This site has been designed for upper-intermediate EFL/ESL students to provide an online environment to teach and learn about issues regarding endangered species. It aims to develop students' linguistic skills in English while engaging them in multimedia activities as well as real world tasks. Several compononents of hypermedia are carefully integrated into the activities and tasks; thus, the use of technology in language classrooms is intended to be promoted while students can collaboratively work on various multimedia tasks to fulfill the objectives of the lesson.

The site includes five more pages in addition to the introduction page. The mini lecture page presents a brief background by discussing major arguments; such as, what it means to be endangered, threatened, or extinct, how long the extinction has been occurring, how the current extinction rates are, and finally the possible reasons for extinction. This page will help students have a general understanding as well as provide exploitable data for the further activities within the lesson. In addition to the mini lecture, the lesson plan page is the actual place where the objectives of the discipline and learning standards are given, the scope and sequence of the tasks and activities are ordered, the supplementary materials are displayed, and several further details regarding the teaching of the lesson are presented. An online video clip, PowerPoint slides, and an interactive map are integrated to the plan carefully in order to supplement the students learning via hypermedia. The digital story page links the lesson to a task-based hypermedia activity as the continuation of the plan. The students are instructed to prepare an “Adopt an Endangered Species” campaign in groups, which requires their collaborative work in order to create a digital story for an endangered animal by synthesizing their knowledge and information with the multimedia materials on the WWW. While being engaged in the activities, the students use the target language in an authentic way in order to express their ideas, thoughts, and feelings in a socially responsible way. Following the digital story page, there is a vocabulary quiz page including a crossword puzzle to test students’ knowledge of the unknown words they have studied in the mini lecture page. The students enjoy a break while guessing the words and see how much they have learned. Finally, the sources page provides a small collection of links for further exploration of the topic through several individual and professional websites on the net.

The lesson aims to address the effective use of technology in a constructivistic learning environment. According to Boethel and Dimock (1999), a constructivistic learning environment “provides numerous opportunities for students to express their understandings, address their contexts, interests, and motivations, focuses on major concepts and big ideas, organizes instruction around learning problems that challenge their current understandings, sets intended curricular concepts in meaningful contexts, allows students explore ideas, provides access to additional information and resource materials, and fosters student dialogue as a primary instructional tool, structuring the classroom to facilitate both student-to-student and student-to-teacher dialogue” (p. 15). All these strategies are carefully taken into consideration during the material design processes. While achieving these objectives for an ideal educational setting, another significant aspect of hypermedia, the issue of addressing multiple intelligences, is concentrated on. The lesson enables diverse learners to get engaged in a series of activities according to their skills, especially the final project “Adopt an Endangered Species Campaign” offers various roles for linguistic, spatial, musical, and interpersonal intelligences.

I hope this website will serve EFL teachers as a useful online environment with rich multimedia content and provide numerous opportunities for EFL students while learning the language in a much more enjoyable way.

Thank you for taking time to explore my website.

Ozan Varli
State University of New York
Albany, NY

For further information, please feel free to contact me.

References:

Boethel, M., & Dimock, K. V. (1999). Constructing knowledge with technology. Austin, Texas: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.