japanese on my own and have a few tips for you guys to make it more fun as learning Japanese or Mandarin for that matter is not horribly complex, but it is alot of information that a student gets to digest.
And the quickest way to learn things is if they are fun, so here's my 2 eurocents on this.
1) I use(d) this software to learn my Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji and it is to my experience by far the best software i have seen to date to learn it.
Click this link here:http://www.declan-software.com/japanese/
It consists of Readwrite Hiragana, Readwrite Katakana, ReadWrite Kanji, a Japanese Dictionary and a software set of flashcards.
About the Readwrite applications i'm simply thrilled...though as a dictionary i prefer a book and the flashcard application is also quite fun to learn with.
So i would definatly recommend you the 3 Readwrite applications and maybe the flashcards one...i'm sure the students will love that.
2) To make things more fun for myself...i like to read Japanese comics, for the younger people this is maybe a bit more attractive then lets say Japanese poetry, although Japanese comics and poetry interest me both, i could understand that when you'd have a few younger students they'd appreciate the Japanese comics.
So maybe you might want to have some Japanese comics lying around and for others maybe some Japanese poetry books.
To have some Japanese newspapers and Magazines(of different topics for different people) lying around could also be quite useful.
3) Movies...i'm a fan of Japanese movies and manga animation, there's almost nothing as fun as learning Japanese this way, so suppose for example when the students have learned some new stuff, when watching a film they could recognize the newly learned words and grammar(be sure to pick the films strategically coherent to the skill-level of the class) even if they don't fully understand the entire movie right away.
Sometimes i watched a Japanese movie and had no clue as to what they were saying, but some sentences got stuck in my mind and lateron when i learned more about the Japanese language i was able to translate the sentences that i remembered...giving a moment of "AHA!, so that was what they were talking about"...this is truly a joyous moment when you figure out stuff like this on your own.
So maybe a simple tv and dvd-player to sometimes watch a Japanese movie could come in handy...maybe when watching with the class the teacher could now and then pause and explain the what, how and why of what was said.
This keeps students interested because they are following the story of a movie(perhaps with sub-titles for the lesser skilled) and while enjoying themselves they get explaination from the teacher every so now and then.
4) Access to chats and forums where real Japanese people hang out, maybe forums that concern some more of the serious matters, because when you would show a forum or chat where Japanese teenagers hang out....the language might be more lets say "non-traditional".
This way they have the possibility to really interact with Japanese people and get accustomed to the way they discuss matters.
5) If it's not too stressful on the budget, maybe you could have some real flashcards to hand out to students so that they have something to practice with when they go home or sit in the bus or anything.
6) Be sure to have some good Japanese dictionaries lying around, because there are so many of these and they all vary in ease of use, completeness etc etc.
I atleast haven't found 1 single Japanese dictionary that covered it all combined with an orderly layout and ease of use.
So maybe to have some dictionaries lying around that are "of different styles" would be handy, because as far as i know, everyone has it's favorite.(Some for example prefer different lookup-systems other than looking up characters by number of strokes)
I introduced Moodle to the school I work at about a year ago, and after a year of trying to make headway, finally I was able to get people to buy into it for this school year. It's been up all semester.
Moodle is GREAT. There's no other way about it. It's easy to use, very featureful, easy to admin, simple to setup and get moving, and still powerful. It blows away anything else we've ever done before -- personal webspace, other course management systems, etc. We did a survey about how many faculty used the web for posting assignments, etc. through our old and exceptionally awful course management system, and the numbers were not good -- about 20% used it at all, and about 5% of the faculty used it often.
Things are very different now. Around 65% of the faculty use Moodle in some capacity, and about 40% of the faculty use it often. They use all sorts of features -- assignments, lessons, resources, discussion boards, etc. It meshes so well with what so many people want to do, and it's so easy to use that there's not much reason for them not to use it in some capacity. And it's flexible enough to be used in whatever way the teacher wants. I think that by next year, about 80% of the faculty will be using Moodle, as those who don't use it now typically want to, they just have been lazy about it.
Moodle is the best thing we've done this year where I work. It's improved communication with faculty and students greatly, and it's helped to keep students more interested in classes. We run Novell, and the LDAP functionality ties in perfectly. Plus with all the great modules, moodle is very extensible. If you don't see an existing module to fulfill a need, you can write it yourself. Moodle can do almost anything you want it to do, and it does pretty much all of it very well.
If you have any questions about Moodle, drop me an email (sigemund AT gmail . com).
It's true that any amount of technology can't substitute for a good teacher who understand the motivation level of students. Still, here are some ideas.
Computers allow the kind of interactive immersion that one teacher can't provide for many students. Making a creative virtual environment with sounds and images that provides feedback on correct learning would help let students explore lessons for themselves at a pace they help choose.
The best test for learning anything is if a student is able to explain it in turn to someone else- having students create Flash animations with recorded dialogue that illustrate what they've learned is a good activity even for technophobes if they are given a basic checklist with the option of doing more.
Part of language is grammar and vocabulary, which is easy to test on a computer; but the majority is face-to-face usage and exposure to native usage, and those would require creative assignments, like "use a webcam to ask a native speaker what they're weekend plans are" which is pretty advanced.
I took japanese at university and the only access we had to computers was in the library, not during class.
The school offered no e-learning but our coursebook had a homepage. So technically if you accessed the homepage at the library the university was offering e-learning.
Not having specific e-teaching is fine since teaching languages doesn't really need/benefit from using computers. Especially japanese: all reports and essays have to be written by hand anyway, doing japanese auto-input on a keyboard doesn't exactly help the students kanji writing skills.
That's not saying that you should't have computers. They are very good for self-study. What you can do / what I did at home was:
Put various websites through rikai like slashdot.jp or asahi shinbun.
Lookup kanji/words with gjiten for linux or jquicktrans (radical lookup is great) for windows. This is almost like a denshi-jisyo.
Flashcard programs: kgold etc.
Of course it's important to have a correctly set-up keyboard and all fonts installed. Windows handles this just fine. I had no problems with linux, but it could be my great dist. The macs at school were a catastrophe (you had to cut/paste kanji from a table containing all kanji).
Jim Breen has an extensive page about japanese with a lot about software. You can google for his name.
Remember to have a goal for each teaching session and to properly teach the students how to use all software you're going to use in class. I.e. don't just plunk students in front of a computer, tell them to open a program and hope they'll take it from there. They will also need a task/exercise to do if they are going to use the computer. Otherwise everyone will just sit there, doing nothing, waiting for class to end. This is a common problem with schools who hope computers will magically teach the students as long as the students sit for a while in front of the computers.
I've not tried to use kanji on an x86, regardless of OS. My Japanese professor in college used Macs exclusively for the lanugage support.
...if you have to ask Slashdot folks what you should use to teach, then you're basically asking us what you should be teaching.
If you have a business plan and a clear understanding of your own instructional approach, instructional technology should fall into place. You should start with the basics and check back when you're ready.
The purpose should not serve technology.
I'm guessing your wife is Japanese and knows how to teach Japanese sufficiently. So that part assumed, ask HER how she wants to run the courses. And if you're all geared up to computerizing it as much as possible, then I dare say that you're running the risk of walking on new ground.
You're asking Slashdot, so you know the answer 9 times out of 10 is "Linux" and/or "Open Source." I offer thoughts along those lines. Speaking as a student of Japanese, I know that learning all the basic aspects of the language is helpful as one aspect adds strength to another. For example, learning kana most certainly aids in speaking and hearing.
Writing practice is an irreplaceable tool. Wanna save paper? Get a pen-tablet thingy for them to practice with. Until the recognition software is available (is it?) your wife or someone else will have to grade from the screen or from the printer.
Listening exercises are critical in my opinion. Japanese people are famous for speaking way too fast. Headsets and exercises that are driven from a server that contains gobs and gobs of sample conversation followed by some simple testing is also a relatively easy thing to conceptualize. It could easily be done using a web server and browser.
But most importantly, Establish the system using conventional means and determine for yourselves if the computers can enhance things in any way that's worth-while.
(Learning to use an IME is a computer-only thing but then again, if after learning kana, they can't figure out an IME? Sheesh... )
It would be nice if those computers you have there have access to the internet. There are tons of free resources to supplement language learning.
Here are what internet can provide:
-
Online dictionaries
-
Tutorials online
-
Online news sites
Also you may want to set up the computers so that the students can watch some movies and stuff (especially the addictive Japanese cartoons). This is indeed a great way to have fun and improve listening skills at the same time.I recommend the following English Japanese dictionaries:
Jeffry's Japanese English Dictionary
SPACE ALC
Yahoo! Jishou (Yahoo! Dictionary)
I recommend the following website:
Nihongo Resources
Since these students are learning Japanese, chances are they don't know enough Chinese characters (2000+ of them) (and grammar) to read your average Japanese newspaper. I suggest news sites written for children:
Kodomo Asahi (Children's Asahi)
In all seriousness, look at getting a few japanese PS2 and Gamecubes, with story driven games like zelda or final fantisy.
This way It will force the students to learn to read japanese while enjoying playing the game. It will be a good experience for you and for the students.
It will be fun and beneficial. Just make sure they cant just skip the japanese, So no soul Calibur 2.
I'm assuming this is a physical school.
:)
Have a library of anime.
Seriously. I learned more Japanese listening to the anime I like in the original language than trying to learn it from a book. Plus it's fun. Motivation. Non-tedious. And you get the correct pronunciations for stuff. Plus how people really speak versus the business type speech in most language books. Plus the culture in some of shows.
In order to retain a language it must be used and excercised. Have newspapers/recorded news shows (my father learned English in three months from these when he migrated over to Canada from Germany), other shows, Movies, CHILDREN'S BOOKS and toys, or whatever else is ENGAGING.
You're not just teaching a language but a culture. It's a very interesting culture.
STAY AWAY from the computers unless it's to surf the Japanese portion of the Internet. Most everything else connected to the computer will be a gadgety and a waste of money.
While I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "language school", I'm going to guess it means either a computer language school (ie, a technical school), or a spoken language school (ie, teach english to japanese children, or vice versa). Either way, it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference in what I'm going to say...
I thought most technically savy people were aware of the shitty nature of all the schools which claim to be "high tech" schools, such as DeVry, ITT Tech, etc.? Maybe you aren't. Let me inform you.
Adding all these "complications" such as high-tech instruction simply detract from the overall education experience. Computer labs are fine, a network is fine, and various other IT infrastructure is fine, but don't let yourself get distracted. If you focus on making the campus (and off-campus access) as high-tech as possible, try to integrate as much cool technology into the courses as possible, and make certain tools prevailant (such as web-cam learning) you will degrade from the quality of the base skills which the students will acquire - simply because these 'tools' will consume time that would be better put towards the more base conceptual skills you're trying to teach.
I've seen this first-hand in many places, and not only in tech schools. Public primary schools in the US (I don't know where you're based, as you don't explicitly mention it) spend copious amounts of money on labs full of computers which never get used. Teachers are required to try and find a use for the labs, and end up bringing their classes to the labs with no goal (resulting in solitaire expert 7th graders). The same occurs in colleges - all the "high tech" goes mostly unused, and when it is used, it's for chat, porn, and various other things that are fairly contrary to the education process.
Not only that, but high-tech stuff adds to the cost of the education, putting a fairly high barrier in place for those who might want to attend. I'm currently in the situation where I'm seriously considering a transfer to another school, as we now have a $400 quarterly (as we're on a quarter system here, not semester) technology fee for all the "high tech" things the school has recently added: a mandatory school-provided laptop for every student, cisco 802.11g APs, Radius (which is used to restrict people from using their own hardware on the network), Altiris (monitoring software for the laptops, as they're still owned by the school), Blackboard corporate edition (courseware, which costs nearly 1M$ for licensing), and a slew of new MS software which is on every laptop but not used. In addition to that, they've got labs full of brand new Dells with the latest geforce fx cards which never get used for classes (due to the laptops) and can't be used for other things such as games (as the students only get a User account on them and fairly strict useage guidelines). Meanwhile, the actual education suffers because they've forced web integration into damned near every course, (resulting in half-assed applications of the technology) and the newly hired professors make less and are of lower quality.
Let me make the following suggestions:
1) Above all else, make course registration simple, your advisors knowledgeable and helpful, and your course requirements logical and not needlessly repetitive (ie, don't require "CS100 Intro to Programming Logic" and "CS150 Intro to C++" both requirements for another course when the content in both CS150 and CS100 is largely the same. Better yet, don't have courses with painfully similar content - you'll only piss off your students).
2) if you are going to sink more money into technology for the school, sink it into infrastructure: Linux servers which the users can have shell accounts on, Samba servers with large amounts of user share space, and various other things which can be broadly applied as a tool for learning.
3) Make the school network accessable from the outside via VPN.
4) Spend more time and money finding the right people to teach and planning
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Oh heck, i forgot...
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Having quite a bit of experience in this area, I can say that immersion is by far the best way to learn a language. You need to get the students speaking, reading, and hearing nothing but Japanese as many hours per day as possible. Software can help with this by providing recordings of native speakers and allowing the students to interact with the recordings.
I would mimic the best language school out there as much as possible.
There are two types of people in this world: those that categorize other people and those that don't.
I spent two years studying Japanese in a University setting (The University of Texas at Austin, if it matters) and the only electronic/computer gadget that was ever worth diddly was the Canon WordTank(TM) http://store.aikotradingstore.com/cawog50.html. This is a genuinely useful study aid and you could do worse than giving one to every student. Beyond that, there's just no substitute for immersion or, failing that, plain old elbow grease.
I'm guessing you're suffering from googleitis and meant moodle instead of moogle.
If that's the case, then yeah, moodle might be a good choice. It's pretty modular, but be warned that it really wants to stick with the social constructionist philosophy. This might actually be quite good for your needs, as I'm guessing acquiring a language is an activity that can certainly benefit from this type of learning--it's just that I ended up on a project that was trying to adapt it to the California DMV requirements and it got pretty hairy.
It works with a bunch of DBs, it's PHP so everybody and their uncle can mess around and customize it, its got nice UIs for students and teachers, and you can even force your advanced students to use it in Nihonji (using the Japanese language pack).
Give it a spin, it's GPLed and everything :)
The most important thing you will need is a good teaching staff. Don't worry about expensive equipment as much as basic educational supplies.
Good textbooks and workbooks, lots of materials for activities, flip-chart paper, markers, dictionaries, a photocopier, and a well-lit room.
Also try to get some materials from Japan that can be used in activities and/or demonstrate how the language is used in everyday life -- things like restaurant menus, magazines (advertisements are great for language activities), brochures, maps, etc.
Don't skimp on physical books and artifacts thinking you can get the same thing online. The books and bits of paper are FAR more helpful in teaching language than any web site is, especially in the hands of a good teacher.
ENGRADE.COM will allow you to post your students grades online in real-time. I'm sure they would like that.
One of the local universities has an interesting system setup. The professors wear a wireless microphone that is connected to a computer running speech recognition software. Whatever they say is transcribed and projected onto a screen behind them, and the transcript (along with audio) are put up on the course web site. Might be overkill, but could be useful (especially having the audio version available).
Forgive me for not having read the majority of the responses thus far, but I have exams I'm studying for.
I take engineering at the University of Alberta and decided to take introductory Japanese as my fourth year complimentary studies elective course. All I can say is that I -highly- recommend against using computers as an aid to learning a foreign language. There is simply no substitute for verbal and written practice.
Our university made extensive use of "web Course Tools" (webCT), including weekly marked assignments, and requiring us to upload pieces of dictation. These assignments were the most frustrating aspect of the course, especially given the sensitivity of trying to type in japanese text from an english keyboard. The number of times I typed 'wa' rather than 'ha' for a subject marker, or 'o' instead of 'wo' for a direct object marker would stagger you. 'nn' was also a sticking point.
Do yourself a favour, get a good textbook. We used the Nakama series here, and I recommend it highly; it comes complete with an audio cd set, so you can listen to what you've been learning, spoken by native Japanese.
Oh, and I hope your teachers are more forgiving when it comes to spelling for handwritten assignments, as well. Especially before they start teaching kanji.
On an unrelated note, Moodle is a quite nice bit of lesson management software; we've started testing it in our school, and it seems fine so far :)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
integrate this web-site into your program somehow: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html I'm not attached to it formally in anyway. But, using the Breen site above, I basically taught myself to read advanced Japanese in a year. It even has open sourced ideals built in, people can submit new words and correct entries.
While a language degree alone may not ensure success, it can augment your overall profile. Companies rarely hire a person for a single trait or skill -- and you'd probably be bored in a position that only drew on one trait/skill. Instead, try to identify your strongest transferable skills, then map them to the needs of potential employers. In doing so, your language skills will become part of your total offering for the employer. In fact, this is relevant no matter what your major. (I did my undergrad in English, so I had to make this my strategy, since some people think Arts grads are useless.)
-- SYS 64738 --
Books and paper. People have been using them (or their equivalent) for thousands of years to learn new languages.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
We just finished up our first quarter offering an Online Japanese Language Course at the University of Washington.
The prevalence of broadband has allowed us to use technologies such as video conferencing in our applications which I think really makes a difference for language learning (especially the oral communications focus the offered class has).
Take a look here to see the technologies we are using: http://www.tjp.washington.edu/bjo/
How I learned French in one year using the Internet, an mp3 player, and a Netflix account.
Written by a fellow geek. :)
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Gotta admit that your suggestion about getting a consultant is a valid option, but I think posting the question on ./ is a good start, at least he might be able to get some of the basic ideas on the table, so quizing the prospective consultant would be a little easier.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
We at the Department of Communication, University of Aalborg, Denmark use Moodle as the primary communications channel for one of our study programs in multimedia. It works extremely well for us -- our students and lecturers love the simplicity of the interface, while also relishing its power. Teachers speak well of Moodle's didactically enabling features, and the ease with which they can structure the time-flow of their teaching using Moodle.
I am the administrator/help desk guy for our Moodle site, and I must say, it is easy as pie. I very rarely hear from anyone, and when I do, it's usually fixed in 15 minutes or less. I've been running our site for almost a year and a half now, and I've only spent something like 20 man-hours on it, all told. That includes spending time upgrading Moodle, fixing bugs in Moodle, AND supporting users. Moodle has a very active and very helpful user community at the Moodle site, which provides lots of help both to newbies and to seasoned Moodle veterans.
I've recommended Moodle for another Danish educational institution, and they've also been running it for a year and a half now, with very good results. The praise lavished on Moodle from their users -- teachers and students -- falls along the same lines as what I said above.
I can highly recommend Moodle as a Course Management System.
Ulrik Petersen
Database engine for analyzed or annotated text
Take a look at uni-deutsch.de. Then, make damn sure you don't do it the way they did, which is to say: do not use quicktime libraries in your java applets, because the result will crash nearly everything.
:-P
Outside this small technical flaw, though, you'd probably find some inspiration in the course content, which is for advanced learners of German as a foreign language. They've included a lot of multimedia elements, movies, audio streaming and so on, and a lot of (vaguely) fun puzzles of the 'join the weird expression to the obsecure verb it sounds best with' variety.
And do a bloody Japanese distance learning course for a reasonable price. No bugger on Earth offers one (except for Leeds or Sheffield or somewhere, who charge 1,000 pounds for it, which is a bit too much to pay for modest squiggle success). And when you've set it up - and it doesn't have to be technically complicated, a set of reading comprehension and modest writing practice exercises in unicode would be an excellent start - let me know...
Habing taken 4 years of Japanese and looking at a lot of online and computer based training tools, I have a gew observations. Are you planning on simply conversational Japanese or teaching the students to read (and possibly write) the language. The biggest problem for many latin based languages (English, SPanish, etc.) students in learning an Asian language it the new symbol set. This is where I found the computer based tools to be the most useful. Drilling the symbol sets for Hiragana, KataKana, and Kanji was something that I found was very helpful. As for the rest of it, a good well written set of textbooks, a knowledgable instructor, and lots of time to practice conversationally seemed to work best for me, and my class. The textbooks I used were BTW, Japanese for Busy People by The Association for Japanese Language Teaching (AJALT), along with audio & video tapes for support.
I would have to go with the other poster on this one and say that he is probably not some technically impoverished harvard mba coming to slashdot for a business plan.
And if he is, I don't think you'll have to worry about him getting insanely rich anytime soon.
to move to Japan for a year or so...
Also, some can't get the work permit needed
to allow them to work as tutors, eg, due to
their age (only younger tutors get them).
So, Skype is a great way to let small
groups (or even one-on-one) tutoring
sessions go forward, with student(s) &
tutor in different lands.
Saves travel $$$'s - both for the big
airfare trips at the start & end of
the contract -and- each working day.
This might be a way for people with great
first-language speakers of English, who
happen to have a disability (eg, blind),
to get into the work force without a lot
of hoo-haw getting to Japan (or elsewhere).
Here's a place where technology finally
brings us benefits in the realm of tele-
commuting.
'bout time...
signs in every classroom
"all your base are belong to us"
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Such is life.
I think I walk the middle of the road when it comes to this subject. You need the technology available as a resource, which everyone who has commented positively has stated how they were successful with it. On the other side, it can hinder things and you could quickly waste your money. Make the technology an extra. Not a requirement. Don't demand using course software, just make the media files and testing etc available for those savvy enough to access it on your server.
Invest in a japanese DVD collection, let it grow over time. DVD will give you the subtitle on / off option. Having 50- 100 Japanese DVD's to choose from in various genre's is a great resource.
Here's something you should try. I know it would work awesome. Get a ton of markers and sticky labels. Label everything in the school with it's Japanes name, hiragana, katakana, kanji. Label a door, pencil, drinking fountain, ceiling, blackboard. you get the idea. Label EVERYTHING! New students will be exposed to it, and can associate the object with the words. a few months in, they will have it memorized. That's how those CD roms work, they show you objects and you pick from labels. Do it in real life.
You gotta get Japanese TV. And Guess what? NHK, is Free. If you know what PBS is in America, it's the Japanese Equivalent. but it's way better. NHK can be recieved if you know how to get it.
Buy one of these, and beam it into the school.
http://www.gavilan.net/nhk.htm
300 bucks, no monthly fees, all the worlds free TV, legal.
You'll be recording shows, make them available in your library. Access to NHK is huge for students. And you'll save not having the cable bills.
Start emailing some Japanese teachers at all universities you can think of, find the teachers emails on the schools' websitesite. Email the teacher about what book(s) they use for efficient language learning, Find the best ones. The best schools use the best books right?
If you need a boatload of online resources, you can check out my bookmarks. I've been collecting the gems for a while now.
http://smick.net/bookmarks/xbel.xml
click on Japan and JAS links.
Moodle is pretty awesome, I couldn't install it on my server, config problem, but it is really easy once installed. Create courses, create teachers, create tests. Best I've seen. Blackboard should be concerned. Moodle's better and Open source!
email me at michaelbuddy 'A T' gmail.com if you want more suggestions, I'd love to know how things work out for you, and help if I can. I've got my own online japanese project I'm working on now.
By the way, Do you know who Jim Breen is? Trust me, you will.
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
It's Better Manually with Better Organized Optical Knowledge.
Sorry but I agree with the other poster, it's a sunk cost.
Unless you have in the upper tens of thousands of $$$ to spend on a full blown language lab, you'd be better off getting some decent books and recordings. Or more to the point, a well-trained teacher.
My son's school has attempted a 'computer technology based education' and frankly it's a complete failure, & I'm hacked off with myself for being sucked in.
Anime would be a great idea, since a lot of students of different age like anime... make them watch it and learn. It has a lot of useful frazes and it`s still fun
I think you should use the computers to enable the students to watch anime with or without subtitles, as well as movies. Also, more important than that, is having the students watch real dialogues that you have recorded. I mean, real situations where people are using Japanese in a store or at the post office or someplace. You have to get the feel for the language and how it's used, which happens more easily if you can see it in action in a native environment.
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
I work for a large, multinational organisation which teaches English in every country of the world. My last posting invovled establishing a showpiece teaching centre in an Asian capital city with a fairly large budget to spend on ICT. This is how we spent the cash
1) Interactive whiteboards in every classroom with good internet connectivity - we ripped out the old whiteboards to give the teachers no option but to use the new technology. IWBs are fantastic language teaching tools, allowing teachers to get away from their keyboard and mouse and work from where they are most comfortable, near the board. The wealth of authentic, real examples of language available via the Internet is endless: video, audio, flash-based animation, text, chat bots and simulated environments all act as valuable and authentic input into a lesson. This variety of input caters to different learning styles and unlike the low quality, pavlovian CD ROMs with their dull grammar exercises and inauthentic language, present real contexts for language work. Teachers kicked up a storm about the change at first but very quickly warmed to the creative possibilities invovled and made good use of other functionality - saving and reviewing board work, integrating sound and video seamlessly in their classes (without the usual TV, OHP, video recorder set up). Fabulous teaching tool
2) We ditched the awful language lab in favour of sets of wireless laptop computers which could be wheeled from classroom to classroom, to allow for language work in pairs and groups. The work being done on screen which acted as a stimulus for oral communication and written practice in pairs and groups, could be pulled onto the IWBs and corrected on the spot. Fabulous.
3) Moodle is very popular but the design of these sites leaves me cold. They look and feel like 'school' rather than feeling as is the participant is engaged in a real, communicative project. Students rarely manage to master all the features and simple act as forum fodder - that is to say, they are participants in a site, rather than the creators of it. This is very de-motivating. Personally think a well designed blog/community website, along the lines of Slashdot is a far better tool, which hands power over to the users (students)and leaves communication in their hands. A considerable body of research is emerging to support this feeling. The blog site was exceptionally 'sticky' especially when teachers uploaded board work from the lessons and used it for review at home and when students themselves cretaed stories and mini-projects online.
d) don't invest in CD ROMs - I've rarely seen a goodone (except for dictionaries) and everything you need is already online.
e) Provide a cafe style area for students to use those old PCs in - relax with a cup of coffee and complete tasks done in class.
Just my thoughts.
When I was learning Japanese, I found watching Japanese TV shows a fun way to learn new vocabulary words in context, much better than listening to fusty old language lab tapes. Plus, it made me feel a little more connected to the culture.
Perhaps you can set up a video server for the school, or even just start with a DVD collection.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
An immeasurably helpful tool that we use at the Army's Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California is a combination of Smart boards and all of our books in PDF/WAV format. The smart boards are projected on using any model projector you want, allowing for cheap or high end purchases, and they basically act as a giant tablet interface hanging on your wall! The students and teachers can draw on the actual screen, interact with whatever you want, etc. Projectors have always been useful in school but its a one-way medium by itself. With these smart boards, you are allowed an entirely different environment than just straight projectors. We absolutely NEEDED high speed internet for use on language sites and native sites in the target language. A good DVD collection in the target language is a must as well. With the projectors, it becomes easy to share a foreign film with an entire class. Our classes were only 10 people each, in 3 classes per team. When we did labs, all 30 of us would gather in labs that had 30 computers with special audio equipment connected to the teachers computer, which the teacher could setup to connect any small groups of students together with the headphones, so they could carry on conversations together without the need to worry about conversations overlapping, or the teacher could take full control over all 30 computers and deliver video control as well, allowing for movies, website demonstrations, etc. If you cant afford the Smart boards, this setup is just as good, however you have to consider the desk space required for all those computers! For home use, we were all issued MP3 cd players, and 8 cds with all the sound files required for the workbooks we had. Originally we used hand held tape recorders for home language practice, and we would bring our activities in for the teacher to grade in the morning. If you want to go more high tech, obviously you could use mini digital voice recorders. I'm sure some of these ideas were mentioned in other posts but I posted all of this to say it actually works at a language school, and its the language school that the military uses to train their linguists.
I know some people here know more about this topic than myself, but I can say that there is a high success rate at this school, and they teach about as fast as possible (Arabic fluency is achieved in 63 weeks of class). But I feel that too much tech will drown the basics out.
And I agree with the poster that said class size is important. 1:12 ratio is a good goal imo. Not too many to have people left out, but big enough to have variety is speaking partners for the students.
If you are unfamiliar with IPA it stands for International Phonetic Alphabet [or Association]. Oriental phonetics are quite different from English, and having something that shows you where the tongue is placed could be a helpful start. Here's is a web-site on that IPA: http://www.uta.fi/~ccjapu/Handson2.html
Web-cams can be useful for conversation, so can using Tony Buzan "Mind Mapping" software - which can just as easily be done on paper. People learn in different styles. You might want to read a few books for ideas: Barry Farber "How to Learn Any Language", and Harry Lorayne "The Memory Book" which (combine with mind mapping) can be a cleaver learning tool.
Moodle is at http://moodle.org/