Triptico

Triptico:

I was recently introduced to a very exciting ICT tool which could boost the motivation of learners in language learning. This tool is highly interactive, creative and thus engage and motivate learners in participation (individual or class) of activities.

The audio-visual appeal of the tool creates a great impact on a learner's 'desire' to learn more.

Triptico is a games and quiz based website which enables teachers to create activities with the motive to engage students in fun based learning. The tag line of the website itself suggests 'Inspiring Imaginatve Teachers' and thus helps teachers to develop audio-visual enabled tasks.

https://www.triptico.co.uk/home

(The homepage of the website shows a brand new website coming up for Triptico, I'm all excited and geared up to see the 'newness' it has to offer.)

The website offers a few features, free of cost, on trial basis, however, a subscription can enable a teacher to the optimum use of all the features that the website has to offer. It also has a blog which highlights and explains any new feature added to the website. 

While exploring the website and after downloading Triptico Plus on my system, using the 'Free Resource' option, I came across a very interesting quiz called 'Whats the Question'. 

The quiz allows the teacher to form questions and pin the correct answer to it, however, when the quiz is played with learners in the class, the answers are shown to the learners, inviting them to come up with the appropriate question tagged to the answer shown. The 12 questions are categorised under 3 categories of marks 10, 20, 30 and the computer picks the turn of team or participant to participate. If the question guessed is correct, the participant scores the marks designated to the question, but if the guess is wrong, the marks are randomly distributed to other team members by the computer. Therefore, the game is played in all fairness. Whats more? Sound effects of 'Yeaaaaaah' as cheer to the correct answer and ' Awwwwwwwwh' for the incorrect answer help in building the competitive spirit and environment in the class.                                                                                                        

The quiz is very easy to create, as the application navigates you into building the activity. Once the quiz is made, it can be saved as a 'text file' on the computed and then uploaded in the application.
The teacher can make use of this activity only in those classrooms which are wi-f- enabled, since the application does not work offline.

I created an activity called ' Know your University Better ' where answers where supplied to the students and they were to guess the appropriate questions. However, a quiz of targeting any aspect of language learning can be created such as phonetics, vocabulary, etc.

The following snapshots can give you an overview of the quiz:

 Once the quiz is made, click on the save option.

Select 'Save as Text File' and save it on the system. 

Then, Load the quiz by clicking on 'Load' option. Your activity is ready to be played in the class.

I really hope you like this tool and you along with your students enjoy the learning through such activities in class. Do write in to share your feedback with me.

Soundcloud

Soundcloud: 

In the attempt of using a language, most emphasis is laid on practice: practice through speaking, practice through writing. Often in the process of learning, the learners shy away from using the language in speaking as they fear failure of making mistakes such as not speaking correctly, not pronouncing a particular word properly, fillers, gaps, et al. It is in this module of Speaking, where Soundcloud comes to much help or should I say 'rescue' to teachers and learners.

Soundcloud is a wonderful tool that can be used by the teacher to encourage speaking practice of the students. It is very easy to use. The students need to go on the website of Soundcloud and create their account. They can then record their speech or upload a previously recorded speech (as an existing file on the computer) and upload it.  The recording can be made upto 1 hr 59 mins for FREE. The link to the uploaded recording can then be e-mailed to the teacher for the teacher to listen and review the recording. 

An absolute brilliant feature of Soundcloud is the way 'feedback' can be given to the students for their recordings. When the teacher is listening to the record, he/she can make a comment or give feedback, exactly at the point where error is committed or a particular point is made for appreciation. The mark of comment is automatically indicated on the frequency bar of the recording. What more, the recordings can be made private, restricting the audience to the recordings.

I feel Soundcloud is a great way to giving feedback as it helps in precision and accuracy helping the teacher comment at the exact point of utterance in the speech which is actually quite difficult to do when giving feedback to the occurring speech in the classroom. In the classroom situation, the student's speech is either interrupted by the teacher for making a comment which breaks the flow of the speech or the feedback is given at the end when the student or teacher might not be able to recall an error committed. 

Also, its a great boon for the shy students or the way I call 'silent zones' in the classroom. The students can sit in the comfort of their homes or a relaxed environment and participate in the speaking activity without any inhibitions.

Another way of  using Soundcloud is where teacher reaches out to students with his/her recordings of a lecture, a thought, instructions, and the students could make comments at particular points of recording such as 'please elaborate', 'not clear', 'give examples' etc. The teacher can use the option of group involvement for conducting such an activity.

The following video takes you step-by-step, helping you understand the tool better:

Take a look and try it out!

Looking forward to your feedback on it..

Adobe Connect

Adobe Connect:

I was introduced to this tool recently and found it extremely fascinating to be in a classroom but not actually a 'typical' one. This interesting feature helps learners and teachers to connect in a class beyond the physical boundaries of a classroom, setting them all up in a 'virtual' scenario. Similar to a traditional classroom, the teacher here is the controller with all the learners as the attendees in the discussion forum classroom. Adobe Connect helps a teacher set-up a discussion forum page where he/she can invite all the learners to participate in any kind of discussion, group communication, demonstration of new idea or learning a new technique. Once the teacher sets-up the page, the link to the page can be emailed to the learners as an invite to the forum. The good part of Adobe Connect is, the learners don't have to go through the ordeal of a sign-up or registration. It is very simple, once the learner clicks on the link, the link opens to the Adobe Connect page asking the learner to input his/her name which will show his presence in the list of attendees and help his participate in the virtual class.

This way, the teacher can actually make a record of the students attending the session. The chat space in the discussion window helps the participants to interact with one another, but, there is a very interesting feature to participation here. Up on top, there is a bar which has an emoticon of a person raising his hand. Once clicked, it gives various options to participate: Raise hand, Agree, Disagree, Step-away. So, if there are two or more people willing to participate at the same time, the raise hand emoticon helps the teacher pick and select the participant, helping to maintain the flow of discussion. Similarly, other emoticons can be used to show the participant's opinion to a matter being talked about.

This particular tool can be used by a language teacher as a follow-up session to the lesson that had taken place in the classroom. Many times, when a new topic is introduced in class, a teacher is not very sure of it being comprehended by all learners and therefore Adobe Connect can be a good follow-up option for a teacher to evaluate her students and further plan and progress with the topic the following day. For example: If a teacher introduced the topic of Nouns in the class, a follow-up session on Adobe Connect could help her gauge as to how many students understood that particular part of speech, the teacher could ask students to participate by asking to give examples of nouns, and then take it further to forming sentences with nouns. In another way, a student could give a sentence and the teacher could ask another student to pick out the noun from the sentence given by the first student. Similarly, such sessions could be built up and a complete activity could take place with all parts of speech.

I feel such sessions help teachers save classroom time as well as keep a check on the progress of all learners. However, such sessions demand more time of the teachers and students, and the students who do not have the facility of computer or internet are unable to participate.

The following link can help you understand the feature better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibPXu8k5tMY