In episode 30, Jose Luis de Ramon Ruiz interviews Patrick Murphy about how his teaching has changed during his nearly 20 year career teaching language courses at the university level. In their conversation, they touch on how Patrick uses Twitter to connect students to real-time culture as well as his future plans for virtual reality as a learning tool. Patrick also discusses how being afraid to fail can keep teachers from taking important risks in their classrooms.
You can read the transcript of this episode here.
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Show Notes
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You can find Patrick Murphy online…
…by email patrick.r.murphy@vanderbilt.edu
…or on Twitter @murphyfall2014
You can find Jose Luis de Ramon Ruiz online…
…by email joseluisdr.ruiz@vanderbilt.edu
To learn more about the other virtual and augmented reality projects mentioned on the episode, here are some more links…
…faculty page for Professor Carlos Miguel-Pueyo
…virtual reality for language learning at University of Texas San Antonio
…Indiana’s funded SOTL research project on augmented reality
We have heard from other teachers on the show who have used Twitter in interesting ways in their teaching…
I’m glad to hear about teachers who are using Augmented and Virtual Reality in the classroom. I am a retired ESL/EFL teacher who has thought about bringing the real world into the classroom for a long time in order to combine the benefits of 1) close proximity to the students in the classroom where the teaching can be easily available to help students with their questions and 2) rich, varied, and authentic content that is relevant and interesting to the students. Of more immediate interest is expanding the benefits of my concise way of presenting and practising the English verb tense system. At a college in South Korea I developed a class activity, a game to help students quickly identify active voice verb tense forms. The game got everyone involved at once and the completion between teams reduced the fear of making mistakes. This Total Physical Response game worked very well, but could be improved with Augmented Reality and/or Virtual Reality by providing students with visuals that could stimulate them to give example sentences to be used in the game, the verbs from which other students would have to correctly identify the forms of. The computer accompanying computer program could give help with making sentences the sentences according to the students ability, thus giving everyone a chance to contribute easily to the game. Also, the computer program could also keep track of each student’s knowledge and needs.
Unfortunately I do not have a video of the game we played in class, but I have a video on YouTube of a simplified version, done with three students and a provider of sentence examples. The YouTube video can be found by looking for Eng Department TENSEMAP. For more information about my visual graphics of the English tense system you can find many of my slide shows on YouTube under Howat Labrum H (58 videos). Many of the slide shows are my monthly compilations of adapter Twitter tweets. My Twitter handle is @Howie7951. A few minutes ago I sent a reply to the tweet in response to the tweet which allowed me to find your helpful article above. Thank you for your inspiring tweet.
Yours sincerely,
Howat Labrum (M.A. TESOL)