[8th] BaiCiZhan-------a Chinese app helping memorise the words.

 Phones have been one of the necessities, and most of the students in my future teaching context have phones. Thus, learning through mobile apps also could be a method of learning the language. Today, I want to introduce one Chinese app helping students memorise the English words, BaiCiZhan. It can also be translated as ‘the word cut’.

Want to download this app? Click here:https://www.baicizhan.com/mobile.html

1.       What is the ‘BaiCiZhan’?

BaiCiZhan is an app providing pictures and example sentences for each word to make memorising words fun. When learners start memorising words, the page will display English, and there will be four pictures at the bottom, one of which is the correct meaning of the English word. Learners need to click on the correct picture to remember the word’s meaning.

There are three small buttons below the picture assisting with remembering.

👉When the learner clicks the Chinese word '斩‘or 'cut' in English, the system will assume that the learner knows the word, and the word will no longer appear in the review sheet.

👉When learners click the small bulb button, the system will show example sentences, word roots and English definitions to help learners guess the word’s meaning.

👉When the learner clicks the small horn button, the system will play the word’s pronunciation again.

👉After clicking on the correct word, the system will also use other tests to help you review, such as selecting the Chinese meaning in English.

Apart from the primary function, this app also explores more functions to enhance learning. Here are some examples:

👐  It gives a personalised plan for each user. It will ask the users’ English level and purpose of learning English and design a proper word lexicon. The picture below shows my plan for remembering the IELTS words, which requires me to insist on remembering 25 words for 104 days.

 

👐  It offers the users a forum they can group to remember the words. Users could post a photo of their learning process each day to record their effort and encourage others.

 

👐  It holds a contest for remembering the words, where the users could compete in a group of two and the person who remembers more words in a limited time will be the winner.

2.       How is it relevant to language learning?

It helps students memorise the words, expand their vocabulary and motivate students to keep studying by making measurable improvements and enhancing the learners’ interaction.

Firstly, a concrete plan like remembering the 25 words each day will let users see the measurable improvements or competence. In that way, they are more willing to keep making progress compared with learning as a more abstract or even no plan. Secondly, giving a poster about their progress each day enables them to show this picture to others like friends or parents, which may meet their need to gain recognition and praise. Apart from that, learning with others at a similar level will also be beneficial to insist on learning since they may feel pressure due to others’ efforts or delighted due to the enjoyable learning experience with friends. Thus, students could learn the words after the class and keep learning in the long term.

3.       Advantages:

👼 Offer a personalised plan for students

👼 Improve the fun and efficiency of memory by the combination of images and meanings

👼  Consolidate students' memory by reviewing words regularly

👼  Motivate students by making measurable progress and building study groups

👼  Provide an offline state to memorise words

👼 I Could use it on the phone

4.       Disadvantages:

👿  add the advertisement selling the English class in the app

👿  could not help students’ English expression

This app mainly helps students remember the words, but it does not teach them how to use them. Even remembering numerous words, students may still be confused about the difference between ‘vast’ and ‘immense’. In that case, students cannot use words correctly and cannot promote English ability of expression or speaking.

👿  It Is easier to forget the words without images.

Students may feel efficient remembering the words by seeing the corresponding images but be confused about the meaning when they see the word alone. This is a common problem that most users reflect on. 

👿  Could not consist with teachers’ teaching.

Teachers could not design the plan for students, but only the app has the right to do so. It can not consist of teachers’ classes and only serves as an assisting app for students to build their essential English ability. 

 

5.       Application in my context

The problem that teachers could not design the plan is the main reason that high school teachers could not use it as the primary tool to learn. However, teachers could still encourage students to use this app after the class and show the pictures to demonstrate their progress each day, contributing to a solid English foundation in the long term.

 

To sum up, this app could help students learn the words according to the plan. The convenience of using it and its exciting design may be beneficial for students to self-regulate and make progress when they even get a higher education. Though it could not offer assistance directly for teaching, it still could contribute to students learning. 

[7th] Use H5P for flipped learning!

As a teacher, do you prefer to be a knowledge transmitter or a guide for students?

The answer is not necessarily only one, but your choice may indicate your preference whether you like the traditional classroom or the flipped classroom. Flipped classroom refers to a teaching model in which students learn the basic knowledge before the class through the website or videos and meet together to discuss the problems, insights or feedback embedded in the learning process. In that case, teachers are more like a guide to accelerate students’ thinking instead of simply telling the answer to students.

When teachers apply the flipped classroom, there may not be enough only to upload the videos of input. In this situation, teachers need more tools to encourage students’ online learning, interact with students and ensure students’ understanding. Here is a tool, H5P, which could help teachers with the purpose mentioned above.

Want to explore this tool more? Click here: https://h5p.com/

 

1.       What is the H5P?

H5P is an interactive content developmental tool for making rich and engaging courseware to increase the interaction with students and gain vital information about students’ engagement and progress. Using this tool enables teachers to create different varieties of content like videos or quizzes in the class. There are more than 30 types of content for teachers to choose from, like an accordion, chart, column, drag and drop tasks etc.

Here, I present a crossword I made to show you how to use it.

You can play it here:https://siyuma.h5p.com/content/1291616555693786437

Instructions for creating a crossword

Ø  👉Type the title and task description in the chart.

Ø  👉Click the ‘add word’ button to add a new question.

👉Type the clue of the answer and the answer in the right column.

Ø  👉You can also choose whether give an extra clue or fix the word in a particular position.

Ø  👉Add an overall solution word to lower the difficulty. Other options like adding feedback, themes etc., are also available.

Here is another example of my image choice.

2.       How is it relevant to language learning?

👌  Teachers could utilise this tool to create interactive content, which could stimulate visual, auditory and other senses to make students' learning content more interesting such as showing the content with a picture.

👌 Students could also be more interactive in the learning process; for example, students may be more engaged if they learn the content by finding the hotpot in the images.

👌  Teachers could use this tool as a small test to evaluate students’ understanding. A typical example is image choice and crossword mentioned above to find whether students remember some words related to animals.

👌  Teachers could use this tool to teach other subjects in English like geography and provide images with hotpots for different places.

👌 Teachers could teach different English skills, like listening skills by dictation form, reading skills by flashcards, etc.

3.       Advantages

👼  This tool offers a variety of forms for teachers to choose from.

👼  A lot of the content is interactive and fun, like crossword or image sequencing. 

👼 The tool is student-friendly and can be used without logging in

👼  Forum on the website provides content samples and guidance for designers.

4.       Disadvantages

👿 This will be suitable for teaching simple knowledge and maybe useless when students want to share their thoughts or discuss with teachers. After all, quizzes like gap-filling or sequencing the image could not transfer students’ insights and problems in the learning process.

👿There are no specific instructions for teachers to design. Teachers themselves should explore everything.

👿There is only one month free for teachers. If you want to use it constantly, you need to pay.

 

5.       Application in my context

The student I intend to teach is Chinese high school students. Though students, especially in the third year of high school, are under pressure from the college entrance examination and prefer the traditional class model and test-oriented teaching, students in the first two years of high school may be willing to accept the new teaching model, flipped teaching. In that case, I may have the chance to utilise this tool for students. I assume three situations using H5P.

👀  Design a task before class

I will use H5P to make small games into my video before class, such as the' Grid Word Search game' to consolidate students' word learning.

 

👀  Design an engaging content to show the knowledge in the video

I can design an interesting form for my main content. For example, I can show my class content by clicking different animals in a zoo picture and displaying the introduction of animals.

 

👀  Design a small competition in class

In the class, I can divide students into groups and make them compete. For instance, I can require all groups to play crosswords and see which group could be a winner. In this way, the tool help students consolidate their knowledge, and teachers can check their learning achievements.

[6th] YouGlish——a new dictionary?

How to help students pronounce one word or one phrase?

Tell them directly? This may not be efficient, especially since only one student asks you.

Tell them in class or advise them to check in the dictionary? Students may forget quickly and cannot hear the pronunciation in a real-life situation.

Then, what should we do? Use the tool YouGlish will be a choice!!!

Want to explore more about this tool? Click this link: https://youglish.com.

1.       What is YouGlish.

YouGlish is a website using YouTube to improve English pronunciation and offering 100M tracks, where audiences can practice pronunciation by seeing how English is spoken by real people and in a natural context.

I will show how to check the phrase [not at all] as an example.

👉 Choose the accent like ‘US, UK’ etc.

👉 Type the phrase ‘not at all’ in the search bar and click ‘say it’.

👉Click the play button of one video to hear how it is pronounced, and the headline also shows the number of videos you can choose. Here there are 31306 videos available for you to hear.

👉  See the sentence below the video to make you hear it more clearly.

👉  Use the button below the video where you can go back five seconds, play again, skip to the next video or adjust the speed of the video.

👉  See the definition and tips for pronunciation below the video to enhance the pronunciation.  

2.       How is it relevant to language teaching?

The most functional usage is from phonetic enhancement to help students find the pronunciation and how it is spoken in English in a natural context. In that case, students may also explore how to pronounce a single word in a phrase or a sentence and improve the stress, rhythm and intonation on a holistic level. To sum up, it mainly offers assistance for students’ speaking skills.

3.       Advantages:

👼  The websites offer different accents, including the US, UK, Australia etc.

👼 The video stops right at the part where the words are being spoken, which is very convenient.

👼  It is fast that learners do not need to log in to search.

4.       Disadvantages

👿  Tips for each word’s pronunciation are the same.

There have no concrete suggestions for a particular pronunciation like liaison etc. The tips below show the suggestions of ‘not at all’ and ‘plain’, which are the same.

👿  Words in different places of the sentences may sound different.

Phrases placed in the middle of a sentence or at the end of a sentence may differ from sound, especially for the intonation, which may confuse the learners. The website could give more guidance about why people speak in that way.

👿  Not mention the pouncing principles in advance but only present the sounds.

It would be better to explain the reason for pouncing that way and then give an example. Only giving examples from videos may increase students’ difficulty finding the pronouncing principles.

5.       Application in my context

👀  Use it as a tool to teach pronunciation.

Firstly, teachers could give students more phrases that contain one pronunciation skill, such as liaison, and ask students to search at YouGlish to find how to pronounce it. After finding all phrases’ pronunciations, teachers could ask students whether they discover some similarities in how to pronounce them. In that way, students could use deductive the pronouncing principles through searching. Finally, teachers elicit the principle from students’ discoveries and teach them about this principle. After class, teachers could also assign the homework like requiring students to find more phrases about the principle taught in class.  

👀  Use it as an advanced 'dictionary’ to help students find the pronunciation.

Students could use it as an advanced ‘dictionary’ offering real context and definition of the word and phrases. Students could not use it as the primary tool to improve their pronunciation still lies to the failure of giving the pronunciation guidance and principles. Otherwise, students need to spend a lot of time discovering the principles.

[5th] Using Padlet to encourage the collaborative learning!!!

Collaborative learning refers to a situation where learners learn together through interaction with teachers and learners. Apart from only asking students to work together, there are massive tools to support teachers conveniently and efficiently enhancing interaction. Padlet is one of these tools.

If you want to explore this tool, click this link: https://padlet.com/dashboard.  

1.       What is the Padlet?

Padlet is software where teachers can initiate a question, and learners share their thoughts by posting words, links, drawings, videos etc. This software encourages collaboration in a supportive and straightforward way. Like the website itself said, ‘it does not tell you how to use but show you how to use.’ Now let me introduce some functions by presenting my pallet as an example.

This is my padlet link:https://padlet.com/1206406771/jvfyd2lvuh3eum09.

Different blanks to choose

Padlet offers you seven different blanks to use for a different purposes.

☺The most usual one is the ‘wall’ blank, where the content is randomly presented on the wall to read. Here, I choose this one, and my topic is discussing favourite dishes!

☺The other type of ‘timeline’ is placing the content along a horizontal line, which will be suitable for introducing the historical event.

☺While the type of ‘map’ is presented, the content on a map and be an initiative to teach the geography or event that happened in different places.

☺Other types like ‘shelf’ or ‘grid’ are beneficial to divide the content into several groups and be helpful to show the opposite ideas or different views.

Several options to decide on for one padlet.

👉  Title: You can type the title, description and icon for your padlet.

You can see my title is ‘my teaching padlet and the description is the question ‘what is your favourite dish?’ And I chose a smiling face as my icon.

👉  Appearance: here, you can choose the wallpaper, the font and the colour scheme

I choose the picture of cupcakes due to the relevance to my discussion topic and the font; the colour scheme is regular.

 👉Posting: here, you can choose the attribution, new post position, comments and reactions

I prefer not to display the author’s names since some students may be shy. Using the ‘first’ or ‘last’ button will allow you to decide where the new posts appear. Comments and reactions will enhance students’ motivation and engagement if students receive positive feedback. Moreover, teachers can use evaluation systems like ‘grade’ or ‘vote’ etc. This will be efficient for activities like debates voting.

Different forms to display the content.

👉Adding the photo

👉 Adding the video

👉 Adding the audio

👉 Adding the drawings

👉 Others like links, location

Here is my padlet using the first four forms:

2.       How is the padlet relevant to language teaching?

It encourages students to show ideas and enhances collaborative learning.

Firstly, students may not have confidence in expressing ideas, and writing the ideas and showing them through padlet offers many times to let them organise their language. Thus, it will motivate them to learn. Secondly, the anonymous function will also encourage shy students to present ideas because no one will know who the author is and make fun of their answers. At last, students will foster collaborative skills by discussing one topic together, presenting their thoughts in groups, evaluating others’ opinions or even debating in the padlet. In conclusion, it impacts students’ learning beneficially by accelerating collaborative work.  

 3.       Disadvantage

         👎Hard to organise

If students are encouraged individually to present their ideas, it will be hard for the teacher to organise the ideas and see them. This will be harder if the class contain 60 or 70 students.

👎Need equipment like phones or computers

Some students at school maybe not be allowed to use their phones or computers. In that case, this tool is not available for them.

 

4.       Application in my context

👀      Divide students into groups

Students should present ideas in different groups since the class will contain 60 or 70 students in my context. Otherwise, teachers can’t read the ideas one by one and neatly organise them.

 👀        Combine it with the TBLT (task-based learning )model

Teachers could initiate a discussion about how to solve a real-life problem or show opinions about a debating topic, where students could present their ideas on padlet.

👀   Combine it with CLIL( content and language integrated learning)

The blank of ‘time’ or ‘map’ will be helpful for students to learn history or geography. For instance, teachers could encourage students to list a vast event of a particular country in English to help learn the history, which the blank of ‘timeline’ will be helpful; teachers could also design a task requiring students to fill the country’s name into the map to learn geography and blank of ‘map’ will be helpful!

 

To sum up, the padlet is a functional tool that could be helpful for different language learning purposes. With the easy instructions and convenient functions, it will offer both teachers and students a new experience where students can learn collaborative skills, develop their cognitive ability and learn the language.