In the distance learning environment, fostering and nurturing classroom community has become increasingly important. Language learning takes place beyond the classroom through community engagement, interactions with peers, family, and friends. By encouraging our learners to value the importance of social and intellectual relationships, students respond positively to risk-taking, increased self-esteem and self-efficacy, develop greater cognitive performance, and so much more. ZOOM provides an online platform for students to not only interact with each other “in” the classroom but outside of it. In this workshop, I seek to offer a practical demonstration of how to effectively do this. I will introduce pre-teaching activities such as turn-taking strategies and conversation phrases and expressions. Following this, I will provide a structure to guide students in leading discussion circles through ZOOM. The workshop will end with student and teacher reflections, insights, and potential pitfalls.

As educators turned to online tools during the COVID-19 pandemic, many adopted Zoom as their remote teaching platform. One feature of Zoom is the ability for teachers to share slides with their students synchronously during the lesson. Although this feature was essential for teaching, the teacher's face became separate from the slides. This disconnect is less than ideal for communication, especially for language learners. So, Zoom added a new feature in the Fall which allows the speaker to use a slide deck as a virtual background, allowing the speaker to appear inside of their own slides. In this workshop, participants will learn how to use this function and how to optimize slides according to design and pedagogical principles. The presenter will also demonstrate how to use this feature to record video content for students to view on demand. Workshop participants will be encouraged to interact with questions and suggestions.

PowerPoint and other slide presentation tools (Google Slides, Libre, and OpenOffice) have long been used to deliver instruction, but most people do not know that they also offer engaging ways to distribute content in the form of audio books and worksheets. Furthermore, these tools allow for interactivity in listening and reading tasks in ways that traditional paper-based and PDF content cannot deliver. This presentation will show over 10 novel ways to use slide presentation tools, especially PowerPoint, to create interactive lessons with audio. Attendees will be able to download sample files and see how these activities work and render in different learning environments. The presentation will first show how to use PowerPoint to create a robust lesson library with minimal effort for any language. Later, attendees will also learn how covert the basic templates of the PowerPoint example files and apply the same tricks on Google Slides, Libre Office and OpenOffice.

Teaching English online during the pandemic calls for innovative technological and pedagogical approaches to shape a meaning-making practice of learning. This session presents a best practice of how Digital Mind Mapping Software (DMMS) and Screen Recording Tools (SRTs) are brought together to support the student online speaking practice. The study conducted a Project-Based Learning (PBL) through Online Community of Practice (OCoP) involving twenty students (five groups of four) of the business administration department. The process went through six consecutive stages, they are 1) identifying the challenging problems, 2) planning the project, 3) scheduling the project, 4) monitoring the progress of the project, 5) assessing the outcome, and 6) evaluating the project and giving feedback to students. The PBL logbook and student-created videos were collected and analyzed using the assessment rubrics. The findings show that the project outcomes were considered satisfying and effective in supporting the student’s online speaking practice. It also encouraged them to be more active, autonomous, collaborative, and explorative. The study also suggests that teaching speaking online should consider adopting the technology-based project learning approach to facilitate the students with a collaborative learning environment.

This paper presents a mixed-methods approach to researching the viability of supplementing mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) apps focusing on receptive skills with a course curriculum that emphasizes meaningful communication, mitigation of error-aversion tendencies, cultural awareness, and presentation skills. Kim & Kwon (2012) and Burston (2014b) have lamented the fact that most MALL applications do not take full advantage of technological affordances to create opportunities for learners to use their devices as tools of interaction. Instead, apps that focus on receptive skills including vocabulary memorization and grammatical rules are more popular. Using Rosell-Aguilar’s (2017) framework for the evaluation of language learning applications, we can determine that many modern apps are not interactive, engaging, or able to fulfill the pedagogical potential of our current level of technology. This paper acknowledges that creating more apps focusing on productive skills is necessary but focuses on how to create a robust curriculum surrounding such receptive-skills apps. Learners improved as shown by standardized test scores, learner reflection, and surveys. Adult language learners working for a company were assigned 50 units of the online mobile assisted language learning application, ReallyEnglish, while concurrently taking weekly hourlong lessons that focused on meaningful communication, mitigation of error-aversion tendencies, cultural awareness, and presentation skills. Learner growth was measured by TOEIC Tests, observed classroom performance, and post-treatment surveys. Learners were given pre- and post-treatment TOEIC tests. A paired sample t-test showed significant improvement. Post-treatment surveys also revealed that learners felt much more confident and comfortable communicating in English.

The present study features a trialing of three feedback types in the essay composition component of a weekly EFL writing course in a private high school in western Tokyo, in the fall and winter of SY 2020-2021. The feedback types were administered on three ICT-mediated applications using a WiFi-enabled Chromebook for cycle 1; and the participants' computing device of choice (Bring Your Own Device) for cycle 2. The feedback types were sequenced as follows: (1) automated feedback through English Listening and Speaking Testing (ELST); (2) teacher feedback through Classi LMS's Questionnaire application; and (3) peer feedback through Google Docs and Google Sheets applications. A process approach to essay composition was implemented. The Action Research (AR) design was adapted in the study. Answers to four research questions were sought: (1) How effective is AI-generated feedback provided on the AWE application of ELST in revising students’ rough drafts?; (2) How effective is teacher feedback provided on Classi LMS's Questionnaire application in improving students’ revised drafts?; (3) How effective is peer feedback provided on Google Docs and Google Sheets in editing students’ final drafts?; and (4) How much did students’ perspective on automated, teacher, and peer feedback change after undergoing the study? Utilizing a qualitative research format, data was gathered using: (a) pre- and post-study student surveys; (b) teacher field observation notes; (c) student learning reflection logs; and (d) essay drafts overall mean scores of respondents. Results found that automated, teacher, and peer feedback types were all moderately effective in improving student-writers’ drafts.

This presentation reports on an action research project which used collaborative digital storytelling activities to help increase student communication, engagement, interaction, and motivation in an asynchronous classroom. An intact class of university students (n=17) participated in a 3-week study where they used Flipgrid (video sharing platform) to co-construct narrative stories. Participant motivation and engagement was measured through a qualitative survey. Storytelling has been considered a useful exercise for language learners because it offers opportunity for meaning-focused use of the target language through narrative structures. While there is a gap in research on collaborative storytelling, an added benefit of it is that learners must negotiate for meaning as they co-construct a single story. With the current need for online classes, platforms such as Flipgrid, learners are able to easily create, share, and respond to each other’s videos. While preliminary, results suggest that online collaborative digital storytelling will enrich the asynchronous classroom.

Whether student presentations are given to large or small groups, one of the challenges for teachers is to keep non-presenters active. One useful way is to have them give feedback to their peers. This also reduces the burden on the teacher having to manage the class and be solely responsible for critiquing many presenters, in whole class presentations, or in carousel (Robb, 2019) style presentations, when it is not possible to see them all. This paper will discuss three ways that the presenter has employed in university classes, both in a real room and in Zoom, to have students give evaluative comments to each other following different kinds of presentations - whole class, in small groups, and also online. Students can give their feedback on their mobile devices and then conveniently receive the evaluations on them, too. Each method has its own advantages, though, and being aware of these will help a teacher decide which to use for any particular situation. The three ways are: 1. Google Forms/Sheets; 2. PeerEval; and 3. Moxtra. The first is best for in-depth feedback, but requires more teacher effort and probable delay in distribution. The second is the most immediate and ‘fun’ for students. The third is designed for online presentations (Knight, 2018), and therefore has special benefits and downsides connected to that. This presenter will explain the pluses and minuses of the three different methods, as well as report survey comments made by students who have used them.

As a co-researcher on a grant at Iwate University, part of our work has been developing a process for a new English communication assessment system, specifically studying interactive conversation. Although this presentation will not discuss the finer details of the grant, mainly due to it still ongoing, how we have currently setup Moodle and YouTube to work as part of the assessment will be covered. The main tools used are Moodle, an online learning management system (or LMS), a plugin for Moodle titled “Personal YouTube”, and YouTube. The discussion will be on how we integrated the three tools together to purposely use the graded assessment function with the rubric tool to allow separate teachers to assess the student’s abilities through video all inside of Moodle without any extra downloads, new browser tabs opened, or large amounts of storage space on the LMS required. Some technical items about Moodle will be mentioned, but the topic should be approachable enough for novice LMS users. The goal is to encourage other teachers to think differently about the use online tools and to provide them with one example of an “outside of the box” way of approaching assessments.

This paper is based on a university course for Japanese learners of English which migrated online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The presenter seeks to offer practical teaching suggestions to language instructors in CALL environments. The scope of the initial classroom research was broad, concerned as it was with how to set up and organize an online writing course, teach the language and structure of interpretive texts, and achieve the outcome of improved student writing as a product. The focus of this presentation is the first of those aims: teaching writing online in an emergency situation while, crucially, giving students individual attention and feedback. The notion of an emergency online course differs markedly from that of a planned synchronous or asynchronous one (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020). Taking advantage of freely available screen capture applications (Monosnap, TechSmith Capture), the instructor collected student work on Google Forms and gave feedback orally, providing spoken comments on student work via links to the audio and video files. The instructor’s reactions, based upon student film reviews as the object of discussion (Bezemer, Diamantopoulou, Jewitt, Kress & Mavers, 2012), helped in reaching out to students personally, even while they inhabited isolated, virtual classroom spaces. Emerging from the research was the realization that spoken feedback differs markedly in character from written feedback. The instructor is not only correcting but also commentating, more inclined to make encouraging and supportive comments, applying lessons from appraisal theory to the work of the student author (Martin & White, 2005).

This study addresses implications for professional development in the current pandemic by exploring novel practices in pre-service teacher education contexts and by emphasising future teachers’ skills and digital readiness. The study takes as an example the involvement by 22 university students (pre-service teachers of languages) at a European university in a hackathon, as part of their university curriculum. Hackathons are time-constrained events that bring together volunteers to address a problem or challenge, often with a social purpose (Gutiérrez, 2018). Adopting an action research approach (Colpaert, 2020; Luo & Gui, 2019), this study focuses on examining the student perceptions as well as the challenges in the design of a hackathon as a pre-service teacher training facility that took place in November 2020. Two mentors (university lecturers) provided conceptual and technical support throughout the process. The hackathon targeted the creation of plurilingual and pluricultural resources for L2 with an emphasis on digital activism and social participation. Groups in teams of 4 and 5 persons were engaged in this process using a variety of technologies (Slack, Google Drive, Zoom) to achieve their goals and all results were made openly available on the DigiEduHack website (cf. Solutions). The opportunities and drawbacks of pre-service teacher education (Hauck, 2015; Borg et al, 2014) through novel remote collaboration and co-creation possibilities will be discussed, as well as implications resulting from the integration of open innovation initiatives (as hackathons are) in standard university curricula and degrees.