Week 2: The teacher gives lectures, students discuss questions with peers or the teacher
Week 3: ...
Well, do you remember what you did this semester? What have you discussed so far? Which lesson impresses you the most? 😲😲
Unless the topic truly interests you, otherwise you probably feel hard to answer these questions. Why? One reason might be a lack of new ways of interaction as we are always in a context where one asks something and the other gives a response orally.
Some people say our comfort zone cannot accurately distinguish our likes from dislikes, which means if we don't try something new, we won't know which kind of interaction has a better effect on our study. 😏😏
As technologies have an ever-changing effect on the education area, it's possible to involve online teaching intervention in the traditional face-to-face classroom.
Today I am going to analyze an app that provides online teaching assistance for adding interaction, which is 'H5P'. 👉https://h5p.org/
This application is a platform to create many interactive tasks such as interactive videos, games and presentations etc. There are various types of tasks associated with crosswords, dialogue cards, drag and drop and so forth (as shown in the screenshot).
By well-integrating tasks with lesson topic and content, students could engage in different activities as knowledge practice after watching the instructive video about the main content. Briefly take my work as an example, I design two tasks for my assumed learner group to write a short essay to describe the steps of doing something.
The process that I would like students to describe is about how to cook food. Thus, it is necessary to be familiar with new words in the chosen online recipe. I create a match game that helps students to memorize vocabulary in the preparation phase.
Then I design an interactive reading, whereby students are able to know what this dish looks like and learn its ingredients and cooking steps by clicking different labels on the picture.
In this phase, students paraphrase information about the cooking process and generate ideas for their drafts.
It seems that this tool is hard to handle :(
Don't worry, there's a button that leads you to the tutorial webpage on the design page of each content. The instruction on how to create an interactive task of this type couldn't have been more detailed.
Relevant to Language Learning
To be honest, this H5P is available for a lot of disciplines since its role is to provide many interactive choices for teachers to implement in the classroom.
If we integrate these tasks into language learning, they can be used to stress different skills. For example,
1. activities like dictation and dialogue cards which usually attach pronunciation of words or dialogue are used to train learners' listening skills
2. games such as drag and drop, fill in blank and image paring are used to assist meaning comprehension, an important part of reading skills
3. tool like chart, Cornell notes provided for students is helpful for essay drafting in order to improve their writing skills
4. there are also tasks like 'answer a question using your voice to practice the learner's speaking skills
How to use it to foster language learning?
1. Think about which language skills you would like my students to improve
If you like to promote their reading skills, then as I mentioned above, you can choose some games to familiarize them with the new words. In addition, you can design an interactive book to stimulate their interest in reading. In the interactive book, students do not simply read the paragraphs by order and then do the quizzes when finish reading, rather, they explore the reading in fun as different parts of the content is hidden in buttons on the picture.
2. Considering the age group
While some tasks contain a large part of text instead of images, images may also occupy a lot of space compared to text in other types of tasks on the other hand. We know that kids or young learners tend to be attracted by colourful pictures but too many pictures in a task might be childish for adult learners. Therefore, task like image paring is suitable for younger learners and adult learner require activities that include more text.
Limitation
😭 Time-consuming
If you are a beginner at this application, oops, I beg you have to spend much time learning about how it works before you engage students in various ways because every content has its design page with different rules and different settings. It's slightly unfriendly for teachers who get started with technology a little slowly.
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