SocialGo in teaching English as a second language
From iProjekt
SocialGo is a community tool like Ning and Elgg that can be effectively used for education purpose. It stimulates student engagement, collaboration between the students and with the teacher, as well as peer-to-peer learning (by sharing of ideas and content).
In the academic year 2009/2010 the SocialGo tool was used as an online learning community site for the hybrid course "Business English 2". Like other online community sites, SocialGo includes the following functionalities: personal profiles, chat, forum, blog, comments, groups formation, uploading of images and video, and events management. Within the course "Business English 2" the teacher used the forum for the description of the task the students had to perform during the current week of teaching, and the students used their blogs to perform those weekly tasks.
In one activity the students had to use a the Web 2.0 tool named nimbb as a widget/API (link to features) that was incorporated into the SocialGo learning community network. The nimbb widget enables recording of video with a webcam and integration of video clips into user website. The students' recordings were later commented by other members of the group. The SocialGo/nimbb combination of Web 2.0 tools proved useful for a small group of students of a hybrid foreign language course.
In the academic year 2009/2010 the SocialGo online community network was used the whole summer semester with all features and no advertising (for 19.99 EUR per month) for the course "Business English 2", and the nimbb widget was used only for one month fore a price of $29 so that video recordings of up to 1 minute could be created. The free version of the SocialGo tool has potentially unwanted advertising, and the free version of nimbb records videos of only 30 seconds.
Below is an example of the use of the functionality "event manager" to define dates for students' presentations.
An example of how the students performed activities in their blog is presented below.
The example of the use of the nimbb API for the tasks that the students had to perform as a recording with a webcam.
