Case Study 2.1: Telecollaboration at a secondary
school in Egypt
Ayat Al-Tawel has been a teacher of English for more than ten years and teaches
at the Baby Home Language School in Cairo, Egypt. She teaches English to lower
secondary learners, with the average class size being 28–30 students and the
language level of the learners ranging from pre-intermediate to intermediate level.
There is an internet-enabled computer lab in the school, but Ayat doesn’t have a
computer in the classroom, so she uses her own laptop. Recently, the school bought
a projector which she sometimes uses in class with her laptop.
Ayat first became interested in using technology with her learners when she joined
the TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) Electronic Village
Online (EVO) session ‘Becoming a Webhead’ (BaW) in January 2011. The TESOL EVO
is organised by TESOL’s CALL Interest section and run by volunteers. For five weeks
at the beginning of the year, participants can engage with experts in collaborative,
online discussion sessions or hands-on virtual workshops of professional and
scholarly benefit. The BaW EVO session is an introduction to Webheads in Action,
a long-standing Community of Practice of language teachers worldwide which
developed out of a session in the first TESOL EVO. Since then (in 2002), ‘the
Webheads in Action community members continued to interact and learn from each
other, prompting work on projects of mutual interest in spontaneous development
of what we have come to call a community of practice’ (Stevens, 2004: 204). Since
taking the EVO session, Ayat has done a number of projects with her learners, and
became a moderator of the BaW EVO session in January 2011.