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At the time of the interview Rosa had been working at Oxford University for just under two years. She has a background in language teaching and education and her primary role is to teach Turkish language and culture to undergraduate students. She delivers some lectures but most of her teaching takes the form of ‘language labs’ in her office where she tutors three to five students at a time. She also has one-to-one tutorials with students when their academic work involves writing essays. Rosa states that she is ‘addicted’ to ICT, using it extensively within her teaching. The biggest drain on her time is preparing for classes, when she started there was no Turkish Studies at the university and she had to start from scratch. She says that she does ‘everything with IT’ as there are very few useful books within her discipline, so she usually looks to the Internet for resources.
Rosa says that she has always had an interest in IT and enjoys learning how to use new tools, explaining that it brings out her ‘creative side’. Rosa has created a great number of small electronic resources for her classes. These include PowerPoint animations, online quizzes, articles, presentations, and lists of links to online resources. She has started to use the institutional VLE but she does not find it ‘visually or functionally optimal’ for what she wants to do and this is frustrating. It is important to Rosa that she moves her academic career forwards and she ‘dreams of making a website’ which will show off all of her resources. She expresses that she is disappointed that other people can not seem to find her materials in the VLE very easily, and she would like to share her work within her subject area outside the university and have others comment on her resources and share their own with her.
When preparing for a class, Rosa scans the Internet for relevant Turkish journal articles. She prepares comprehension questions for her students based on these articles and then prepares a lesson handout. She sends the handout to the students via e-mail prior to the class, and then uploads it to the VLE. Sometimes she records herself speaking in Turkish (from the article) and uploads that to the VLE too so her students can hear the language. Through various online bibliographic databases and Google, she also finds relevant secondary reading and puts this into the VLE as well. For aural classes she creates and uploads sound files to the VLE, and for grammar classes she uploads animated PowerPoint presentations. Rosa feels that it is important to make as many materials available to students as possible and encourages them also to look for resources and add them to the VLE.
Whilst comprehension and grammar classes largely revolve around learning ‘facts and rules’, the teaching of Turkish culture involves debate and discussion. Rosa would like her students to be able to communicate more with students in Turkey and feels that ICT will be an appropriate means to do this.
When students are required to write an essay they send it to Rosa via e-mail. In the tutorial she goes over their essay with them and they retype it. They e-mail it back to her and she adds notes and corrections to the essay. She then publishes their essays to the VLE so they can compare their essays with those of others. Rosa claims that ‘they feel so motivated because they can see them there’. Next term she wants her students to start evaluating their own and each others’ essays and would like to find an online tool to help them do this.
Rosa collects feedback every term from her students. She states that this has had a significant influence on how she teaches and how she uses ICTs in her teaching:
::Some of the feedback I was getting from the students blew my mind, it really did. Areas that I thought they were having no trouble with were revealed to be problematic, and some of it you know is very important for stuff they have to do later on and it was affecting their whole learning experience. I developed some more teaching resources, some games and some animated PowerPoints to help them and it seems to have worked. This year’s students found it much easier. Of course this could just be because it was different students, but personally I am convinced ICT helped them learn more effectively.
Rosa sees ICT as an ‘investment’ in her teaching. She is prepared to put in some time in the beginning and ‘be patient’ while creating presentations and animations which are ‘tricky’ and ‘time consuming’; as each year she will only have to ‘update them rather than have to build them again.’
She describes her colleagues as being ‘afraid’ of computers, and seeing much ICT as unreachable in terms of the skills needed to use it, but Rosa disagrees: ‘They think that it makes life more difficult but it’s vice versa’. Rosa has attended quite a few courses at OUCS to improve her ICT skills. She feels that greatest, and indeed only, support she gets is from the Computing Services because she knows ‘people there personally’ to ask questions. She feels that there is little interest in her own faculty. She has tried a number of times to bring up the idea of an ‘IT and teaching working group’ but has been met with little enthusiasm from the IT committee. She wants to further her ICT and teaching skills and teach people what she has learned, saying ‘if they saw how practical and enjoyable it is they would be interested.’ She has asked to join the IT committee but again has had no response and feels that this may be links to her gender and her age. She feels annoyed that she cannot share her ideas and learn from her peers.
When Rosa has a new idea concerning ICT she first tries the relevant technologies herself to see if it is practical and feasible. She asks people who ‘know IT’ for advice. Rosa is pleased that she has successfully been allocated development time from the University’s Academic Computing Development Team (ACDT) to develop some language-learning games, but this is an issue that her project requires web hosting. As her faculty do not have a server she may be forced to use the VLE which she feels will not let her do what she wants to do with her project. Rosa feels that there are not enough incentives for individuals to develop the use of IT in their teaching: ‘they won’t use it if it means extra work with no reward, not unless they are really passionate about it’. Rosa really wants to start to use ‘digital books,’ films and TV to help her teach Turkish language and culture, but she has nowhere to store these objects (the files being too large for the VLE). She also wants to create Flash quizzes as a means of formative assessment. She has them on paper but does not know how to transfer them to a computer.