Online didactic resources + video analysis

Today is the 8th of October of 2020. A sunny and beautiful day.

The class of today has a surprise prepared for us: a presentation full of cool information for us by an old student from Dolores. Her name is Adriana González Domenech and shows us a presentation called Recursos Digitales para el aprendizaje de inglés. It was her Final Paper of the Degree and a great font of resources for this pandemic-online stage of life and, obviously, a great bank of resources for the everyday class. These are the web pages that I most liked:

• Cambridge English: There is a huge variety of games and activities, add to music pulled apart full of songs and lyrics to work on with the children.

https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/learning-english/parents-and-children/activities-for-children/) and (https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/learning-english/games-social/)

• Wizkid campus: Here we can find reading videos (audiobooks) with different levels. 

https://wizkidcampus.com/

•  Powtoon: With this online resource you can create animated presentations, that can be already done or create from the beginning as you like. This is useful for working on the four language skills with the students: writing, reading, speaking, and listening. Also, it is compatible with different methodologies. 

https://www.powtoon.com/

• Storybird: A web page that includes online books. We can create them too! Or, even, the students, so they can cork the writing skill. It is adaptable to different levels with different book structures (picture book, long-form story, poetry). An example could be to create a cooperative book in which, every student would need to create a chapter to continue the story.  

https://storybird.com/

•  Anglomaniacy: It contains online resources and activities for different levels. You can find songs and flashcards also! 

https://www.anglomaniacy.pl/

• Voki: This incredible resource allows you to create avatars, either students or teachers. You can add content, dialogues, etc. Also, you can record your voice or choose a language and its accent.

https://www.voki.com/

•  British Council (Learning English Kids): It offers a lot of activities based on real contexts. 

https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/

•  Storynory: Another option for online books. In this huge library, we can fin books written by the authors of the webpage in addition to classical books. There is also an option of audiobooks to focus the attention on the pronunciation, for example.

 https://www.storynory.com/

•  Quizziz: It is like a Kahoot. We can create our quiz to evaluate a unit, for example.

 https://quizizz.com/

 

How many interesting information, right? This is the kind of thing I like about these classes, you do not only learn theory or techniques, you also receive a lot of ideas and resources so your imagination and creative teacher mind can fly away and create good ideas for our future lessons. 

Some of the key ideas we discuss after Adriana's presentation were these:

1. This allows students to be exposed to different accents. 
2. We can integrate different skills. 
3. Also, we can include an oral dimension in the activities. 
4. To sum up, all this can be summarized in one word "engaging". The students feel attracted by this methodology and visualize the learning process as something fun and creative. 

To conclude the class, we have been working in our little groups to analyze two videos of TPR methodology, and this is with we came up with after watching and discussing them:

• What are the roles of the teacher and the students in this method? 

The teacher's role is active because is the one who provides the information constantly and, at the same time, is leading the phases of the activity. Despite that, the student's role is active too, because this technique needs them to gesticulate and imitate the movements and sounds the teacher creates, at the same time they are connecting these movements into logical information (translating the meaning of the gestures into sentences). Later on, they will also write them down into a sheet, so they are not passive at all! 

• What are the stages and procedures in the implementation of the method?

The different phases of this method are three: 

First, the teacher presents the different sentences with the voice and a movement, which the students have to repeat later. They are presented and repeated always in the same order. 

Secondly, the students need to repeat them, with the teacher leading and accompanying them, but now in a different order. 

Thirdly and finally, the children are going to listen to the same sentences but in this case, by a voice recorder from a CD and sort by numbers the different pictures from a sheet that explains those sentences or actions. 

• What are the main theoretical principles of this method?

The main principles we have found are these:

- The statement learning by doing is the principle that guides the method. It combines the visual, listening, and kinesthetic factors to turn them into learning. 

- Using gestures as commands (sentences or words)

- A silent period first (the children only have to do some sounds. For example, when the teacher says car they do the sound of a car but not pronounce the word). With this silent period, we allow the kids to process the information they are receiving (inputs) and we give them time to connect that in their minds until it makes sense. 

• What are the advantages and disadvantages?

The advantage is that children learn better by imitation, furthermore, it is more attractive and joyful for them to study this way. Also, they can learn the correct pronunciation, lose the shame of doing things in front of their classmates, and connect movement with a complex cognitive learning process.

 On the other hand, we have disadvantages. With this method, the students can not work on writing and speaking skills. Also, they can not work in small groups or pairs, and at the same time, this makes the teacher a harder situation to evaluate the progress individually.

• What techniques or strategies included in this method would you use as an EFL teacher?

We would include the whole technique but as a complementary task to support the lessons itself. We can use to secure, for example, our students have acquired and understood the affirmative sentences.

What an incredible and full class, right? I love it when I have the sense of my head burning because it means that I have too many interesting information to process, and when it is interesting is wonderful! 

See you next week!