iTELL 2018: Day 2

Hi guys...

This time I am going to write my experience in joining second iTELL conference 2018 on the second day. There were presenters on the second day, similar to the first day but there were two plenary speakers on the second day and those are from UNS and British Council. 

The first plenary speaker was Ms. Drajati and she is a lecturer at UNS. She presented about TPACK in the concept and practice in the classroom. Maybe some of you are new to this term, so am I. So, TPACK stands for Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge. Her presentation is quite interesting and since this is a millennial era whereas many youths are using technologies in their life. 

As we know that the number of people who use mobile keeps increasing from time to time. It was about 0.08 percent of the population that connected to the internet in 2003, then it increased to 1.84 in 2010, 3.47 percent in 2015 and it is predicted that there will be about 6.58 percent people in the world connect to the internet. In 2016, Chai and Koh mentioned four dimensions of learning qualities and those are active learning, authentic learning, reflective learning and the last one is collaborative learning. Active learning covers manipulating, observing and articulating, while authentic learning related to real world. The two other dimensions are reflective learning that relates to self-assessment and continual improvement, while collaborative learning is about understanding.

So, what is the role of TPACK? TPACK itself helps the teacher to make the students engage and enhance to achieve the effectiveness in learning. There is a research conducted by Ms. Drajati in 2018 that group of teachers who have experiences about 1-3 years. They have more varieties in their teaching by using technologies, such as Youtube, C-Map tools, and video. While the experienced teachers use the media, such as power point. The pedagogical knowledge itself covers three parts and those are strategies to apply in the classroom, project-based learning, and think-pair-share. Collaborative learning can be in many forms, such as but not limited to group work, online discussion and share with other scholars. TPACK also helps the students to boost their knowledge in learning in practical ways (Koehler and Misra, 2009). So, let's try TPACK in our classroom :)

The next presenter was from British Council and it was presented by Mr. Novyana. He presented about cyberbullying and child protection. As we know that there are many possibilities by using digital apps, such as terrorism, hitman, porn, frauds, and drugs. It is also possible that children become victims of cyberbullying. Children can be the receiver of bullying, they can be the participants and also they can be the actor of bullying itself. 

Bullying itself can be in many forms and it is not always about touching and mocking. It can be abusing texts, posting or threatening messages, imitating, meme, and image tagging. In 2014, McAfee conducted a research and it mentioned that 17% sexters share the message that they receive to someone else, and the text itself can be sent in various ways. It is quite a dangerous right if the message is on the wrong person. So, there are some steps that can be done to avoid or limitate the cyberbullying itself, such as advice children not to answer any unrecognize message from unrecognize person, use block features from media, record the harassment message. As a parent or guardian, we should care about our kids because the research shows that 43% teens have accessed video online and we do not know what the video is about. About 36% of them have accessed sexual topics online and 32% of them ever access nude content. After hearing his presentation, I realize that there any many ways for our kids to fool us by using technology but as a guardian, we should now to show them the better one for them.

All right, moving to the next presentation is about gamers experience to learn a language and it was presented by two fresh graduate students from UII and their beloved lecturer, Ms. Hapsari. This is about their final paper. So, their research participants played DOTA games for three years. There were two gamers as their respondents. They did interview, observation, and documentation to collect the data and then they did triangulation data. 

I also participated in Ms. Fajariyah presentation and it was about teaching integrated skills of English through mobile-based digital storytelling project to Indonesian EFL students. This project was conducted in one of junior high school in Yogyakarta. In her class, it is about 66.6% of the students have smartphone although their school is on the border between Gunung Kidul and Bantul. So, she asked her students to make a presentation about how to make a food, such as timus. First, the students have to write the recipe in Indonesian and do some revisions. After that, the students translate it into English. The students, in a group, practice at home about how to make it and then they record it. They also present in front of their friends about how to make it, then their peers will give comments on their works. In doing this research, she did some ways, such as questionnaire and interview. In a questionnaire, she has eight statements to be answered by her students with neutral, agree and disagree with the answer. In doing this research which was conducted in October 2017, she found some problems such as limited time allocation, grammar knowledge, students pronunciation and the deadline. 

In the last, I participated in Ms. Finita workshop. She used some apps in her workshops, such as padlet and canva. She taught her students about how to make digital poster campaign. She started with identify the opportunity > design > prototype > feedback > presentation. In the prototype stage, students can do some freehand design on a piece of paper. Overall, it can be said that her workshop is divided into four parts, plan > experiment > discuss and > reflect. To participate in her padlet, we can access this link padlet.com/finita_dewi1/itell2.

After participating in this workshop, I think that there are many apps that can be used in teaching, either of teaching languages of teaching other subjects. Students can be more enjoyable and easier to understand the materials by using apps. The game is not always bad because students who play online games will have more vocabularies than those who do not play games, they can speak better than those who do not play games as well. But, guardians should be care as well with their children when they are online because many predators outside there who are waiting the victims.

Hope this is helpful for language teachers wherever you are.