From the ESL Talk homepage: (link no longer functional)

1. Click on 'want to chat?' icon.

2. Wait about 2 minutes until you see the 6 chat rooms.

 

3. Click on 'The Pub'. (You could select any of the 6 rooms but today we will use The Pub.)

4. A chat dialogue box will now open.

The Chat Dialogue Box

This chat dialog box has 3 sections: On the right you see the names of the people in the chat under 'Users Logged On' On the left is the text of the conversation (Output Interaction Box) At the bottom you see 'enter your text below'. Type in what you want to communicate in the space provided. When you have finished typing what you want to say hit enter. Your next now appears in the upper left hand window and can be read by anyone else in the chat room. NB: to leave the chat room you must hit the QUIT bar.

USES OF CHAT

For and with students:

• General communication
• To gain familiarity with the medium
• Analysing discourse and grammar
• Talk to students out of hours
• Partnerships with other classes (across town, interstate, international)

For and with staff:

• General communication
• To gain familiarity with the medium
• Talk to other staff out of hours
• Meetings

THERE IS AN INTRINSIC FASCINATION WITH INTERNET CHAT BUT ITS EDUCATIONAL VALUE IS LIMITED UNLESS: there are remote participants there is a specific purpose it is limited to 6-8 students chats with more than 6-8 students need to be closely moderated Otherwise perhaps the telephone does is better! In my opinion text based chat has a limited and short term future. If more than 6-8 participants are present it can get quite chaotic. It will eventually be replaced by voice mail, voice chat and video. For my own teaching I use 3D chat in a graphic environment.

 

USING A TAFE BULLETIN BOARD

From the ESL Talk homepage: (link no longer functional)

1. Click on bulletin board icon

2. You should now see this menu in the top left corner:

2. Click on forum. You should now see a box like this:

3. Click on ELLS

4. You are now ready to contribute to the forum.

To compose a new message (thread):

• Select compose. This box should appear:

 

• Type a subject for your message in the space provided
• Type your text in the box
• Click on preview
• Edit if necessary
• When happy with text, click post.

To reply to someone else's message.

• Click on title of message you want to reply to
• Enter your text in box
• Click on preview and/or post as above.

These are the 2 basic and most common functions of this bulletin board. There are many more. If you want to know about all the other functions just click on help in the menu on the left hand side.

(This site comes from the very early days of the web and notions of internet security were still pretty vague. And as both usernames and passswords are published here it was clearly only intended for a very small audience!)

LOG INS FOR ESL TALK

1) ESL Talk Home Page - http://143.92.1.65:8900/SCRIPT/vpesl/scripts/serve_home (link no longer functional)

2) ESL_SA Mailing List

 

 

3) Michael Coghlan's Homepage - http://michaelcoghlan.net

4) Webpage for this session - michaelcoghlan.net/ELLS/conf.html

5) Powerpoint Presentation for this session

 (Page updated 19/04/20)