Milli mála - 2019, Page 70

70 Milli mála 11/2019
TELECOLLABORATION HI-UB
provided a good emotional atmosphere and fostered their motivation
towards the telecollaboration project.22
As the group at HI was smaller than the one at UB, each HI
student was paired with one or two UB students for this first task.
The following week, HI students were asked to have a videoconfe-
rence using Skype or Google Hangouts with their partner or part-
ners. They were asked to share personal pictures related to different
times in their lives (in order to encourage them to talk about a mean-
ingful topic). This was used as an ice-breaking task but also allowed
UB students to perform a needs analysis,23 which means that they
could find out what HI students needed to improve (vocabulary ac-
quisition, grammar accuracy, pronunciation and intonation and so
on) so that they could accordingly could take action and design activi-
ties that would help the students in Iceland to improve.
4.2. Task 2. Everything you always wanted to know about …
The communication channel for this task was conducted through the
WhatsApp messaging service. The main objective consisted in the
exploration of forms of multimodal communication and its teaching.
The first step of this task consisted in establishing a discussion to
choose a sociocultural theme about the other students’ countries and
cultures that might have aroused their curiosity and interest. Once
these topics were identified, the students paired up and divided in
groups of 4 (two students from the UB and two from HI) in order to
create a short video about the chosen topic and share it with their
classmates from the other university. As they were using WhatsApp,
the supervisor teachers recommended the students to record videos
with a length that would suit this messaging service, which means
between 3 and 4 minutes.
The pre-service teachers also had to consider possible didactic exp-
lorations that could be carried out through these visual narratives.
22 J. T. Pujolá, O. Espejel and P. Concheiro. (2019). “First Encounters in a Virtual Exchange Project:
Analysis of Students’ Interactions and Their Reflections.“ Proceedings Social CALL, pp. 227–235.
The Education University of Hong Kong. file:///C:/Users/mdc/Documents/proceedings%20
CALL%202019_DEF.pdf [accessed November 17th, 2019].
23 A need analysis tries to get information on the situations in which a language is going to be used
and the purposes for which that language is needed. This can vary from one student to another.