How can I use technology with young learners?

With great tips on what to think about in terms of keeping your young learners safe, focused and engaged, find out Pete's answer by watching the video below:

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Becca

Check out more from Digital Awareness Month by following the links below:

How can you teach speaking online and through technology?

Skype, podcasts and social media

Self-access centres: should you or shouldn't you?

Should I open a self-access centre?

To find out the answer, and things you should think about before making this decision, check out the video below.

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Becca

Check out more from Digital Awareness Month by following the links below:

How can you teach speaking online and through technology?

Skype, podcasts and social media

 How can I use technology with young learners?

As anyone who has been teaching IELTS for some time knows, the listening section is as much about developing effective exam strategies and having a good range of vocabulary, as it is about actually listening and understanding the texts. The app reflects this as it places the onus very much on training students to develop good technique and prepare themselves prior to hearing the listening input.

But how did this approach go down with our learners at Bellerbys College? Pre-Masters student Putra from Indonesia shares a few of his thoughts in the short video below:

Putra's insightful comment that “listening is not only listening, but also reading and writing” highlights how using the app has helped him to take a more holistic approach to the listening exam. It is good to see this kind of approach explicitly expressed in IELTS materials as it is something I am always stressing to my classes – namely, that things like developing their range of synonyms and using their time effectively is the real key to success.

Here are some of our other student comments:

• 'It's very good to know how to use the words already there to help us to find the answer'
• 'There is a lot of good advice about how to use time better and prepare for questions'
• 'It's useful because there are specific exercises which allow to practise skills like paying attention on details of conversations'
• 'It is useful because the examples are just like the test and we can practise in any place'
• 'I didn't know there were so many different skills and things to work on!'

As this feedback indicates, our students were pretty positive about the app's approach to listening preparation. And preparation really is the key here – as teachers I think we appreciated how the tips and activities on the app can help students prepare a mental schema for questions prior to listening. In IELTS listening exams, they only get to hear texts once of course, so this kind of skill is absolutely essential to develop. Instructing them on how to use content words in the questions to focus their listening, and getting them thinking about which might be the tell-tale keywords to highlight are valuable ways to aid the development of their IELTS listening skills. 

Each part of the listening exam is focussed on in some detail and students are familiarised with how the questions are formatted and how the texts work. For instance, students are sensibly advised that they need to maintain concentration since answers are often bunched together in a listening text. After each section is explained, the app provides sample exam practice opportunities for learners to try out the recommended approaches. This helps to ensure that while sub-skills are focussed on in detail, the students are constantly reminded of how these skills will be operational in the context of a real exam scenario.

What I personally most appreciated as an IELTS teacher was the practical nature of the tips offered to students. Things like using headings and subheadings to navigate their way through texts in part 4, and finding their way clearly through maps by quickly figuring out the starting point and visualising the speaker's journey through the terrain in part 2 map tasks.  Even the most proficient native speaker listener would need to pay attention and adopt these kinds of strategies to get top marks in the listening exam.

The app doesn't provide a full listening practice exam, but in focussing on the development of the wider skills needed to do well, it makes a positive contribution to the learners' preparatory repertoire. As Putra says, when it comes to IELTS, “listening is not only listening”.

Be sure to join us next Monday for the final summary of the IELTS Skills app series!

Rui

The IELTS skills (complete) app is now available for just £3.99 (was £9.99) and is available for download here.

Let us know your own thoughts on the app in the comments section below.

Read more in this series here:

Introduction

Reading between the bus lines…

Role-playing reality…

Break it down to build it up…

This section includes useful practical information, such as the importance of timing in the two writing tasks, as well as more technical strategies that students can apply when approaching the questions themselves – and of course, there is a range of tasks to cover the specific question types that arise in each section.

Once again, we have enlisted the help of our students to provide feedback on what the app offers in terms of writing skills development. This time, we will see comments from two Pre-Master's students: Putra from Indonesia and Ksenia from Russia.

From Putra and Ksenia's comments, we can see that they found a use for both the 'administrative' information (for example, relating to planning, timing, and explanations of each test component) and the practice tasks themselves. The ease of access afforded by having all this information in one place – and, crucially, a place which students are likely to carry with them most of the time anyway – seems to be a winning factor for our students. Like in other sections of the app, being able to manipulate and move the information with their fingertips seems to help students to visualise the goal of the task better, and is cited as one of the app's major benefits. It seems worth noting here also that Ksenia talks about the usefulness of the app in confronting the more challenging parts of the test; I'm sure that in some stage of our careers, we have all taught students who would rather skip the difficult bits, so perhaps the structure of the app helps to make these parts seem less daunting.

Several other comments were made specifically about the writing section of the app, including:

• 'The Golden Rules are very useful and give good advice on how to do each activity and avoid wasting time'
• 'The writing section helps us to build a good structure and link sentences'
• 'The introduction part is good. Now we know the rule that we can't copy the rubric in our introduction'
• 'The writing activities are good, as there are many useful tips and exercises which can be helpful for the IELTS exam'
• 'The multiple choice answers help us to analyse and understand the tasks'
• 'In task 2 writing exercises, we learn some good vocabulary'
• 'The task 1 pie charts activities are useful to help us get critical information and show us how to organise the sentences'

Putra made the point that using the app had helped him to identify where and why he had gone wrong in previous IELTS tests, showing the ability to self-evaluate. As teachers know and students find hard to grasp, this self-assessment is often key in helping students progress continually, so it is promising that the app prompted such spontaneous reflection and that Putra was able to identify areas of weakness. However, for Ksenia, the app was useful as an introduction to IELTS before her first test, and helped her to understand the requirements of each writing task. These different experiences illustrate the usefulness of the app for students at any stage of IELTS preparation.

Another positive aspect of the writing section is that, like in other sections of the app, it breaks down the tasks into micro skills, and in doing so, it's easier for students to identify weak links in the chain. It is therefore easier for them to work on these and see an overall improvement. Breaking up the writing process in this way is essential to make it seem less overwhelming, and to give students small, focused tasks they can achieve and then put together to build a whole text.

Importantly, all these individual skills are analysed and tested with interactive tasks at each stage, from checking understanding of the task, to specific language features to incorporate, to ideas on structure to checking for mistakes. It really is interactive all the way through and this helps to keep students' interest – especially important in writing which can otherwise become rather dry.

There is, of course, a limit to what any app can do – the most obvious example being that it is not able to mark a student's written work in the same way that a teacher can – but we feel that the app is useful in exposing students to controlled tasks such as multiple choice questions, and through these interactive tasks they can build up useful model answers upon which to base their own work.

Next week's post will cover the final skill section: listening. Please do join us again and let us know how your students have been getting on with using the app themselves.

Chloe

The IELTS skills (complete) app is now available for just £3.99 (was £9.99) and is available for download here.

Let us know your own thoughts on the app in the comments section below.

Read more in this series here:

Introduction

Reading between the bus lines…

Role-playing reality…

Don't just sit back and listen…

From the many skimming and scanning exercises to innovative features such as disappearing text activities to develop reading speed, we felt straight away that the app had a wide range of useful reading tips and a pretty comprehensive focus on all the different sub-skills students need to work on.

But what did the students think? Here are two of them, Ziyu Yang and Madeleine from China, giving us their thoughts:

 
So Ziyu Yang and Madeleine were very positive in their assessment, citing the value of both the different types of activities on offer and the convenience of having an app on their smartphones – to be used whenever they felt like it. Madeleine's point that technology like this appeals to young people like her is an important one. Exams like IELTS often appear very inaccessible and intimidating to students and her comment suggests that making use of students' personal devices like their smartphones may help to bridge the gap between them and the exam. This is certainly something that for the teachers involved in this project has provided a new avenue of research that we would like to delve a lot deeper into in the coming months.

Feedback from our other students was similarly encouraging, with the following a short summary of their main points:

• 'The app helps me to improve my understanding of the best methods to use in the exam and to develop different skills'
• 'Games like the words disappearing at different speeds helps to improve the speed of finding particular information'
• 'I like the tips on how to analyse the question'
• 'This trains your eyes to read faster so you don't waste time in the exam'
• 'It helps to concentrate on particular parts of the text instead of just looking at one big text all the time'

What was great about this student feedback is that it confirmed what we teachers thought might be one of the primary benefits of the app: that it would help our students to reflect more on the way they were approaching each part of the reading exam. In other words, the fact that they could engage in discrete reading activities (rather than these just being part of a wider course book unit) and the kinaesthetic nature of these activities seemed to help them see these readings skills as actual practical skills, not just as abstract knowledge about the IELTS test.

We feel that the app has helped students to better identify and distinguish different sub-skills and there was a sense that through using the activities on the app, developing these was somehow easier or at least more appealing to work on. On this note, the interactive game element is an important aspect of the activities as students can have fun challenging themselves (and each other) to make quick progress and win. For example, with the disappearing text exercises, they can choose whether the text disappears off the screen at a slow, medium, or fast pace before as they skim or scan for answers. They can move up the levels and chart their scores to see their progress. This is a key point as it is often difficult for students to see tangible and confidence-giving progress as they try to cope with the challenges of IELTS.

The interesting thing about having an app like this for IELTS is that students can get a sense of their progress using the same material (i.e. the app), rather than having to buy a new book to work at a higher level. In this way again, they can start to see the reading exam as a series of discrete skills, some of which they may be better at and others which they need to work more intensively on. Although the app does not expose them to a wide range of material on each of the sub-skills, it provides a great introduction and raises awareness of them in an engaging and accessible way.

The app is not a replacement for an IELTS course or indeed a course book. Students will still need many of the more traditional types of instruction as they negotiate their journeys through IELTS. With the complexities of the reading test, this is all the more so. However, apps like these point the way forward for new, exciting and pedagogically sound ways of engaging students and helping them to reflect on their exam technique and sub-skills development.

In next week's post we'll be feeding back on the IELTS speaking component of the app. Please join us on Monday 11th March.

Rui

The IELTS skills (complete) app is now available for just £3.99 (was £9.99) and is available for download here.

Let us know your own thoughts on the app in the comments section below.

Read more in this series here:

Introduction

Role-playing reality…

Break it down to build it up…

Don’t just sit back and listen…

In this video I interview Kerstin and Casey who talk why they decided to do a CELTA course, what were the best and most difficult things about their course. They give tips to people who are thinking about the CELTA course. You can also find out what has been their first teaching experience after the course.

Have you just completed a CELTA course? What was your experience with CELTA? Are you thinking about doing the CELTA? Is there anything else you would like to find out about the CELTA?

Joanna

In this video I interview Annie Altamirano, who is an ELT writer and teacher. Annie talks about becoming an ELT writer and how she finds ideas for new material. She also gives tips to people who are thinking about becoming ELT writers.

https://sas.elluminate.com/mr.jnlp?suid=M.65C65E2E455ED13E34F872A40D16E5&sid=2009418

Things you may learn from the video:

•    How you can become an ELT writer
•    What it takes to be a good ELT writer
•    Where the ideas for ELT content usually come from
•    What the biggest challenge in creating ELT material is
•    Difficulties in writing English teaching material you can come across

Enjoy!

Joanna

Watch the video below and find out how to take part in this competition!

Send your ideas to blendedmec@gmail.com by 24th June 2011

Joanna

Macmillan launched a glorious new app to help students, teachers and teacher trainees practise everything related to pronouncing the sounds of English. Watch Joanna firing questions at Matt Kay about Macmillan's new and brilliant Sounds app:

With the Sounds app you have phonetic sounds and example words literally at your finger tips. Just tap on one of the phonetic symbols displayed in Adrian Underhill's chart on your phone, and listen to the sound. You can also listen to example words by holding the button down. The example words appear at the top of the screen, so students can easily check the spelling.

Why not take your phone to class and play a game?
Press a button and ask your students to note down as many sample words of their own as possible in 1 minute, all with the sound they just heard.

The advanced version for students familiar with the phonetic chart is to reverse the game – you (or the app) say the word, and they note down the phonetic spelling. Tough, but possible – with a bit of practice using the sounds app!

You can download the free version from www.soundspronapp.com. The Premium version with lots of extra practice material will be launched very soon.

Enjoy!

Eva