c. Selecting ICT Resources

The teacher in the case study is completely at home with the skills behind most of the options we have looked at above, though he has limited knowledge of PowerPoint and is likely to be shown things by pupils as much as the other way around. He has used practical games, already has some word-processed materials, he has seen some good sites on the World Wide Web, and he knows how to use a CD-ROM.

You may not be in the same positions as he is, so we shall look at the options in the context of your school and your experience. Think about the following points as they apply to you:

Use discussion only, and not use any ICT (or other technology) at all.
I have a bit of a problem with this (I would say that, wouldn't I?) in as much as my own experience of working with this area of work is that it is both hugely enjoyable - on its own, without technology - and very challenging for young people. Especially in terms of the objectives set for this case study, there are some interesting ways of using ICT to play games and generate models that we shall see as we go along. For this reason, and because you and your pupils will come up with further ideas of your own once you have seen the basic idea at work in the case study, I would not want to discount ICT altogether.

Use a word processor package to create worksheets on the area of work.
Here the question is one of how much the pupils will learn, retain and organise if the teacher spends his time on creating learning and testing resources using a word-processor, and how much they would have done so anyway. My own view is that it need not take much time to create high quality learning resources that integrate text, graphics and other stimuli - flow charts and tables, for example, that illustrate processes and products. It also seems likely that the time spent on creating high quality resources of the sort the teacher wants is likely to be returned in the adaptability and re-usability of the resources.

Undertake a practical exercise based on the game 'Chinese Whispers' and introduce a variety of sentence and message types to it.
Most of us have done this, and it is often enjoyable and capable of generating interesting and engaged responses to the practical questions of communication. I have just two problems with it. Firstly, it is as unpredictable as all acts of group communication, and the points that we want to illustrate are not always generated by the game. Secondly, because it is practical, there has to be a jump from the exercise to the understanding of the principles that not all pupils appreciate. I still play the game, and still enjoy it, but I also now use the electronic game where I want to get more reliable results in terms of pupils' understanding of the principles and in terms of their ability to model and control communication in line with the principles.

Use the World Wide Web to gather resources.
The way this case study works is not so much by gathering resources from the web as by using a specific range of facilities on the web for purposes quite different from those for which they were designed. I am referring here to the on-line translation services that you will find referenced later in the case study. These services are generally very poor at doing what they are suppose to do - providing immediate translations between languages - but it is this that makes them excellent for a game of Electronic Chinese Whispers. By in-putting a variety of sentences for translation between languages, and by varying the sentences, the languages and the translation engines themselves, we can illustrate important points about communication in a single language.

Have pupils present their findings through a PowerPoint classroom presentation, and/or send this presentation to other schools/organisations for sharing and discussion.
However pupils formulate ideas, you can have them use PowerPoint not only to express and exchange the ideas but also to provide the modeling and controlling element of the work. The supplementary resource that comes with this case study provides the beginnings of an example of a PowerPoint presentation that collates the various types of translation error into a model of the sorts of things that can go wrong between speakers of the same language. The basic types of errors are:

• Sentence length - this is achieved by simply inserting lists into sentences to complicate the translation engine's job and add time to the task.
• Sentence complexity - this is achieved by adding clauses to the sentence.
• Ambiguity in language items - words or phrases - this is achieved by using words we know have several meanings when translated into French, German or Spanish, or by introducing idioms.
• Number of communication acts - this is achieved by putting the same sentence through a number of translation acts - from English to French to German and back to English, for example.
• Communication context - this is achieved by varying the translation service - there are several on-line, and the differences between them can be quite marked even at simple vocabulary/simple sentence levels.

Now that you've looked at my ideas about the options available, you need to make your own choices. The teacher in the case study has decided to use all options including PowerPoint, and to combine two or more in particular sessions over a two-week period. You need to plan to do something of this sort. On the next page, make a copy and fill out the summary to help you get focus on what you will do. I've put in some suggestions - you can use these as you like. Think of some uses of your own, and make a short note on what you will have to do to make it work, what you expect the benefit to be to your pupils, and what difficulties you expect to encounter when you do it in the classroom.

Resources Selected for Work on Electronic Chinese Whispers