iTELL 2018: First Day (Part 1)

Hi guys

This time, I gonna share with you one of the conferences that I participated in. This two-day, I participate in iTELL 2018 which is held in Solo, Central Java. This event is about language teachers and practitioners gather to share their research using technology in teaching languages. This conference is held March 13-14, 2018 and there are some sub-topics offered, such as blended learning and technologies, collaborative and or interactive learning with technology, creating and or managing online teaching-learning environment, cyberbullying, cyber-culture, identity and language, development in mobile teaching and learning.

There are about 42 parallel presenters at this conferences from the various institution from Indonesia, such as from Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, ITB, UNS, UAD, UII and many more. All those 42 parallel presenters are the expert in their research and I have opportunities to attend some of those presentations. 

(1)

I joined in room 4 and the first presentation was about google drive as a media to promote collaborative learning in the extensive reading course presented by Gusti Nur Harifah, an English lecturer at Universitas Muhammadiyah Surabaya. Her reasons choosing Google Drive (GD) in her class because it offers flexibility, deadline, sharing easiness, collaboration, feedback, comment, and discussion. It is flexible because students can access it wherever they are as long as they do have internet connection and smartphone with them. Deadline, teachers can set up the deadline so it can help them to control the students in submitting their works. Collaboration, students can collaborate with their friends in many aspects, such as sharing recourses, discuss their work online, give comment for their peers work and teachers also can give feedback online. 

The object of this research is students in their 7th semester. To help her to organize this research, she created a table (contains students' names, references, summary 1 and summary 2). She also asked her students to do blogging based on her syllabus. She mentioned that her reasons doing collaborate learning because the students can share their resources easily with their friends because they just need to drag the resources file to GD. As an addition, students will be able to read their friends' article as their references. She concludes that students can do learning and be doing task collaboratively, share their works and learning materials easily, they can do learning outside the classroom as well, increase their motivation in learning languages,  being autonomous learners and use autonomous skills, and also use technology in language teaching. It is also true that 20% of them have a problem with this, either technical issues or other issues, but the use of collaborative learning is the solution for this issues.

(2)

After joining GD presentation, I joined next presentation and it is quite new for me because I never heard about this before. It was presented by Suhandhini and Bustanuddin As Shuaidy, English lecturers at Universitas Muhammadiyah Purwokerto. They presented the use of schoology as learning management system (LMS). LMS is a software that can be used for many sectors, such as for administration, documentation, reporting, tracking and many more. One of LMS that can be used in teaching are Schoology and Canva. Schoology involves teachers, learners and parents as well, so they can monitor the learning progress. Teachers can set up the rules, design the lesson (time allocation and deadline), create quizzes and tests. Teachers also can create badges for the students. This app also gives statistical information for the teachers and parents about the students' activities, such as accessed links, submitted assignments and time they spends on schoology. 

Schoology allows the users to create, manage and share the content and the resource and this app is also known as VLE (virtual learning environment). This app is really user-friendly, featured packed and inexpensive (it means users need to pay for it, doesn't it?). This app is also good for autonomous learning because participants have flexibility, they can share any resources among them, exit slip (teachers will know directly about the students' comment), teachers can do direct assessment and survey as well. Like other apps, this app has its own weaknesses and strength.  It is efficient, independent, recourse flexibility and accessibility, time flexibility and self-learning. But this app makes the teachers difficult to find out about the students' work authenticity, assessed based on knowledge, also become a problem for learners who prefer face-to-face learning, and the last one is about students' awareness about their duty. In short, it can be said that this app is affordable and convenient enough so that the teachers can create their own features, real-time formative assessment feedback and give direct comment.

(3)

The next session was quite interesting for me since I am interesting enough in linguistics. It was presented by Ignatius Tri Endarto, an English lecturer at UKDW Yogyakarta. He did a research about the use of corpus or corpora in language teaching, such as finding the most commonly used words in business or in tourism. Corpus linguistics itself is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of real-world text, such as "conduct research" not "make research". The trend itself in learning corpus linguistics gradually increase started in 1980 and until this time. At this conference, he gave example about to find out the most common appeared words in Obama's inaugural speech (word frequency). He also gave example about the using of article "a" in Obama's inaugural speech and this can help the students in learning languages about the use of article "a" and form of words used after article "a". Some of corpora apps are GLOWBE, COCA, and BNC. When use corpora, teachers need to think about the age of the learners because this app is quite complex. Also, teachers need to think about the learners' need and proficiency before using this app. Corpora can be used in any type of tests, such as filling the gab, vocabulary quizzes, and jumbled sentences. 

(4)

Still, in the same room, I joined Lilia Indriani, an English lecturer at Universitas Tidar, Magelang. She presented her study on the use of MALL in TEFL classroom: novice teachers' perspective. MALL itself is derived from Mobile Assisted Language Learning and she used Edmodo in her classes. She uses questionnaire about the use of technology by ELT students in their classes and the results are projector (74.07%), word processing (33.33%) web page (51.85%), internet (81.48%), digital video (66.67%), email (25.93%), presentation software (77.78%), audio (66.67%), video conferencing (22.22%), others (game, chat ware, poll site)is about 11.11%. There are some advantages using MALL in her class and those are easier and interesting, help students in teaching (organizing, explaining, etc), interest to join the class, decrease the students anxiety of learning, memorable lessons for students, materials prepare and share to the students before, teachers-learners collaboration, help teacher to organize the class. There are some disadvantages aspects as well and those are the internet connection, multi-activities, spam and inappropriate advertisements, difficult to monitor students activities, need good class management. Students said that MALL is very helpful. For example, when he was sick, he accessed the materials from his home. Other said that students do multi-task when using MALL and teacher needs to manage the class well.

Due to some reasons, I resume the presentation that I attended today (iTELL2018 day 1) into two parts, those are part 1 and part 2.

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