Twitter - making ELT on trend!!!

Almost everyone has a Twitter account now. You can find almost everything ranging from your friends' most recent status to private lives of Hollywood stars. Although being criticised for amplifying mundane, Twitter is a very powerful sharing community where teachers can find a constant supply of useful articles, website links, lesson plans and many more. Indeed, some teachers have already taken advantage of the Twitter's format to keep their classes engaged and up-to-date on the latest technologies. Like what the famous educator, Russell Standard said, "[Twitter] could replace regular search engines as a means of finding classroom ideas".

Blendspace for blended learning

As the use of internet and technology becomes more and more popular, incorporating digital and online materials in education is apparently inevitable. Therefore, we have the idea of blended learning. It is a formal education program in which e-learning is combined with traditional classroom teaching and self-learning to create a more flexible learning environment for students to learn in their own pace.

Why blended learning?

• less expensive to deliver, affordable and saves time
• flexible - students can access to the materials from anywhere at any time
• students can access to global resources that suit their needs and levels
• students cam learn at their own pace so it can reduce stress and increase sense of satisfaction
• without face-to-face interaction, students may be more willing to interact with other learners and their instructors through email, discussion boards and chat room.
• can track the progress 
• help students to develop knowledge of the latest technologies and the Net

An ELT blog that cannot be missed!

I've been blogging for quite a while. From time to time, I will browse others' ELT blogs to get some inspirations. This blog, Nik's Learning Technology Blog, is the one that I particularly like.

This blog suggests many useful technological tools with step-by-step instructions that teachers can use to help with their teaching. 

Why is it good?

 

Voicethread - An Authentic Listening and Speaking Tool

Whenever I use those listening exercise books to practise listening with my students, both the students and I will feel meh. 

"Again? These are brainless exercises!" 

"It always slows down and emphasizes the answers for a few times! Nothing is challenging!" 

"I don't want to just sit here and listen to the tape for the whole lesson..."

Students feel the exercises are tedious and easy, but there are really no better listening exercises I can find in the market for them. Yet, they know that they have to drill their listening skills in order to excel in the public exams. Therefore, they just force themselves to concentrate in class until they eventually doze off. This vicious cycle really bothers me a lot until I was introduced this tool, VoiceThread.

What is VoiceThread?

VoiceThread is a cloud application (i.e. no software needed to be installed) which allows group conversations from anywhere in the world in a central place. It basically is a collaborative, multimedia slideshow that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to browse the slides and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (by a microphone, phone or web camera), texts or by uploading an audio file. Users can share the slideshow by sending others the link or embedding it on your own social media page.

The above video can give you a brief introduction of VoiceThread.

WebQuest - A new way of self-learning

In this Internet era, all students can get access to all sorts of information easily. It leads teachers to think about how to make use of this channel to help students learn. That's how all sorts of self-learning research and projects that students have to do begin. Yet for most of the time, students will just directly copy what they found on the Internet. So at the end of the day, they cannot learn anything and have no awareness about the importance of intellectual property. WebQuest can solve this problem yet serving the purpose of having students to think critically and synthesis their own arguments.

So what is WebQuest?

WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most of or all of the information that learners work with come from the web. Rather than simply presenting establish facts, a WebQuest starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios, in which students have to identify and research issues and questions to develop their knowledge or solutions. Most of the time, teachers will provide some useful links in a WebQuest to assist students with their research.