I have been going through a website that supposedly is designed for students to learn and practice English as a foreign language in Japan, but the site also encourage young native speakers (English) to play the games and learn from the activities. I do not want to criticize the website, because I am sure that many children can learn something from it, but I would not use these kinds of websites in my English teaching classroom. The reasons are first of all that the games ask you to complete different quizzes and will off course only provide you with right or wrong answer and no explanation. If you happen to answer wrong you get minus points, leading to that this could be a very negative experience for the student if he/she can not complete one question, and looses all the points he/she already made.
I also question why we need to use a computer to play games like “Hangman” or “Matching pairs”, when those are perfect examples of activities for children to communicate around in pairs or groups. Along with “Hangman” the board game “Guess who?” is a fantastic way to communicate, describe and be comfortable while learning. “Guess who?” can also be transformed and the pictures can be changed with different themes and why not play the game live with the students being the “bricks”?
(foto by:unloveablesteve, flickr.com)
(picture posted according to copyrights)
I would want my students to communicate to learn English. I want them to talk, write and explore how to use the language in a creative way and that is why I would use a blog in the English education. For the students to have their own blog would give them the opportunity to write in the blog about matters that they believe is important and to use the English language for something that they are interested in. The blog posts will also be up for discussion with the class and social, global and multimedia ethics would be thought. Many schools and classes write articles and make newspapers, to use the blog we would enter a more environment friendly zone and also gives the parents the opportunities to have a direct access to the children’s development and work.
I am also very keen on the idea to have the blog on the class website (where information, forms, homework and week letters and planning would be posted) so that is will be a natural part of what they already would be used to. To create a website like that you can very easy use weebly.com ( http://education.weebly.com). Smart, environment friendly and easy for most of the families today, who use email and internet in work and in private everyday. For those families who do not have the opportunities to enter the website at work or at home will off course be provided with a paper copy of the news and the weekly letter, so no obligations, no pressure for families.
In short the resource would be a blog created at either weebly.com or blogger.com or any other free blog network. The blog will work as forum to post text, poems, news, work and information about other activities that happened in the English classroom. The students know that there is a receiver for their work, and will therefore make a bigger effort when creating. The students will always have the opportunities to publish their work and that will make them proud. To make this work we need a computer with internet access and the above mentioned blog account (and possibly a digital camera to post pictures on the blog to make it visually come alive)
For me as a teacher I will have access to all the texts written by each student in one place, giving me the opening to easy evaluate and to see progress in the work. The blog would be a tool for helping the students to see their own progress, with will help me as a teacher to motivate them. Me, as the teacher also has the responsibility to make sure that no pictures of the children (without parental approval) are being posted and that all text is correct and representative is the blog.
The students will write and publish real information, example a post about last week’s fieldtrip, give grades on the food in the cafeteria, tell about something they find important and discuss world news etc. the students will know that they always have a receiver and will be published and that their job is important and will not just end up in a pile or draw of old texts (like too many texts do now unfortunately). Education and knowledge about layout, fonts and esthetics will also be a part of the blog. How do we attract readers? How can we make the post look as good as possible? The students will feel important and the work they do will always feel meaningful.
POSTED BY: THERESE BOLIN
No comments:
Post a Comment