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Tech Talk
Digital Collage: a motivational tool for learners
Lucius Von Joo Kanda University of International Studies, Japan Lucius Von Joo currently teaches for Kanda University of International Studies, Japan. He holds an Ed.M. in Comparative and International Education and has teaching experience in deaf education, elementary education and EFL/ESL in California, Japan and New York. His research interests include computer assisted learning, film and documentary content-‐based learning, student educational backgrounds and learning approaches, video-‐cued multi-‐vocal ethnography, and family and communities as educators. E-‐mail: lucius-‐v@kanda.kuis.ac.jp
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everal language learners that I have spoken with over the years have stated that they want to be generally better, but often don’t know how to make a measurable plan to do so. Goal setting can be a very difficult component of learning. As language learning is a lifetime endeavor this can be very challenging. One way to approach this is to envision your future self and then work backwards on how you get to be that future self. Visualizing your future L2 self to help with learning motivation has recently become a hot topic and is a good place to start with learners in general. Athletes are often trained to visualize the finish of a competition in order to enhance their performance. They visualize winning the medal and work backwards to determine how they can make that accomplishment happen. Learning languages may not have such distinct milestones, however making a picture of what your future L2 self will be doing with the language may help. The clearer the picture the learner can create, the easier it will be to make a plan to get to that desired place. In this Tech Talk I will focus on the creation of future-‐self collages. These collages can serve as the first step in creating a language learning plan or as a reassessment tool for a plan that has been set into motion. These future-‐self collages are often made by gathering images that represent what you would like to become. This can be done with physical images clipped from magazines. However, it may be difficult to acquire magazines and the limit to the number
and range of images offered by magazines may be confining to the author’s visualization. This is where digital collages can be very helpful. A magazine may have one image of what the author had in mind in comparison to the plethora of images to choose from when searching digitally. Digital collages can be made with smart phones, tablets or PC’s and will also help with digital literacy. This Tech Talk will be separated into three sections: 1) Creating a digital collage; 2) Sharing collages with others; and 3) Using an app called ThrowBack to be reminded of the collage in the future.
1) Creating a collage There are many photo collage applications that could be used for this project that offer similar features. One of the most popular collage applications, with good reason,
Independence 70 IATEFL Learner Autonomy Special Interest Group Newsletter 1