Are you the type of teacher who is always willing to get feedback from your students and colleagues? If so, this post is for you! According to the Oxford learners' dictionary, feedback can be defined as advice, criticism or information about how good or useful something or somebody's work is. Also, feedback can take many forms such as oral, written, informal, formal, descriptive, evaluative, peer and self-assessed feedback (New South Wales University). What if I tell you that there is a website you can use to provide or receive feedback in a more interesting way? Stick around and I'll tell you more.
VideoMail.io
VideoMail.io is a web-based platform that allows users to send and receive video emails. It is free and very simple to use. All you need to do is access the website from your computer or cell phone and start to record your video emails. In order to start recording your video message, you should write your email address and the email of the person or the people you want to send the video to.
Although this platform was not designed for giving or receiving feedback. I decided to give it a try and see how it went with my students since some of them are quite shy and generally get really embarassed when they receive a feedback in front of their classmates. I used it in three ways. Firstly, to provide feedback for my students on their oral presentations and their written compositions. Secondly, to ask my students for feedback on my lessons. Thirdly, to provide their classmates with feedback - I generally ask them to choose a classmate and send them a feedback on their work. The use of VideoMail as a way to provide and receive feedback really worked in my context. My students are really engaged with this tool and it has become part of my lessons.
Positive aspects๐
It is a user-friendly platform.
It is free.
It helps the teacher to build a good rapport with shy students since the feedback is given individually and do not expose them to the whole class.
One thing to bear in mind ๐จ
The only negative aspect about videomail.io is that you can only record up to 3 minutes of video.
Let's get down to business!
Watch a simulation of a teacher providing a simple feedback for his students by using VideoMail.io.
That's all for today, guys. See you on the next post! ๐
There is always a time when we seem to get used to our teaching materials and find they are not as efficient as they used to be when we first started to use them. This feeling might be related to the content, images, activities or even to they way our students engage with these materials. When this time comes it is very wise to be prepared for allowing yourself to use extra materials that will suit your local needs and tastes. In this post, I will write about an online platform in which you can create very interesting teaching materials to use with your students inside or outside the classroom. Stick around and I'll tell you more.
The Canva platform
Canva is an online graphic design platform where you can design several types of contents from flyers to storybooks. Plus, there are many features and designs that look very professional and are very easy to work with.
How does it work?
Canva offers a lot of free templates so that you can customize according to your teaching context. All you need to do to start to use Canva is to create a free account and start to plan your design. All the information in the platform is very easy to follow. You do not need to have any expertise in design in order to start creating your materials with it. Also, you will find a huge variety of graphic elements such as images, different types of fonts as well as icons so that you can make your materials more attractive to your students.
Although I was given free access to use Canva for Education a long time ago, I was not familiar with it before coming to England. It was only when I had to create some teaching materials for two modules of my MA TESOL course that I became a fan of this fantastic design platform. I used it this term to create two different types of materials. One textbook for 3rd grade students and one storybook for children. I got really amazed at the amount of resources that are available on the Canva platform. I was able to create characters, landscapes, add audios to the materials and much more. Check some of the "masterpieces" that I created through this platform:
Storybook
Textbook
Other types of materials
Flyers
Slides
Posters
Mind maps
Positive aspects
It is a user-friendly tool.
Teachers and students can sign up for canva for education (all resources are free).
Overall, Canva is a very useful online platform where creative teachers can develop their ideas and create wonderful and meaningful teaching materials. Although material production requires a little bit of patience and time, I am quite sure that if you start using Canva to create your own teaching materials, your lessons will never be the same. Your students will certainly beneifit a lot from it and will love you FOREVER.
That's all for today! See you on the next post! ๐
Are you looking for a new tool to engage your students in your class? If the answer is a big YES, you are on the right post! Early this week, I had the opportunity to explore a bit more of an interesting online platform called Genially. Wanna know what this is? Stick around!
Genially
I first heard of Genially in 2021 when I was working in a big office in Rio and had to give a presentation to my colleagues. I remember that one of my friends had been using Genially for a while and recommend it to me. I decided to listen to her and gave it a try. I was able to create a very interesting presentation, but unfortunately it was a one-time thing and never used it again. This week I was quite surprised to come across Genially again in my ICT class. I discovered a lot of new resources in this amazing platform.
Genially is an online platform where you can create highly interactive contents. From simple picture presentations to professional animated videos. There are many ways you can use Genially in your classroom. Here are some ideas. With Genially you can create:
Quizzes
Interactive videos and images
Infographics
Portfolios
Flyers / handouts
Games
Training materials
All of these resources, if put to good use, can make our lessons more attractive and engaging to our students. All you need to do to start creating your interactive contents is to create a free account, log in and select a template related to the design you want to create.
Although the interface and the platform itself are very user-friendly, some teachers who are not used to designing powerpoint presentations may have some difficulty when it comes to customizing some of the templates available there. If you feel challenged by that, I really recommend you to watch this tutorial here.
Let's get down to business!
This week I created a funny quizz to practice the name of the professions with my students. I used a ready-made quiz template and customized it to be used in one of my lessons. This type of activity has a great potential to engage our students and bring more fun to our class. Take a look at the result:
That's all for today, guys. See you on the next post!
Are your students struggling with their pronunciation? You have tried everything but they are still stumbling over simple words? Maybe it is time to recommend some funny tools for them to brush up their pronunciation skills. I'll share with you a very interesting online pronunciation tool that I came across this week. Then stick around and I'll tell you more!
YouGlish
YouGlish is a website that works as a type of "pronunciation corpus". It has a collection of videos from YouTube with real speakers using the English language in various ways and in different situations. The purpose of this website is to help users to improve their English pronunciation.
How to use YouGlish?
It is quite easy to use YouGlish. All you need to do is to type the word you need to practice or learn the pronunciation in the search bar and click on Say it! Then the website will automatically select the videos where the word you typed appear. There are hundreds and hundreds of videos for each word you type. This makes it really easy for you to master the pronunciation of a specific word you are looking for. In addition, you can also listen to the pronunciation of the same word in different varieties of English such as Australian English, Irish English and Scottish English, for example. Another plus is that the website offers the subtitles of the videos, and every time the word is spoken in the video they highlight it in yellow, so the users know exactly where and when the word appears.
Students are able to listen to words being pronounced in different varieties of English.
Words are pronounced by real people and used in real contexts.
One thing to bear in mind ๐จ
Although the students can rewind and adjust the speed of the parts of the video where the word is pronounced, I think some begginers might feel challenged by the way the word is delivered by the speakers in the videos. A good alternative to tackle this situation is to recommend other online resources such as online dictionaries as an extra option for students with lower level of English to use. There are many good online dictionaries that offer the pronunciation of the words both in American and British English. Here they are:
According to the Oxford learner`s dictionary, collaboration is the act of working with another person or group of people to create or produce something. Many people believe that we learn better when we work together with someone, and I totally agree with this belief. Making our students to work together with their classmates, in pairs or in groups or even online, may facilitate their learning process. They can help and learn from each other as well as becoming less dependant on the teacher. In this post, I intend to introduce an application that has great potential to be used with our students when it comes to making them to collaborate and learn from each other.
The Flip platform
Flip is a video discussion platform where you can create groups and add different discussion topics to each group. It is a very powerful tool when we need to involve our students in virtual discussions about a specific topic. Flip is very user-friendly and it is FREE. In addition, you can create as many topics and groups as you wish. You can use Flip's website or you can download the app and use it in your cell phone or tablet.
First, you need to create a free account and log in. After doing that, you have to create a group. It is very simple. All you need to do is to click on the "group" button and a new group will be added to your dashboard. Your "group(s)" is/are the place(s) where you will be posting the topics of your discussions, activitivies or collaborative tasks. You can introduce a discussion topic or an activity there, for example, and tell your students to come up with their answers and opinions on the topics and activities proposed.
How do I use it with my students?
I use Flip with my students in many different ways - giving and receiving feedback, promoting speaking activities, group discussions, study groups and fostering teamwork.
Regarding the teaching of the four language skills, I woud be very wrong if I said we could only use it to promote speaking activities. Actually, you can use it to work with all the four skills. It all depends on your level of creativity and your lesson goals. However, in my opinion, it works best with speaking-based activities.
I would say that all the features available in the Flip platform make it really attractive for our students to use it. They can add backgrounds to their videos, drawings, texts, emojis and so on. Whenever I prepare any activity using Flip, my students get very excited about it and really engage themselves in the activities. It works pretty well with teenagers and adults.
Things to consider before using Flip
1. The main interactions between students using Flip occur through short videos, so if your students are a bit shy to show their faces or record themselves speaking, it could be a problem for you to use it with them.
2. There is not a virtual whiteboard or sth similar to allow students to share written texts or files in the groups. Although they can comment on each other's videos individually, I think it would be useful if they could offer an extra collaborative space inside the groups so that eveyone could share things or post comments at one place only.
Let's get down to business!
I have been giving a teacher training course to EFL teachers who are interested in working with young learners. It has been three weeks now and this past week we were talking about social and emotional learning. I decided to create a very simple collaborative task for my students by using the Flip platform. I created a topic called "When do kids feel sad?" and asked for their help to answer this question. This worked as a preparation task for the class that would take place in that week. I used it to brainstorm some ideas from my students and make them collaborate with each other. Here's the result:
That's all for today, guys. See you on the next post! ๐
Much has already been said about students' autonomy and how to promote it. However, things change when it comes to dealing with teachers' autonomy under the perspective of the teacher as a learner. There are many definitions of what teacher autonomy is about. The most common one is when teachers have 'academic freedom' (Sehrawet, 2014) - when they are able to make their own choices regarding the teaching materials, the methodology as well as the types of assessment they will use in their day-to-day teaching practices. Here, though, I will focus on the perspective of the teacher-learnerautonomy.
Teacher-learner autonomy
flickr.com
Defining it briefly, teacher-learner autonomy is associated with the idea that teachers should have ownership of their own learning as teachers (Smith & Erdogan 2008). This perception is closely connected to professional development. How can we promote autonomy inside of our classroom if we are not autonomous teachers? This is one of the questions that come to the minds of many English teachers when they are told that they should do their best to foster their students' autonomy. Being an autonomous teacher is also about recognizing your strengths and weaknesses. Learning more about our weaknesses and being willing to improve them will lead us to successful teaching practices. We shoud try to learn more and more each day. We always need to ask ourselves the following questions:
What do I still need to learn?
What should I improve in my teaching practices?
How can I delevop my English teaching skills?
By reflecting on these questions, it is gonna be much easier to spot possible constraints regarding our practices as well as to find a solution to them.
Having said that, I personally recognize that a teacher's workload can be very heavy. There are always exams to grade, lesson plans to prepare and lots of students to teach. In addition, in certain contexts, it is very difficult for some teachers to attend conferences or even participate in teacher development courses. So, here, I intend to introduce you to three websites that will help you to develop your teaching skills. You can be either an experienced or novice teacher, there will be always something you can learn from the resources available in these websites.
BBC Learning English - The teacher's room
https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/
BBC Learning English is a fantastic website full of resources for both teachers and students. The section The teacher's room is dedicated to offering a lot of tips on how to teach English. They cover many useful topics such as teaching models, drilling, teaching vocabulary and so on. It is very interesting the way they bring theory and practice together in their videos. They always start their lessons with an introductory video on the topic - there is a brief explanation and practical examples on how to apply the tips they are giving. They also provide their audience with a full written explanation about the topic they are dealing with. In addition, there is always a quiz in the end of each "lesson" so that you can check what you were able to learn. Overall, it is a wonderful platform for teachers who are not much familiar with journal articles reading or who do not have enough time to read them. You can watch a short video demonstration below:
Another interesting website is the VOA learning English. They offer FREE online training for English language teachers worldwide. They have a collection of ten teacher training videos on topics such as English for Specific Purposes, Critical thinking skills, Learning strategies, Listening skills, etc. Each "unit" has a script of the video as well as the lesson plan of the class that was used in the unit. Overall, the videos are very useful. We can learn a lot from them. I really recommend them for novice teachers; However, if you are an experienced teacher, you can benefit a lot from them as well.
Last but not least, there is this wonderful website from the United States Department of State - American English. There are hundreds of useful resources for both students and teachers. They have a special section for teachers called 'Teacher`s Corner' where you can find a lot of articles and materials focused on teacher development. Also, they have a collection of recorded webinars covering topics such as speaking, listening and pronunciation, global citizenship, reading and writing, teaching methods and so on. Everything there is of high quality.
Another interesting resource are the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). They are online free courses offered in partnership with many American Universities. Some of these courses can be taken on a self-paced basis, while others require that you attend a few synchronous online classes. When you complete the course, they issue a certificate for you. I took some of these courses a few years ago and I really recommend that you take at least one of them. You learn a lot from these courses, and the best of all is that it is FREE of charge.
That's all for today, guys. See you on the next post! ๐
References
Sehrawat, J. (2014). Teacher Autonomy: Key to Teaching Success. Bhartiyam International Journal of Education & Research, 4(1), ISSN: 2277-1255.
Smith & Erdoฤan. (2008). Teacher-learner autonomy: Programme goals and student-teacher constructs. In T. Lamb & H. Reinders (Eds.), Learner and Teacher Autonomy: Concepts, realities, and response (pp.83-103). John Benjamins Publishing.
Have you ever felt that your lessons are not that interesting anymore? Or that your students are bored with your teaching? You are not alone! As time goes by, our students start to get used to our lessons and lose interest in them. That's why we always need to look for new ways of spicing up our classes. Last week, I discovered a website in which you can create your own talking avatar, and maybe this can help you to bring more fun to your classroom.
Voki
voki.com
Voki.comis a very interesting online platform with a great potential to be used in the teaching of foreign languages. You can use it to teach English in many ways. The idea is that you create your own character(avatar) and you add a voice or some sound to it. There is a huge variety of avatars you can choose, from emoticons to 3D people. It is very fun. You can even customize these avatars by changing their skin and eye color, accessories and so on. I am sure your students will love it.
I started to use Voki website with my students last Wednesday. It was a very good experience. They got really excited when I told them they could create their own talking avatars in this website. We were working on a lesson about animals from different continents, and I came up with the idea of engaging them a little bit more in this lesson through the use of the avatars available in the volki website.
First, I asked them to choose an animal avatar and do a quick search about the continent where this animal is originally from and the food they generally eat. Second, I told them to pretend they were these animals and introduce themselves by telling their names, their place of origin (continents) and the type of food they like to eat. They really enjoyed this activity and we all had a lot of fun. You can watch it in the video below.
Advantages to language teaching
I would say that one of the strongest features of this tool
has to do with its audio-visual nature. The fact that our students can record
their voices, listen to their avatars and see them all at the same time is a
plus when it comes to using it to teach a foreign language. This is a very
useful resource that can be used to enhance your students' listening, speaking
and writing skills.
There are several approaches to language teaching you can
use this tool with. Here, for example, I used this tool to promote "the
practice moment" of a lesson based on the PPP approach (presentation,
production and practice). You can also create activities based on the
Task-based approach. You could ask your students, for example, to pretend they work for a
marketing agency and their task is to advertise a product or a service with the
avatars they created.
The only limitations I've found in the voki platform are as
follows: First, if you want to have access to all the avatars, you will need to
buy a special membership; second, you cannot add an audio that is longer than
60 seconds to your avatar if you are using the free version. Apart from these
limitations, everything else is quite useful when it comes to using it to teach
a foreign language.
We, English teachers, are always looking for new ways of enhancing our classes. It does not matter if we are teaching kids, teenagers or adults; we are addicted to trying to make our lessons as enjoyable as possible for our students. This week, I was surfing the net and came across a very interesting blog with useful tips on storytelling techniques, and I will be writing about it in this post. Stick around!
The LessonStream Blog
https://lessonstream.com/blog/
First of all, it is important to say that you will not find a step-by-step guide on how to tell stories in the LessonStream blog. The purpose of this blog is to share some ideas as well as some experiences teachers had in their classrooms by using stories to engage their students in the lessons and make them to communicate in English.
The LessonStream Blog is aimed at teachers and educators. Its layout is very organized and appealing. The colors are not strong and the initial banner (students interacting in a classroom / library) matches the purpose of the blog. Also, it is very easy to navigate on it. With a single click on the buttons provided in the beginning of the page, you can access the posts and the topics you are interested in. The posts are categorized into eight different topics, such as story in ELT, the teacher as a storyteller, storytelling techniques, etc.
Overall, it is a very good blog for teachers who want to start to use stories to engage their students in their lessons. The posts really inspire you to think outside the box. I would say that the only drawback of this blog is that if you want to have access to more content on storytelling and the lesson plans, you will need to buy a special membership to join their community of teachers. I haven't done it yet, but I am planning to do it soon. The membership fee is not that expensive and the teaching resources advertised seem to be of good quality.
I've also found a very short video from the National Geographic Learning YouTube channel that presents some tips on how to prepare for storytelling. I found it very useful and I am sure it will give you some good insights into this subject. The video is aimed at teaching young learners, but the same techniques can be adapted to be used with teenagers and even adults. Here's the video:
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