Dubai – Japan Virtual International Exchange

1. Dubai – JapanVirtual International Exchange by Nicole Shammas and Jumana Tarazi

2. Dubai-Japan VIE • The virtual international exchange (VIE) took place between Dubai Women’s College Bachelor Year One students and mixed level Japanese students from Osaka Gakuin University from October – December 2011. • JALT (Japan Association of Language Teachers), good resource for finding exchange partners. • We will discuss why we embarked on this exchange, what it involved, how we implemented it and present student feedback.

3. VIE Goals To use technology to link English language students in Dubai and Japan to promote cultural awareness and understanding in a global environment. To explore the use of technology in an English language collaborative process with a focus on improving students’ accuracy in spoken and written English.

4. Why a virtual international exchange? a VIE is the ideal platform to develop cultural awareness, polish IT skills, build core soft skills For example: Empathy Build confidence Social graces/Conversational etiquette Critical thinking Improve English language skills

5. What did we do exactly? Our counterpart in Japan (Laura Markslag) and our-selves did very similar activities with our students in preparing them for this VIE Students were shown pictures of Japan followed with a discussion of what we knew and what we wanted to know. Students wrote introductions and asked questions to their Japanese partner which were posted on Ning - a social networking site. Students identified and corrected mistakes in their postings

8. What did we do exactly? Example of a posting on Ning

9. What did we do exactly? Example of a ‘flourishing’ interaction between Dalal from Dubai and Yoshihiro from Japan

10. What did we do exactly? We had two synchronous meetings during the exchange where Gmail was used for video conferencing (more later) In the first meeting students met in groups as it would be less intimidating one group at a time it gave other students valuable ‘viewing time’. The second meeting we had was intentionally more focused students talked about their favorite cultural object. session was one on one, with students conversing in front of the whole class with their classmates listening

11. How did we do it? For video conferencing, we used the voice and video chat tool that is integrated into Gmail Easy to install and use. Our counterpart in Japan also installed the plug-in and after a few quick steps, we were able to start a video conversation. Watch VIE Video

12. How did we do it? Used Ning as a social networking site secure and easy to use in terms of navigation and organization. We then set up two groups to allow students to correspond with their counterparts in Japan. Students were sent invitations to the site Students created their postings without prior training as most of them were familiar with online social inter-action. To ensure that our students were safe online, we conducted an Internet safety workshop that was also prepared by CALM (Ed Tech department). Ning Site Demo

13. Student Feedback Students’ feedback from this exchange was overwhelmingly positive 93% of our students indicating that they found the exchange to be excellent over-all. 87% of the students indicated that they would recommend the site to others 80% found that it was easy to use the Google/video chat tool. Watch feedback video

14. Conclusion Soft skills taught in this exchange are fundamental to learning. They teach our young Emirati women to be: Mature Self-aware Reflective Open-minded Confident For teachers Fun to teach Inspiring Teaching in a multicultural vs. monocultural environment A lot to set up but very rewarding!

15. Thank You