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.
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.
