![[The University of Leicester]](unilogo.gif)
Wimba Voice
The Voice Board was used for students undertaking the MA distance learning programme in Applied Linguistics and TESOL provided by the School of Education to discuss four e-tivities. The e-tivities were adapted from four portfolio tasks in the module material and were designed using Salmon’s (2002) concept of e-tivity.
The first e-tivity took three weeks, and the second, third and fourth e-tivity took two weeks each to complete. A schedule of this Wimba Voice pilot is shown in Table 1 below.
|
Week |
Dates |
E-tivities |
|---|---|---|
|
1 |
13-18 April 2010 |
E-tivity 1: World Englishes |
|
2 |
19-25 April 2010 |
|
|
3 |
26 April - 2 May 2010 |
|
|
4 |
3-9 May 2010 |
E-tivity 2: Gender and language |
|
5 |
10-16 May 2010 |
|
|
6 |
17-23 May 2010 |
Break |
|
7 |
24-30 May 2010 |
E-tivity 3: Analysing Talk |
|
8 |
31 May - 6 June 2010 |
|
|
9 |
7-13 June |
Break |
|
10 |
14-20 June |
E-tivity 4: Critical Discourse Analysis |
|
11 |
21-27 June |
Example E-tivity
Below is an example e-tivity that the School of Education used in their pilot of Wimba Voice.
| Spark | Listen to one of the following World Englishes podcasts in the Module Materials section of Blackboard:
|
|---|---|
| Purpose | To show your understanding of the concept of World Englishes and related issues. |
| Step 1: The Task | Ask an Inner, Outer or Expanding Circle speaker you know to talk about their use of English for approximately 5 minutes. Record the speaker onto the E-tivity 1 Voice Board. (Click here to access it.) Then give a short commentary on what the speaker says, relating it to any of the issues covered in this unit. Your commentary can either be spoken (as a separate Voice Board message) or written (in the Voice Board text box).
Your commentary should be a maximum of 500 words (if written) or 4 minutes in length (if spoken). Timing: To be posted before 25 April |
| Step 2: The Response | Respond to at least two other people’s postings, adding any additional insights you can think of to their commentary. Your response can be spoken or written. Please start by responding to someone who has not yet received any other responses.
Timing: To be posted before 2 May |
| Step 3: Reflection | Please remember to reflect on the use of Voice Board for the e-tivities. You can click here to go to the Reflection discussion. This discussion board will be available throughout the pilot. |
Wimba Voice Help Guide
To aid students (and staff) in using this new technology, DUCKLING developed a help guide for using and for the e-moderation of this technology:
