Vance's website: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/4631/esl_home.htm
Email vstevens@emirates.net.ae

This handout at http://www.netword.com/vance@tesol2000zu

This session intends to cover, in a brief hour, several tools found useful in synchronous mode online language learning. These tools have used to great effect in the online class Writing for Webheads This class, is conducted as a hobby by the presenter in conjunction with two other teachers (Margaret Doty and Michael Coghlan, never met personally). The WFW class has been meeting regularly and developing a strengthening sense of community together continually since 1998.

The following has been prepared to briefly overview and demonstrate the freely downloadable online synchronous communications tools we have used over the past year during the course of this class.

3 ICQ accounts were set up and installed on 3 laptops with dialup connections. The instructor is using his own ICQ number 2774215:

3 Email accounts were set up at hotmail.

An egroup was set up via http://www.egroups.com. Called zu2000tesol, it is reachable at zu2000tesol@egroups.com

The three email accounts were subscribed to the egroup

Passwords were obtained for the egroup accts by visiting http://www.egroup.com and following simple instructions after clicking on the word: forgot?

The hotmail and egroups accts were all visited, to clear all the subscription offers at both sites.

Passwords for the hotmail and egroups accounts were all set the same (an egroup name is the subscribing email address, and the egroup site is accessible by means of the name and password)

The following programs were installed on 4 computers:

ICQ from http://www.mirabilis.com

The Palace from http://www.thepalace.com (we had trouble downloading the latest and are using a 1997 client installation)

Two browsers, Netscape and IE. Of the two, IE is likely the most current.

To make web access more "friendly" I created "networds" for the following urls:

To make a netword, visit http://www.netword.com

To use a netword, either go to the url above and enter a netword, or the url above slash netword; e.g.

Finally, I invited the teachers and students of the online class Writing for Webheads to join us.

• By the time the session begins, the presenter will have tried to make contact with the teachers and students in the class. Normally, this is how we do it:
• We log on the Internet
• ICQ starts automatically. We have entered each other in our "buddy lists" so we look to see who is online.
• We steer each other to the following locations:
• Lately, our meeting place of choice is the voice chat room at http://www.netword.com/webheads_voicechat. This room is ok if everyone has a version 4+ browser and a sound card. Mic is not absolutely necessary since if you can hear, what is being said, you can respond in text chat.

• If anyone has difficulty with the voice chat, we retreat to the text chat room at http://www.netword.com/webheads_textchat

• If possible, we meet at the Palace. This is the text chat venue of choice. Instructions for reaching the Palace chat area can be found at http://www.netword.com/webheads_chatclass

Three members of the audience will emulate a class of students.

The "students" can log on to their email accounts. They should have messages waiting from their egroup. They can dash off replies to their egroup.

The student can visit http://www.egroups.com and log in giving their email address and password. They can ENTER the chat.

The students will now visit the Palace. We will try for campus.thecampus.com on port 9998. Once there, let's meet in the Kiosk (if lost: Options / Goto Room / Kiosk 130)

The students can then attempt to meet at the text chat room, http://www.netword.com/webheads_textchat and the voice chat room at http://www.netword.com/webheads_voicechat

The amazing thing about these two chat clients is their simplicity of creation.

• The text chat was created by visiting http://www.homestead.com, using the page builder on the web site, and dragging a chat icon onto it.
• The voice chat was created by visiting http://www.hearme.com and registering for emailed code which is simply cut and paste into notepad, saved as an html document, and uploaded to any website. Anyone who visits the url can use the chat.

You can browse around the Writing for Webheads site at http://www.netword.com/webheads to get some idea of how the class is conducted.

You can visit the following urls to try to download the real videos illustrating our attempts to communicate audioVISUALLY via freely available Real products:

• Vance at http://members.tripod.com/vstevens/efi/welcome.htm
• Felix at http://members.tripod.com/vstevens/efi/felix_see.htm
• Michael's Real Slideshow presentation: http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/Sound_Files/adelaide.htm