English language school in the heart of the Japanese Alps, and English language learners sharing their experiences online. Teachers post regular items about teaching, learning tools, events in the school, their day to day experiences living & working in a foreign country. Students post on whatever takes their fancy - book reports, festivals in home towns, postcards from business trips etc. A little Brit of England in the guts of Japan!
Showing posts with label iOS in the classroom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iOS in the classroom. Show all posts
One of the things I like to do with my YLE classes is to review a graded reader by reading it badly. Sounds a bit daft I know, but for my way of thinking, if the teacher's making mistakes, it's alright if the kids do too!
This works as a listening exercise, as well as a (mostly) model for pronunciation, and gives learners time to think about the words & be reassured with how they will say them. No more than one 'mistake' at a time is challenge enough.
Importantly, reading out loud is not 'a test' or final proof of understanding, internalising the vocab etc. It is hard to do, as we are doing different things to reading silently (eg skipping words we are not sure about, just like the teacher told us to do!). Of course, I would like the higher frequency words to have gone in & be recyclable by now, but new ones (eg met for this first time in this book such as 'whale') or hard ones (eg 'through') ain't no biggie if we need help. Help provided to if, as in this case, we are a weaker class and struggle a bit with confidence. Nudging along and finishing is an important landmark for us all - no need to sweat on the hurdles.
With 'good' learners who take things in quickly and get bored easily when you (teacher) want to slow things down & make sure stuff has 'gone in properly' rather than in one ear & out the other, it is difficult to find ways to make the slowing down part interesting & engaging.
Hello iOS devices in the classroom. I am saving up for an iPad, as I am convinced these are a very cool & adaptable tool for learners. Am also convinced kids do not need convincing (or even teaching how to use them - I saw a report recently that kids in Ethipia were given a load of iPads but not given any instruction...they were using something like 144 apps within a week!). Three years ago I wanted to ask our parents to provide each child with an iPod Touch. I was right - we should have done (we didn't; I was argued out of it because of gamification, cost, what if not 100% adoption etc)
Anyway, now my lovely iPhone 5 arrived, can use my old 3GS at the same time in class with the wifi. Previously-created flashcard set cued up through dedicated Quizlet app and tapped where I wanted the boys to start working ("learn" function). Books open at first - new vocab after all - and left them to it. Predictably competitive, they demanded another go when done. A pained look on my face & a reluctant "OK" :) They think they are running the show!
The app corrects errors after the user has tapped 'go' - and then clears the screen for the user to input the correct answer (so pay attention - it shows you where you messed up).
The app pulls you through seven items at a time & gives you a breakdown of how you are learning - which ones you need to recycle (which it does subliminally = no teacher-heavy involovement).
Below is the set of items we were working on, from the Quizlet site. I love Quizlet for many reasons - parents love the fact we can embed into Edmodo and that they can practice at home too - the audio means they are not compromised if unable to speak English well enough themselves.
(By the way, we only 'did' one page in an hour long class with only 8 vocab items on it...)
I have been thinking about audioboo for the last week or so since I found a tweet that very interestingly reported using audioboo for error correction. I think the original idea was Steven Herder's. The main gist of that idea was to have students record themselves talking about eg a photo (and for me this immediately said "use it for FCE Speaking Test practice!") and to then write down a transcript, possibly as an out of class activity. In class? Use it as a dictation exercise but have a different student work on a recording. I like this idea because the recording is unobtrusive so would not hinder fluency, and it really does provide a healthy opportunity for refelction/peer input as to actual output.
In my class, students have already read the Story Tree graded reader at home, listened to it on CD, and worked through the accompanying workbook. The story and vocab then, is familiar several times over. Nevertheless, important to warm up before wading in to action. In our case, we listened to the story again off the CD, and followed along. Time was going to be an issue, so I did not want to do anything else at this stage, just get the story back in our heads. (With time, an extra resource used would have been Quizlet - key vocab exercise or two).
Preparation: which took 10 minutes typing as quickly as possible, inputting the entire text of the story into Wordle. Important: avoid capitalisation except for names, otherwise you'll get replication in your cloud which is unnecessary/confusing. Here is the wordle on the left.
Word clouds explained: An image is generated of the words found in a
text. Size of the words repesents the relative frequency that those
words occur in the text. This works very nicely with graded readers
which recycle vocabulary/phrases a lot.
I strongly recommend using eg Tagxedo instead of Wordle! There is more variety in the templates etc, and you can save your wordclouds as jpegs etc. Wordles once created cannot be searched i.e. fairly useless if you want to go back later & use again. Embedding here has also given me formatting headaches :(
NB Orientate most/all the words horizontally for young learners, and see if you can find a decent font that does not have unfriendly /a/ or /g/ etc. (I couldn't find one on Wordle)
Cover the words in the readers, and just use the pictures (as cues). Explain that you want students to retell the story, using the wordle (printed out) to remind them of the words they can use.
Use audioboo app on iOS device and record (the free app allows you 5 minutes of recording time) (another recording app is fine, but the 'boo means other students can access it on their devices/at home after etc). I think with younger learners doing this as a collaborative task is a good format (or in my class, with mum). Seeing the timer run down is a good management tool to get students to 'finish' (and not dwell where they 'get stuck').
It is important that you brief the students against trying to get the story 'perfectly right' - retell it word for word as in the text. I don't think even teachers could do this! Rather, it generates in students the awareness that words 'are missing' (but that they can still narrate a story). Playing back the recording now will identify those words. With the wordle (not the text) listen to the students versions and circle the words on the wordle that they use (with older learners they could mark the word every time they used it). Obviously, teacher will need to hook up the iOS to a speaker for class to hear if this is a group exercise, and to pause regularly for students to 'replay' the soundtrack in their heads as they do a mental wordsearch.
My students really enjoyed listening to themselves and trying to figure out what they had said, and were quite critical of themselves! They were also keen to find their own 'mistakes', such as using the 'wrong' verb/noun collocation. We found that we had used some other words (not in the world) and made a little list of those. We found we had a big bunch of words that we hadn't used at all - for various reasons eg low frequency, 'new', false-friend used instead etc. In our particular case, the students had not used any of the words used in direct speech, nor the narrative verbs eg 'say', 'shout'.
This gave us an excellent excuse to read the story again! Students were asked to speak the parts of the different characters (necessitating a bit of reading ahead to recognise their parts and therefor the key words we had overlooked initially - cool!) while I narrated. This is a nice way to finish, as it gives students a polished final production - record it as an audioboo too. Ask students to 'add oomph' (not yell) - a muttered "Oh! Help!" doesn't work, does it?!
Final reminder - make sure you iOS battery doesn't run out while you are doing this (mine did, as we were reading the book again together). You will get the idea, anyway, I hope! If you want to take pictures while you are doing this, you will need another device/actual camera (recommended)!
Try this with your class - and please give me feedback!
One of the things I like to do with my YLE classes is to review a graded reader by reading it badly. Sounds a bit daft I know, but for my way of thinking, if the teacher's making mistakes, it's alright if the kids do too!
