Wallwisher

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.

 



http://www.wallwisher.com/

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.