Bilingual Education And The Internet
What, can the Internet offerbilingual education teachers, students and administrators? Is the fear of getting left watching the World Wide Web’s digital divide expand along racial and language lines impetus enough to justify the incorporation of mice, browsers and LANs into the multi-cultural / multilingual curriculum? Are there technological avenues, which are especially appropriate and sterling for use specifically in bilingual classrooms, teacher planning periods, and administrative board meetings? In other words, what unique tools or opportunities does the Internet afford bilingual education students and teachers? What is the history of the Internet? What sites best serve to aid in the education of English language learners? These and other questions will be scrutinized. top
o Internet and Computer Technology:
§ Current technology (2000): Describing the progress which has been made in even the last three years is a formidable task. While the cold war drove the creation of what eventually became ARPNET (forerunner of the internet), the international arms / technology was over by the early 90’s, leaving the then budding network industry in search for direction and impetus for advancement. Besides stout corporations and universities, developments in bandwidth reduction, streaming video / audio, and credit card processing / encryption were motivated in fraction by the on-line pornography industry, which was the first sector to generate substantial revenue from web commerce. Fresh user-end technology available for viewing, exercise and or download includes but is not limited to nearly anything one can think of: e-mail, streaming audio / video, text to speech, test generators, forms pages, chat rooms, games with chat, web cartoons, animation, audio files, video files, news groups, bulletin / message boards, multiple user interfaces, data bases, text files, statistics, biographies, stories, newspapers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, poems, presentations, language translators, tutorials, lesson plans, assessment instruments, magazines, discussion groups, spell checkers, music players and creators, competitions, collaborative projects, tangrams, puzzles, calculators, paint and draw programs, virtual field trips… top
§ Statistics: In 1984 there were 1000 network nodes, 5 years later -100,000-. Currently there are about 107 million e-mail users worldwide and 172 million Internet users (92 million in the united states alone) browsing well over 800 million web pages. There were a reported 8.6 million Internet users in Latin America (916,000 in Mexico) with an estimated 24.3 million users by 2003 (NUA). According to the NTIA, 61.6% of those with college degrees now use the Internet, while only 6.6% of those with an elementary school education or less exercise the Internet [graph]. Between 1997 and 1998, the White/Hispanic gap for Internet access widened by 37.6%. Also the gap between computer ownership for White and Hispanic Households continues to widen: from 1994 to 1998 the White/Hispanic gap increased 42.6%. Those earning under $20,000 and using the Internet outside the home are twice as likely (2.12 times) to get access through a public library or community center than those earning more than $20,000. American Indians/Eskimos/Aleuts, Blacks, and Hispanics more often turn to Internet access outside the home, compared to Whites. The e-Rate program has helped connect more than 80,000 schools and libraries and helped numerous children and adults learn how to use modern technologies through new points of access to the Internet. School is the most popular access point, with more than 80 percent of youths age 10 to 17, according to a joint study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and National Public Radio. Almost 63 percent of U.S. public-school classrooms had Internet access by year-end 1999, up from just 14 percent in 1996, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. top
Information access => Administrator, Instructor, Student and Parent
While some sites require a paid membership to view their information, most offer their resources free of charge (including applications) in hopes of building up web traffic through repeat visitors and word of mouth recommendations. Although some applications and memberships are worth purchasing, one can usually find comparable versions for free elsewhere, affording access and use to nearly all the Internet’s resources free of charge. Points of entry such as public libraries and schools give individuals from all economic backgrounds access to a wealth of information previously available only to academia and the affluent. Nearly everything on the web can in some form or fashion be found outside of the virtual world, however there is neither single edifice nor organization besides the Internet where so much material may be accessed. Such access is facilitated through the use of one of the many search engines (Yahoo, GoTo, HotBot, Lycos, Northern Light, Dogpile, AltaVista, Terra, Yupi, Metabuscador, Lightspan), which scan millions of pages of content, finding sites it believes most match an entered query. Therein lies the web’s ability to empower, whether a king or a lowly street sweeper- with a click of the mouse and the use of a browser the world’s information unfolds (forever). With a creative mind, nearly anything on the Internet can be used in a classroom setting. The proceeding will focus on the facilitative role the web can play for the enrichment of the bilingual teacher, student, and administrator experience. top
- Education Information Webs: The wealth of internet information devoted to the art of teaching is extraordinary, from grade level interdisciplinary lesson plans to articles on the latest theories of literacy development, government sites, general education sites and bilingual education sites make up the bulk of what will be covered in this section. top
- Private sectors: with information resources in the construct of lesson plans, research, theory, e-news, e-books, and bulletin boards come from many fronts including non-profit organizations, universities, commercial software / book / product vendors, teachers, students, parent organizations, and the like. At times it is difficult to understand who is ultimately behind the information that loads on a web page. Also rare are sites with shrimp or no agenda, this is especially true in regards to language learning theory pages. Cummins talked about the presence of misinformation and how to approach the subject in a 1998 discussion on technology and education:
Two very socially committed Canadian educators, Maud Barlow and Heather-Jane Robertson, for example, label the ‘information superhighway’ the ‘disinformation superhighway’. I appreciate their reasons for being skeptical about the Internet but the solution is not to abandon the playing field to corporate or any other dominant group interests. The same corporate interests that control the advance of technology also control the publishing industry but no one has suggested that we should not publish books and articles or buy books for our children just because these actions contribute to corporate profits. Jim Cumminstop
- General Bilingual Education Information Webs: Probably the biggest section in this subsection including: university, school, non-profit and private info-webs. These webs represent some of the most in-depth English and Spanish resources available. From Australian Aboriginal studies to papers by Krashen, Cummins, and de Avila, the sheer number of sites make them easy to locate yet hard to navigate through the merely well intentioned pages to those sites which stand out in scope and depth. A first cessation should probably be Jim Crawford’s Language Policy Web and Emporium, which explains much of the politics and legalese surrounding bilingual education. Close behind is the Extensive Reading (ER) Pages web, which contain a variety of papers by Krashen and company on the merits of Free Voluntary Reading now ER as well as an annotated bibliography of studies involving FVR and other reading methods for first and second language learners. Politics, government and Latino issues are the focus of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI), offering statistics and current legislation and research. The Dr. Jim Cummins (BICS/CALP) web contains many of his recent as well as ground breaking early works concerning second language learning and literacy. Dave’s ESL café is also a site full of usable affirm and varied resources. Other sites such as the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and the National Education Association (NEA) offer overviews of the issues as well as program information and in the case of the NEA, a comprehensive guide to various resources pertaining to bilingual education. The World Revolution organization offers their bilingual education resources as part of their consciousness-raising mission; also committed to social change is Café Progressive which offers education discussions and information. Free access to on-line e-books is available through the National Academic Press for August and Hakuta’s Educating Language Minority Children, and Improving Schooling for Language Minority Children a Research Agenda. Other titles available for reading on the win through the NEA include: The Case of Bilingual Education Strategies, Chinese Students in America, Starting out Right: A Guide to Children’s Reading Success, Resources for Teaching Elementary School Science, Reinventing Schools: The Technology is Now!, and Education and Learning to Think. Literacy assessment and evaluation webs such as the Literacy Inquiry Network (LINK) and I teach I learn.com’s Literacy Assessment site, offer literacy ideas as well as the chance to contribute one’s own thoughts and ideas to current and future projects. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) offers some relevant resources and papers pertinent to language learning. The University of Southern California’s Center for Multilingual and Multicultural Research (CMMR) is substantial in its range of programs. Jill Kemper Mora of San Diego State University offers: a presentation (pictorial summary) of the theoretical principles behind bilingual education, an Internet Classroom for Teachers of Language-Minority Students (part of the Electronic Classroom on Reading On-Line.org), a road map to effective biliteracy instruction planning, a guide to planning instruction for English language development, and a table which outlines the bilingual education debate. . Also indicate are the many national, state, and local associations for bilingual education that unfortunately offer very little of anything to non-members. top
- Discussion webs and message boards: at times the need for information pertinent to a unique situation is required, this is just one of the reasons one might turn to education message boards, info-request forms, or listserv which allow for feedback tailored to the space. Interactive / people on the other side, webs lend themselves to a feeling of community and support not felt to the same degree on other sites. This is also a place one might go to earn a partner classroom across the country or across the ocean. ERIC provides a number of listservs related to bilingual education free of charge while Arizona Situation University’s Center for Bilingual Education and Research charges $15 dollars to join their bilingual education listserv. The International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT) offers its listserv free of charge but reserves the fair to reprint submissions in any of its publications (none of which are offered on-line). UseNet groups’ K-12Net offers dozens of relevant news groups, as does Ed Web’s listserv compilation. NCBE offers six web-based discussion groups all related to the education of linguistically and culturally diverse students (teacher preparation, assessment, family and community, resources, program design, and curriculum instruction). The New York Times‘ Learning Network holds a variety of discussion groups including one on bilingual education (registration is free) also available are various lesson plans for ESL / English and other subjects. top
- Lesson Plans: various databases, some previously listed in the government section (FREE, GEM), are well into the process of archiving thousands of lesson plans into searchable databases. This saves preparation time as well as allows for a better exchange of ideas on the closest level to the learners themselves. First-year teachers can not only use successful lessons but also better understand the components of a successful lesson. Experienced teachers are given a forum where they can give back to the teaching profession and troll for fresh ideas in remarkable traveled territory. ArtsEdge offers art integrated plans for ESL and Language Learners. An exhaustive list of lesson plan sites is available from Springfield Township High School. Paso Partners, from SEDL offers integrated bilingual science, math and language units. Simpler is the John Korber’s ESL Lessons page with lessons on disasters, community design and games. Sites with lesson plan databases greatly increase their chances for repeat traffic provided the plans are abundant and well planned. A variation on lesson plan sites is Mr. O’s 3rd grade bilingual class manager, complete with plans and scheduling for an entire year (1999) a literacy journal and TAAS instructional objectives lesson plans are brief but it gives a sense of day to day and week to week organization. top
- For Profit: ONLINE READING ROOMS
- at times it is quite difficult to discern if a site is making a profit somehow through the sale of member preference information, or log-out redirects. More easily spotted are sites that gawk to sell products or prominently residence banner adds on top of the dwelling. For-profit webs tend to be very ascetically pleasing. These sites are worth a look in that many are corpulent of useful resources designed by professional educators and programmers some sites such as Classroom Connect, and iTeach.com, give a free trial membership. top
- Tools: There is an abundance of freeware and shareware programs available for free download as well as many programs that allow a free 30day trail (more than enough time to complete a lesson). Also available are applications, which rush on the web page’s server, these range from text-to-speech and currency converters to spatial reasoning and language translators. As is true for all the tools listed in this collection, there are numerous activities or uses that will go unmentioned as attempting to list them all would be like writing a dictionary. top
- E-Lective Language Learning: Developed by Cummins in a technology theory paper, this tool heightens cognate awareness and renders above level texts comprehensible. Though there are few examples on the Internet, existing sites point to a great potential especially for intermediate level language learners. top
- E-Mail: Most adults can remember a time in their school age years when they wrote letters to a class across the state, country or nation. The excitement of finding out about a pen pal from another region is not easily forgettable. While there are no guarantees that people are who they say they are in chat rooms, contacting another school through their website is a fairly secure blueprint to ensure e-pals are who they claim to be. E-pals also allow students to communicate expeditiously and with the wait on of certain e-classroom websites, learners can even catch the country from which they wish their e-pal to originate. A class studying volcanoes could acquire a sister-project class with access to volcanic activity, do interviews… empowering the other class as experts. English language learning could be the goal; choosing a sister class from Japan or Scandinavia would necessitate that communication assume place in English. Conversely, a class from the Philippines, Spain, or the Spanish speaking Americas would afford (Spanish speaking) participants an opportunity to develop cultural awareness while partaking in curriculum enriching activities in their first language.
Using the Internet for sister class exchanges and joint projects illustrate the reality of diversity in our global environment and the foolishness of either ignoring or pathologizing it in our education systems. Jim Cummins
Free Educational Mail Network, oldest and largest of the educational networks in the U.S., uses the Internet to link more than 140 electronic bulletin boards. FrEdMail offers collaborative activities designed to help students become better writers and learners. It also promotes the sharing of resources and experiences among teachers. An e-mail must be sent to arogers@bonita.cerf.fred.org requesting directions to the nearest node. Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections (IECC) is a free service to help teachers pick up partners in other countries and cultures for e-pal, project exchanges, and educator discussions; there are currently 8120 participants from 81 countries. Children looking for an Irish e-pal need examine no further than E-pals. Setting up e-mail accounts for a classroom is as free as hotmail.com, mail.com, especially for kids are: surfmonkey.com, Mykindasite and MeToo.net. top
- Internet, technology, and the bilingual classroom
- The case for empowerment: Cummins speaks of the need to empower students, second language learners especially. This empowerment comes, he believes through what Alma Flor Ada calls significant literacy. The final stages of her progression include questioning the cultural relevance of a picture or record and then based on learner discussion deciding on a plan of action. In Ada’s discussion with Dr. Cummins and Dr. Ramirez as part of the booklet Virtual Power: Technology, Education and Community, she describes technology as a separate type of literacy:
Technology is indeed a recent perform of literacy. If our children are not well educated technologically, they will not have an opportunity to have equal access, but there are certain caveats to this. The first one is that we should not think that technology, itself, is going to teach children to think critically. I think students need to be, parallel to their learning of technology, acquiring an ability for self-discovery, self-awareness, understanding of others, and certainly high levels of critical reasoning. I want them to have as noteworthy access and understanding of technology as possible always from the perspective of mastering these tools so that they can become an instrument for the expression of that critical awareness that is developed in them. Alma Flor Ada.
According to department of education studies, much of the population served by bilingual education relies on the public library and schools for their access to the Internet. It is vital that these students be given every opportunity to utilize and perceive the array of resources it offers. From information gathering, and application familiarity, to critical web-literacy, second language learners need exposure to this empowering tool.
There is no shortage of case studies showing how the Internet can and has been broken-down for transformative purposes by educators in many countries around the world and I believe it can be a major tool for social action and empowerment of both teachers and students within bilingual education programs. Jim Cumminstop
- A word of caution: Spending 100% of class time on the Internet, using it as a gold standard for classroom activities or talking only with teachers you meet in chat rooms is probably detrimental to quality instruction. With any innovation there comes the temptation to overuse the new resource, web use and educational gain most likely share a curvilinear relationship.
I certainly agree that it is naive to engage in uncritical ‘hype’ about technology solving our educational or any other of the social problems that we have in abundance. We need to see very carefully at how we are using technology and, as all of us have suggested, use it within the context of a transformative pedagogy that is focused on challenging coercive relations of power. Jim Cummins
While the Internet’s vast range of uses make it superior to former innovations such as language labs, questions need to be asked before choosing the web resources as all or part of the instructional vehicle for accomplishing a determined instructional objective.
I certainly agree that it is naive to engage in uncritical ‘hype’ about technology solving our educational or any other of the social problems that we have in abundance. We need to look very carefully at how we are using technology and, as all of us have suggested, use it within the context of a transformative pedagogy that is focused on challenging coercive relations of power. Jim Cummins
Questions such as: would the exercise of technology improve the experience? Is the instructional objective met directly by the use of the Internet? Are there enough resources so that every learner has a chance to receive the benefit the employ of the web will have? Is the amount of teacher preparation time / learner acclimation time necessary to use the Internet for a certain activity justified? Have programs (We-Blocker, Cybersitter, Surf-Watch, X-Detect) been installed to block students from purposely or accidentally accessing violent, pornographic or otherwise contemptible materials? top
- Conclusion. Although the digital divide remains an issue for concern, the past few years have seen economically depressed schools receive financial help in bringing Internet access into their classrooms.
As far as access in schools is concerned – initially the type of schools that were wired were ones that were well resourced anyway. But now, with the current federal technology grants there is a commitment to identify those schools with the least amount of tech resources and let them have first dibs on this funding. Doctor David Ramirez.
Good teaching with paper, pencil and loads of books will always be better than awful teaching with lots of time on the Internet. When outmoded with caution and creativity, the web can perform good teaching even better, and transform students of all ages and tongues into empowered technological literates.
Current state of bilingual education (summer 2000): As an institution, bilingual education has been attacked and maligned since its inception in modern American society. Recently individuals from the English for the Children movement have mobilized families and communities with rhetoric and criticism of transitional bilingual language programs. With the 1998 passing of proposition 227, the children of California became test subjects in a program that offers little first language support. If Ron Unz and his followers (English for the Children) get their way, Arizona, and Colorado will be the next states in the Union to substantially crop the role bilingual education plays in their respective school systems. Research reveals the great potential bilingual education is capable of unleashing in its students. A base of cognitive conception and development in a student’s first language best equips them to negotiate meaning, contribute, and learn in a second or third language. The responsibility of bilingual education is extra-ordinary in the obstacles it faces on many levels. For instance, children receiving instruction in their first language (not English) must also find time during the school day to learn a current language. Meanwhile their English-speaking peers are advancing as well, making the point at which second language learners equal the performance of monolingual students a engrossing target. Another concern facing bilingual education in Texas and other states, which employ high-stakes testing to determine student promotion / retention and teacher / school effectiveness, is the growing temptation to reassign some or all English as a Second Language (ESL) instructional periods to teach test taking strategies or allocate less preparation time for ESL due to the pressure of raising classroom test scores (especially applicable when bilingual students take exams in their first language). top
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Filed under Global Forex Ada by on Jan 17th, 2012. 