Education should change and evolve to fit the emerging needs of the society. For this reason, teachers must have a wide range of digital resources in an age where technology is present in our daily lives. As a student-teacher, I have already experienced the usefulness of including technology in class. Below, there is a top 5 of interesting technological resources, some of them already used.
This is a perfect tool for reviewing or assessing students, easily for teachers and enjoyable for children. It is perfect to create different kinds of quizzes about any topic, including many options for answering. Students will be able to answer individually or in group using their devices. The teacher has many setting options depending on the intention of the activity. If the aim is to create a competition, a limited time for answering and a classification of the participants after the questions can be added. On the contrary, if the teacher wants to use it as an assessment tool it can be set no time for answering and a different order of the questions for each pupi, having at the end the performances of the students in each question as a group and individually. Teachers will have immediate results and do not even need to create a quiz if they found a suitable one in the webpage. Moreover, it does not need to give a numerical mark, but it can be given feedback by adding comments. It allows to go through any topic and practice reading and listening skills. It is very motivating for students, since it is kind of a game and they love using technology. However, there are some drawbacks regarding the devices and the connectivity. This tool cannot be used without Internet and for every participant or group it is needed a different device.
This app allows teachers to relate English and other subject areas. It is an application that incorporates devices with GPS that allow teaching and learning about the territory. It is useful to create itineraries for children to follow and go around the city/town while doing other activities such as filling questionnaires, taking pictures or simply discover the city. I wanted to add this tool because in my internship I have been able to participate in a project elaborated by two schools in the English classrooms. All students prepared information about different places of their cities, introduced their schools to the students from the other one by exchanging videos and, then, together had done kind of a gymkana locating all the places and explaining the information gathered to the ‘visitors’. It is a really nice tool to promote listening, writing, speaking and reading in the English classroom and outside. The main disadvantage is that depending on the device the new versions of the app do not find all the itineraries, but this can be solved checking the devices beforehand and contacting the client assistance. It also needs Internet connectivity to be used.
It is an application for iPad that allow students to create stories in an easy and funny way. Writing texts and speaking are usually the most difficult skills for children. Using this tool, it can be increased their motivation and interest towards the language. Students can choose an interactive background and characters from different packs and add voice or text to tell the story. The stories can be saved in the library. The teacher can observe their development and students can read their classmates creations. As a drawback, it is not possible to print the stories but there are other options such as doing screenshots.
Teaching students how to do presentations in front of the class to explain their mates something about a topic is quite difficult, since they do not know how to select the important information and read all the time. This tool is very nice to prepare interactive presentations in an image. Students can add images, videos and text by inserting links in the image. The information added in the image can be opened by passing the mouse on the different ‘stickers’. Any kind of topic can be done with this tool and all English skills can be developed through its use. The only ‘negative’ aspect could be that it is difficult for children to understand the app at first, since they can visualize that every sticker has extra information ‘inside’.
This tool is perfect for teachers and students, for preparing materials and for developing tasks. It provides a wide range of templates to create different kinds of documents. Students will feel engaged because they have some guidelines to follow in case they need some help. What is more, they have many creative tools and options that let them develop their creativity. For teachers this is a good tool to prepare appealing posters, diplomas or presentations to make the lesson funnier. It is nice that the files can be shared and different people can work on the same document. Moreover, it can be free downloaded and used without Internet connectivity. Canva is another resource to motivate students to write.
All these tools are useful resources for the English class that increase students motivation, interest and performance towards the language. What is more, some can be a bit time-consuming when preparing the activity but then the results are worthy, as well as the assessment time saved with some of them. I would like to add two resources that are very useful for any class, not just the English one. Any teacher needs to have a resource Pinterest, a world of ideas, activities and different proposals to engage students in their learning processes originally. Knowing the students personality, not just their academic characteristics, is important to manage the class and to help them emotionally. For this reason, I consider very useful the webpage Sometics which creates sociograms that show the relationships in the class. This is very useful to decide the classroom distribution to avoid excluded pupils and to think of the way groups are done.
Although all of them are interesting and might be included in class sooner or later, I would definitely choose Quizizz as an indispensable one. It offers many possibilities for students, to play while learning or revising previous knowledge. It deals with a common problems all teacher face, different learning rhythms, since it gives students the opportunity to take their time, reflect and ask for clarifications (even better for shy students). The teacher can focus its attention on those students with higher difficulties, observe which are the main errors in the reports and revise the exercises altogether. and it is important to consider that it is not fantastic just for students because they enjoy but also for teachers because it saves a lot of time spent in assessment. All topics can be worked, which allows to prepare different Quizizz and use it whenever they are necessary or even modify them to apply improvements for future lessons.
During the seminars a symbaloo page was created, where many links to useful websites were added. To access it, click here.