Clicknlearn is an interactive language learning website which promotes autonomy in learners through its interactive presentation, games and exercises. The lessons are constructed using tests of ESOL and BAT as main agenda. There are six levels- four ESOL for primary and secondary education and two BAT for prepraration into tertiary education. In each level, it is further divided into three categories-easy, intermediate, and difficult.
How to use it??? Let's watch the tutorial!!
Application in language teaching:
Preliminary activity to introduce the new topic/lesson.
Preliminary activity to activate their schemata of the previous lesson.
Weekly Quiz. for example, at the end of the week, students are given quiz using this website to test students' understanding of the week's lesson.
Homework for students. This helps to reinforce knowledge learning.
Advantages:
The are six main levels, where in each level , students can choose the activity according to its difficulty level.
The topics are arranged accordingly to each level which suit learners in general to their age.
The activities are interactive and context-based.
It uses functional approach in teaching language.
The documents can be printed. As source of note or further reference for students.
The instructions are clear and easy to understand.
Disadvantages and limittations:
Insynchronize use of keyboard typing and mouse click for data entry. The repetitive need to use mouse click instead of Enter keyboard to submit the answer, after having typed the answer using keyboard is tiring after a while.
Some exercise cannot be skipped and must be finished till the end. This would demotivate students to continue playing the exercises as their motivation to explore and preview the lesson is hindered.
Some of the exercises are content- based which without prior knowledge/presentation is difficult to answer.
Breakingnewsenglish offers language learning with abundant sources of authentic materials which comes together with the latest news.The activities are developed from the news updated from Breakingnews website. This offers authentic language use to students in their learning or in other words, learning in contexts, which makes the lesson more motivating.
Application in language teaching:
Ready materials for language exercises, which can be used whether as pre, while, or post activities.
complete activities which are arranged to scaffold learning
As homeworks or optional exercises for students who want to improve their language skills.
Advantages:
Real world materials and contexts. Therefore, students are exposed to variety of knowledge/contents.
The materials and exercises are free and do not need signup.
Students can do the activities by themselves as answers are provided. This features allows students to foster autonomy in their language learning.
The activities covers listening skills, reading skills, grammar, and vocabulary(spell and words).
There learning activities are conducted in form of games which is fun and interesting for students. This aspect raises motivation in students which eases the language learning process.
The activities stimulates quick thinking, which is a crucial element in language classroom which hinders monotonous and boring perception of language learning.
Disadvantages:
Requires internet connection
Lack of interactivity@interaction or activities which support communication. Therefore, one aspect of language skill-speaking skills are not really developed. Teachers need to adapt the materials to overvcome this issue.
Lack animation and colours which after a while brings off the mood.
Mybrainshark is a site which allows normal presentation to be an audio presentation. This would include powerpoint presentation, video, document, photo album and even podcast.
Application in language teaching:
For teacher:
As an alternative to classroom teaching.For example, in case where teacher needs to go to short course, students can continue their lesson by accessing this audio presentation at the computer lab instead of having replacement teacher giving random exercises.
For students:
Classroom activities:
a) Story-telling. Students work in groups. They need to create their own story in form of either PowerPoint presentation,video,photo album. Then, one student as a narrator, the others as characters in the story and they need to voice over the characters which they records in their presentation. This is done in classroom and their final works are then send to teacher and class blog. This activity promotes colloborative learning through the process of discussing their story and assigning roles, which also helps to develop their communicative competence, creativity and teamwork.
b)Giving feedback. Students comment on each others' works. This helps them to reflect on their own learning in which metacognition awareness is raised, further enhances learning.
2. Outside classroom activity:
Enable students to practise pronunciation and tones in presentation before the actual presentation. As they do this, they are more aware of the language use and mistakes since they would usually check their presentation before saving it. This deepen learning as they are able to reflect and raise their metacognitive awareness(Krashen 1985). Another aspects of improvement are fluency, motivation and confidence .
Advantages:
The account is free and has access to other presentations of various range of topics.This access could be utilised by creating activities using the various presentations available.
The works can be shared and tracked. This allows teacher to monitor and check individuals works while students can learn from each others' works.
Fosters creativity in students and active engagement in creating the tasks. Since they can hear their own voice which suggests that their works are being heard, they would be more motivated to do the tasks as the sense of ownership is increasing.
Encourages shy and intimidate students to try speaking and presenting since there is no face to face audiences.This helps to build their confidence.
Disadvantages and limitations:
The unfinished presentation cannot be saved and edited later. It will automatically saved as finished presentation. Therefore,if students want to edit the presentation, they need to do the recording again from beginning.
The audio for each slide on its own cannot be edited at specific minutes. Users need to repeat the recording from the beginning if want to edit the audio.
The session is limited and users need to login again after certain time. This could disrupt the project progress as any unfinished project will be saved automatically and they need to start again from beginning.
Wordsift is a learning tool which main function is to summarise text into keypoints in form of word clouds. The site also provides additional tools in relation to the text 'sifted' where it draws the mind map of the keypoints, provides alternative links and videos as further references, a thesaurus, and a dictionary with examples of sentences from the text.
Application in language teaching:
For teacher:
Helps teacher in the process of designing and adapting materials. As teachers need to select the suitable materials, wordsift helps in skimming and scanning process.This means, teachers are able to have general view of texts through the word clouds which saves time for teachers.
The site also provides several other references/articles related to the text as alternative or further readings. This provides teachers with alternative of variaty of texts to choose from if the selected text is not suitable, which saves time for teacher to search for new article.
For students:
Pre-writing/pre-reading:
a) Guess the content of the text from the word clouds. This activity can be used as pre-writing activity to activate students' schemata.
b) In groups, asks students to read an article and list out keypoints of
the article. Then, asks them to compare and discuss their lists.
Finally, teacher gives them the word clouds to confirm their lists.
2. Writing activity:
Create a story using the word clouds. This activity helps to develop students'cognitive ability since they need to use all the words in the word class to create a whole new story. The process is similar to matching up pieces of jigsaw puzzle.
3. Speaking activity:
Match pictures with suitable word clouds and justify. In groups, students are to match given picture with several word clouds. After they have chosen the suitable one, they are to justify and present their choice with other groups. This activity allows discussion which helps to develop communicative competence and stimulate their cognitive ability.
4. Vocabulary learning
Fill in the blanks with suitable words. This activity can be done either as pre-writing/pre-reading activity or as post-activity where it supports vocabulary learning through the contextualisation of the words from the examples from the text and helps reinforcement of the vocabulary memorization if done in post activity .
Advantages:
It is free and no need to sign up or have accounts.
Teacher can custom own wordlists into word clouds.
The words can be sorted out in few categories which includes common to rare, rare to common, A to Z, and Z to A.
The words can be identified according to genre or subjects such as Social Science, Mathematics and Language. This helps students to understand words use according to its contexts.
There is workspace available if teachers want to use it. This workspace could ease students' note taking or copy some exercises.
Examples from text of selected word, which provides students its contextualised word use.
Thesaurus and mind map at hand to foster study skills and encourage autonomous learning by students.
Disadvantages:
The design of the word clouds is simple and of only one colour. This issue is resolved by alternative site which is Wordle, which offers more designs for the word clouds. Below is an example:
Need to have suitable Java software, which is a hassle as one needs to download it if their computer/laptop do not have it.
TodaysMeet is a virtual, backchannel chat room which allows students to speak, give comments and ask questions at the same time and for teachers to conduct discussion in realtime without interference of raised hands or students disruption. It is free and requires no account or passwords, only the url for anyone to join the room.Once there, students login to Todays Meet simply by typing their name
and clicking Join.
Application in language teaching:
Online discussion
Brainstorming
Revision
Language assessment
Advantages:
Easy to use interface
Allows every students to participate actively in the discussion at the same time.
Previous points or ideas can be retraced and acts as notes.
Can decide how long the room is active-no need for hassle to deactivate it.
Disadvantages and limitations:
Need for every students to have resources to the Internet or mobile devices.
Responses are limited to 140 words or less. There is no development to the points given.
Minimize real face to face interaction between teacher to students and students to students. This could hinder development of students' communicative competence.
Dvolver is an animated moviemaker which allows students to practice making dialogue in contexts. This software provides basic elements of a story such as characters, background settings, and plot where students can choose from the various selection and create their own dialogues to make up their own stories. The step by step procedure eases its use for the students while allowing them to share their works at the end of the movie, which helps teacher to evaluate students' work directly.
Application in language teaching:
Teacher can demonstrate language functions such as inviting, describing, and persuading to the students through dialogues more effectively as it depicts real life situations.
Teacher could ask students to share their works and comment on each others works.
Class project or group work on making a movie sets on certain themes and language points learnt each week.
Advantages:
It allows for learning language in contexts.
It encourages creativity in the students as they can play around with the animation to create their own dialogues and stories.
It is fun, interactive and engaging for the students since they have control and choices of their own works/learning.
It helps in language learning as it caters different learning styles(multiple intelligences), especially visual and music intelligences.
It is free, easy,and quick to use, thus avoids much time spent for teaching the procedures.
Students can share their works by sending emails and able to have immediate responses through the comment section below it.
Disadvantages:
The characters' lines do not match with their expressions and there is no voice when they are talking. Thus, students cannot learn pronunciation.
Some of the characters' profiles are not appropiate to Malaysian context as they could be opposing the mainstream culture.
