Russell Stannard celebrates the connected classroom.
I thought it might be interesting to look at an actual lesson which formed part of a series of experiments we have been recently doing at the University of Warwick, UK. The focus of these experiments is on using technology to get the students speaking more outside class and several of the techniques we have tried out have been very successful.
A while back, I mentioned a tool called MailVU. It allows you to make video emails, so instead of simply writing an email, you can record yourself speaking using a webcam and then send the message. MailVU lets you make recordings of up to ten minutes and it is very easy to use; in fact, it only takes three clicks to make a recording and send it. What is even more impressive is that the service is free!
Events in my life
The lesson was with a group of 25 Japanese students.
Part one
I started the lesson by drawing the following timeline on the board and explaining that it showed some important dates in my life:
1979 1983 1986 1988 1993 1997 1999 2000 2008 2009 2010
I began to talk about some of the dates, explaining what happened and telling the story behind each event. This lasted for about ten minutes. (When you put up a timeline, you can add a few notes under each date if you want to give the students a few clues as to what happened on that particular date. This is especially good if you are going to get the students to ask questions about the dates, rather than simply talk about them.)
Part two
I then put the students into groups and asked them to talk about the dates and what they had understood from my talk. As they did this, I moved around the class, listening and taking notes.
Part three
I then gave some feedback to the students about mistakes with grammar and vocabulary that I had heard, and we talked a little about describing events in our lives and any verbs and adverbs that might be useful.
Part four
I then asked the students to draw their own timelines. I encouraged them to add lots of events, such as starting a certain course or school, meeting friends, holidays, travelling, important social events, etc. I told them to add one or two notes to each date to help them explain them.
Part five
I then put the students in pairs and asked them to explain their timelines. Again, I moved around the class, listening and taking notes.
Part six
I then told the students that for homework they had to go onto MailVU (MailVU.com) and record themselves talking about their timelines. I showed them how to do this and explained that they should send their finished recordings to me.
Part seven
All 25 students made recordings. I listened to them and made notes in Word for each student, explaining any mistakes they had made with grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. I sent the feedback directly back to the students.
Part eight
In the next lesson, I played two of the best recordings and talked about why they were so good, focusing on the elements I liked best.
This was a very successful activity. Follow-up questionnaires indicated that the students liked it a lot and realised they could make further recordings in their own time to improve their speaking. Some of the students explained that they had made the recording several times before sending it – in other words, they
had spent 30 or 40 minutes speaking and practising to get their recordings right – and this is exactly what I was hoping for. The great thing about this idea is that it can be used for so many different scenarios and the technology is incredibly easy to use. Students pick it up in minutes and they will probably find uses
for it outside the ELT classroom. Some might even see that they can use this tool as a way of developing and keeping a record of their fluency development. Other scenarios you could use it with might include the following:
- talking about a best friend
- holding up an object to the screen and describing it
- talking about their typical day
- describing a great holiday or day out they have had
- talking about future plans and ambitions for the future.
The key point here is that, for activities like this to be successful, we need to connect what we do in the classroom with the speaking activity we want the students to do at home.
The more you prepare your students for the speaking activity, the better they will do the recordings at home. Some teachers have likened the idea to a task-based approach to teaching: the goal is to get the students to record something at home and send it to the teacher, so there is a task for the students to
achieve. I particularly like these types of activities as they get the students speaking and using technology outside the class. This may not be a lesson that you can do at the moment if you are limited byinternet access or the level of computer penetration in your country, but keep it in mind as in the future an opportunity to try something like this will probably be available to you.
For help on using MailVU, go to: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/mailVu/index.html
Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTon award,
all for his popular website www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
This article first appeared in issue 78 of English Teaching professional, January 2012.
