Wallwisher
What is
Wallwisher?
Wallwisher is a 2.0 free online tool where
anybody can create an electronic co-wall. Although it was originally designed
for a wide range of gift cards such as birthday or anniversary, it can be now used
for educational purposes as well. The procedures for creating a wall are very simple
and clear.
1)
Create an account, or you can log in with you Gmail
account.
(Other
people do not need any accounts for posting comments on your wall.)
2)
Enter
your name and e-mail, and type your
preferred wall URL.
3)
Set
viewing and posting to Everyone, and
choose your favourate theme.
4)
Upload
a picture, type a title and subtitle for your wall. Click
Done.
5)
Share
your wall URL with students, and then, they will be able to join the same web
page and can stick images, videos, links with texts (up to 160 characters), and
PDFs electronically.
6)
Double
click anywhere on the wall so that post
a message window can open. Fill in name or nickname, and write a comment in
the provided space.
7)
On
line visitors can add a comment as well to the wall if it is set to public.
8)
Students
can move or delete comments in edit mode by clicking the top
right hand X.
9)
The
owner/original creator of the wall
can monitor/move/delete comments and edits the wall anytime.
Why is this
adopted for language teaching?
I think
that this application provide learners and teachers with a great opportunity to
combine knowledge with enthusiasm. Here is an actual classroom activity we have
experienced in our ICT lecture.
Classroom settings;
Divide the class by groups of 4 or 5 people.
Provide one or two computers for each group.
Tasks;
Think about the interesting spots to recommend around the world. To
give it a more realistic context, our teacher, Russell suggested three cities including
Moscow, where he is scheduled to visit on his business trip next month. After this activity, he sent
us a feedback email, and provided us another tasks. Please refer to the PowerPoint
video embedded below.
As you listen to in this PowerPoint video, we
did produce a great deal of collaboration conversation in English by the medium
of discussion, question, negotiation, and doing our tasks. These are a wide
range of benefits in that wall creating activity as the following.
Advantages:
- Easy
operation.
- Wallwisher can build a lot of collaborating conversation.
- Web-quest
is great for exposing students to
different media.
- Posting
different tasks/roles on individual group activate
the class.
- Authentic
tasks/materials make inputs
participatory rather than passive.
- Students
can promote brainstorming each
other.
- Students
can be cognitive by editing,
organizing or designing procedures.
- Assigning
different groups different tasks
encourages each group to look at the data that relates to them.
However, there are still limitations.
Limitation:
-
Need
a computer facility. One computer per a pair or a group.
-
Required
a personal valid email address for creating an account.
Ethical
issues are to be considered.
-
A
potential difficulty of organizing the overcrowded wall when whole class
students have left comments there.
-
A
potential possibility of Cyber-attack/bullying.
l As for the word limit of a text (up to 160
characters) should not be included in its limitation since it will be
effective for students to focus on writing a concise text.
How can we use it
for language teaching?
- for warming up
- for introducing a target words/grammatical
structure
- for speaking activity;
1)
Put strange pictures on a wall, and ask students to talk about
2)
Put images of people/things, and let students do role plays and create original
stories
- for brainstorming; provide students a task,
and ask them to comment each other.
- for sentence/paragraph reconstruction
- for learners’ presentational or writing
skills
- for enabling students to summarise their
understanding within a limited words
- for collaboration work
- for teacher’s/students’ feedback
Reference: (Texts of PowerPoint slides)
Wallwisher
activity:
We were 5 people, and had two laptops to
use. Our group’s task this time was to introduce some interesting spots to
visit in Moscow, - especially for our teacher, Russell, -during his long
lecturing journey. In the beginning, we just engaged in searching attractive
places on the website separately because nobody has been there. Quickly, I
could imagine some nice places to visit, such as the Moscow Kremlin, Red
Square, or St. Basil Cathedral, because personally, I am interested in the
history of the Russia and the Russian Revolution.
The Kremlin is at the heart of Moscow, and
one of the sites is still used as the official residence of the Russian President. I am sure you may have seen Kremlin on the
films of 007 or Mission impossible. Then, I
found another nice place. That was a space
centre near Moscow! There, you can do a simulation of astronauts. However, my unusual idea was quickly rejected
by the other members due to the time limit of the task. Then, my dear Catharine proposed us a smart
idea! She said, “We should just search
the top ten tourists’ attractions in Moscow on the Google site because our time
is limited”. All of us agreed to her
smart suggestion. Then, we suddenly united in tackling our task.
Question
No.1:
The answer is; we did produce collaboration
conversation in English by the medium of discussion, question, negotiation, and
doing our tasks. We read the descriptions of the spots, but to be honest, we
could just skim and embed the data.
In the beginning, I talked a lot about
Moscow, but from the middle, I tried not to disturb them but just watched the
procedures as a digital immigrant.
However, I felt how amazing their cooperation and collaboration works
were!
Question
No.2 :
In the beginning there was just a blank
space. First of all, we naturally
divided our roles as a director, web-searchers, wall designers and an observer,
- it’s me. We selected the top five
spots by two laptops, and accordingly embedded the images and videos one after
another quickly on a wall of Wallwisher. Since it was our first experience, at first we had some difficulties to
embed the pictures and videos. Therefore, we needed to cooperate and exchange our
opinions frequently - how and where to embed these images, which location and
size is appropriate, or what descriptions to put on the wall – in order to make
a wall fabulous with links to video, pictures, music, websites, blogs, etc. Furthermore,
to give this activity a more realistic context, we were requested to produce
information according to our teacher, Russell’s actual itinerary. Using
authentic tasks and materials help us to be communicative. It was a
goal-oriented brainstorming session.
Question
No. 3:
-
It can build a lot of Collaborating
conversation.
-
Web-quest is great for exposing
students to different media.
-
Posting different tasks/roles
on individual group activate the class.
-
Authentic tasks/materials make
inputs participatory rather than passive.
-
Students can promote
brainstorming each other.
-
Students can be cognitive by
editing, organizing or designing procedures.
-
Assigning different groups
different tasks encourages each group to look at the data that relates to them.
Question
No.4:
I think this can be good because there are
always extrovert and introvert students in a classroom. For extroverts
students, providing a presentation does not matter, but in contrast, it may
invite a lot of anxiety to introvert students. First of all, teachers need to
divide a pair or group with the former and the latter as possible as they can. Some might say that they cannot assess the
speaking quality of quieter students, but nowadays, teachers can do it by
providing a presentation task using a web-tool as homework.
Question
No.5:
I think that Wallwisher is a useful multimedia application with a simple
operation.
I understand that providing a time limit is
always necessary for teachers to organize a lesson time. However, this time I
could not scan the text well due to such time pressure, and in addition, I felt
that if I had done the task alone, I would have created my wall in different
way as I wished. Therefore, I think we may ask students to create their own wallwisher
for their homework, which will be also useful for reviewing this tool, or
reading and writing practices.
