[Tool sharing] Today's Meet

Have you ever had issues with trying to get students to actively speak up in class whenever you ask them questions or are trying to hold a discussion? Especially with Asian, shy, or students that are not close, sometimes it is difficult to nudge them to voluntarily answer your questions or chip in some thoughts and ideas to the topic. It does not mean that they do not know the answer or are not thinking; they probably just feel less motivated to speak up, intimidated by the anticipation of their teacher and peers looking at them as they speak up. Thus, Today's Meet is a good online chatroom for teachers to use to stimulate student response during class discussion.

What is Today's Meet? 

Today's Meet is a simple and free tool that anyone can use. You can log in with your Google account and create a chatroom for your students to use. In the screenshot above, you can see the different kinds of settings you can adjust for your chatroom. The name for your room is also the URL of your chatroom to share with the students, so there might be a limitation to picking a suitable name that has not been taken already. But this function is quite convenient, since once you have selected a name, you can just post the URL to your students via email, social media, or just have them type it in their URL bar on their own since the link is quite simple and straightforward.

Next, you may adjust the availability of the classroom. You can keep it from one week up to one year. With this function, you can keep the chatroom open for a longer period of time and assign students to go on the chatroom to talk about discussion questions assigned as homework, or to reflect with their peers about the in-class activities. Since the interface of Today's Meet is very simple and straight-forward, teachers will not have to worry about students getting lost or confused with using the website.

Advantages and disadvantages of Today's Meet 

As you can see from the screenshot above, the teacher can post a question in the chatroom and students can key in their response to the question. There is a colorcode function which can be visually easier for teachers and students to distinguish between each other. However, if you notice the character limit above the message box, you can only key in 140 characters at once. There are pros and cons to that-- with the word limit, Today's Meet would be quite fitting for a pre-task as teachers can ask general questions as a gist task to activate students' prior knowledge. The short limit will help ease students' anxiety as it reassure them that they do not have to write a whole academic and professional paragraph to answer the question, but just a simple, brief idea that they have. On the other hand, the character limit restricts Today's Meet to just gist tasks. If teachers want to go in-depth with the task and want to stimulate more communicative output and critical thinking, then Today's Meet would not be suitable as students cannot fully express themselves, therefore, this may restrict their flow of logical reasoning and thinking. This also implies that the word limit and the lack of variety in functions also hinders natural and collaborative interaction between the students. It may restrict more interaction than in the physical classroom when students are conversing face to face. 

Lastly, Today's Meet allows teachers and students to save the transcript of the conversation. This function is helpful for teachers, since they can use the transcript to assess students' interlanguage and use this to structure and design the next language focused task. This is useful for evaluating and teaching spoken English grammar, collocations and vocabulary, but may not be suitable to assess writing ability since the restrictions and function of the chatroom only allows casual, simple and brief responses. 

Therefore, I suggest using Today's Meet as an icebreaker instead, to help students open up and warm up to their peers, and to help them feel comfortable expressing themselves with other colleagues. Today's Meet may possibly be a good support for the teachers to encourage students' participation and reduce their anxiety as they are gradually lead out from their comfort zone. Today's Meet is simple and easy to use for digital-immigrants as well, so teachers that are experiencing student anxiety or silence may give this tool a try!

[Tool sharing] Breaking News English

Have you ever felt that there is not a single textbook in the world that completely suits your teaching and learners' needs? Do you often have other ideas and authentic materials that you want to use to supplement your coursebook but you just don't have the time to design them? Fear not, as Sean Banville's ready made lessons and exercises on Breaking News English have you covered!

Breaking News English is an English teaching website that provides articles and exercises relating to current issues and topics. Each article is graded from level 0 to level 6. This is very useful for teachers as you can select the difficulty that suits your learner's level. Here is a table that gives you a clearer idea of the range of difficulty for each level.

LISTENING 

1. GRADED AUDIO CLIPS 

Not only are the reading passages on Breaking News English graded, the listening clips are also provided in different paces and accents to fit students' needs. If students have trouble listening to native speakers, then the teacher may use the "slowest" or "slower" audio clips to practice their listening skills, and gradually move up to the faster paces as they have a better understanding of the content. 

Using the graded audio clips is very useful for learners to observe and pick up the correct pronunciation and natural intonation. Since native-speakers normally do not speak at the "slower" or "medium" pace, having the "fastest" paced clip provides more authentic and natural practice and prepares students to interact in a real-life setting. 

2. ACCENTS 

Many learners also have trouble understanding different accents, especially British accent since most listening materials used in English classrooms are based on American accent. Having audio clips of different accents available is very beneficial for students' listening skills, especially if the teacher is non-native or the class is from an EFL setting. 

As students are exposed to different accents, their listening abilities will become less rigid as they can pick up on different varieties of English speaking. This may also reduce the discrepancy between the English language used in the classroom and English language used in the real world. 

3. MP3 FILES 

A helpful function Breaking News English provides is for teachers and learners to download the audio clip as MP3 files. We can never take technology and the internet for granted; sometimes the wifi disconnects when we need it most and it's quite troublesome for teachers, especially novice teachers, to have to come up with alternative exercises on the top of their head. To prevent such disaster from happening, teachers may download the MP3 files beforehand as back up and to ensure smoother progression of the lesson. 

Another advantage of having the MP3 files is that learners, especially autonomous learners, can save the MP3 files on their smartphones or tablets and listen to them when they're commuting to school or on a lunch break. Listening skills is difficult for learners of EFL context to enhance since they do not have much exposure to the L2 outside of the classroom. Hence, this function is a great boost for learners to become proficient listeners. 

EXERCISES 

Banville designs over 40 different types of exercises that go with each article that covers all of the four skills, spelling, grammar, pre and post reading exercises and many more (the categories may vary according to level). The reason why there are so many exercises for each article is that it is the total amount of exercises created for the topic, and different tasks fall under different levels according its difficulty. 

Russell Stannard suggests teachers to be selective; he states that he usually only goes over three exercises from the site in one class. Therefore, it is important for the teacher to keep her teaching aim and focus in mind while she is selecting the exercises for her students.

Clear instructions for each exercise are provided at the top of the page, which saves time for teachers figuring out how to use the exercise and the underpinning learning goals. This is also helpful for autonomous learners that want to study English on their own time but do not have a teacher to guide them. 

There are so many exercises provided on Breaking News English that it makes adapting textbook materials or supplementing courses for teachers a lot easier and is a lot more time efficient! Teachers won't have to spend time creating the worksheets on Word, searching for templates and content! The exercises on Breaking News English serves as a good guideline for novice teachers that do not have enough experience in designing effective and purposeful exercises. Using the exercises from the site may give them more ideas into teaching. 

Flexibility- Online exercises or print PDF worksheets 

Another useful function Banville has blessed EFL/ESL teachers with is the downloadable PDF file of the exercises! As I have mentioned earlier, you can't expect the internet to be working all the time! You can just print the PDF files as worksheets for a back up plan or when there are insufficient devices in the classroom! 

 There are so many exercises and possibilities for teachers to utilize into the classroom, but today  I will just focus on the two exercises recommended by Stannard-- Text Jumble and No Letters. The two exercises ask students to rebuild the text, which is suitable for post-reading activities, after the students have worked around the text thoroughly. 

1. Text Jumble

With Text Jumble, students need to reconstruct the text with the giving segments of the text. Stannard suggests organising the students into pairs to complete this task, as it will generate knowledge exchange and discussion about which segment works together grammatically and the logical sequence of the series of events in the text. 

Stannard says often times students might break into their L1 while figuring out the correct order, but it does not interfere with the students' learning as they go through a lot of cognitive and contextual language processing when they read the text carefully. This would be a good practice for students' reading skills as they are not just skimming through it, but they're reading it to pick up meaning and language structure at the same time. 

When students get the wrong answer, the tool will indicate the error with an 'X', which may generate more discussion between the students about WHY their choice is incorrect. The exercise also keeps score for the students, which may spark up excitement in the class as they get competitive or determined to score the highest.  

If you select the wrong choice, an 'X' will appear 

2. No Letters

No Letters is another text reconstructing activity. It is more difficult than Text Jumble as students are not given a word bank to select from. Instead, they need to jiggle their memory, knowledge and understanding of the text to complete this exercise. Therefore, it is even more crucial for teachers to ensure students are very familiar with the content and language of the text. Stannard also suggests teachers to conduct this activity in pairs to generate more discussion. 

The purpose of this exercise is to generate students' vocabulary and grammatical knowledge that fall under the same genre. For instance, students may think about words related to the topic,  "lack of sleep causes late night cravings", such as "fat", "calories", "sleep", etc. For each word the students get right, it will appear on the text, and gradually chunks of the sentences and passage will formulate. It gets harder as students use up most of the vocabulary words they know. Students may guess the words from the context and trigger their collocation awareness, which may also stimulate more higher thinking discussion and higher discourse analysis between students. 

The incorrect words inserted in the bar by students will appear on the side. This is worth noting for teachers, as they can have a clearer understanding about the students' thought process and may also base their follow-up language practices on the students' errors. 

Teachers should make sure that students are aware that the goal of the task is not to complete the entire passage, as rebuilding the entire passage from scratch may appear to be intimidating and demotivating for the students. Teachers should let students know that it is impossible even for native speakers to accomplish the task, so that students will feel less stressed when doing the task. Instead, the teacher may make this a competition for students to strive for the highest score. After time is up, the teacher may switch the task to asking students to summarise the passage in their own words for a more natural language output.

DRAWBACKS AND LAST REMARKS 

 I do not have any criticism about this website as there is so much for teachers to explore and integrate into their classroom. If I had to be picky, the only concern I have is perhaps the layout. It is quite simple, which may not be appealing nor attractive to young learners. Teachers who choose to use exercises with children may need to decorate the worksheets or arrange it in a more interesting way.

Overall, Breaking News English is a resourceful website that provides text, pre-, during-, and post- reading and listening exercises. The exercises are suitable for different settings, from learning alone to pair work and even group work as well. The exercises help busy teachers save time and give novice teachers more ideas into education.

Can you think of any other potential problems with Breaking News English? Or are there any benefits of this website that I haven't mentioned? Is there another exercise that you strongly recommend? Leave a comment below! :)

[Tool Sharing] Blended learning with blendspace

What is Blended learning?

According to Thomlinson and Whittaker, blended learning is the mixture of face-to-face teaching and online technological tools in the language classroom. Many teachers face the same problem of not having enough time to provide basic linguistic and content input and advanced, analytical exercises. Therefore, blended learning has become a growing approach for teachers to use in class sessions effectively as students get the receptive component done at home (such as readings or online lectures) as they meet in person to learn critically. Blendspace is a tool that allows teachers to design input and comprehensible tasks for learners to complete before coming to class.

Blendspace is a tool that has many educational sources for you to search for and incorporate into a mini lesson for students to complete when they're outside the classroom. It is user friendly as it has templates for you to choose from as you package the materials and exercises into the lesson. 

Sources: Ready-made materials 

In this screenshot, you can see that there is a large bank of ready-made teaching materials for you to incorporate into your lesson. Simply type in the keyword of your topic in TES Resources Search search bar. Sources you can find may include worksheets, factsheets, videos, booklets...etc.

Sources: Online Materials 

If you do not fancy using others' ready-made materials, you can find more "raw" and authentic materials from other sources such as Youtube, Google web or images, Flickr, or even materials you have from your computer!  However, one thing I found a bit frustrating with this function is that it does not filter the search results, so sometimes the list of sources may be a bit messy and overwhelming for you when you're trying to find something educationally appropriate for your learners.

create questions to check students' understandings

Sources: creating your own 

If blankspace or the web doesn't have anything that matches your needs and that you don't have anything complete at hand, you can start from scratch and just type in your content in the "Add Text" function. The functions are pretty similar to a blog post setting! 

You may also use the "Add quiz" function to create comprehensive questions to evaluate whether students have understood the text or material given for them to study before class. This is very useful, as it gives the teacher a better idea of where the students' understanding currently are at so that they can make any last minute modifications to their lesson before meeting the students in class, such as reinforcing a grammatical rule that students are confused with, or rephrasing a point in the text that students did not understand, etc. 

Learner interaction outside the physical classroom 

Lessons created on blendspace can also promote collaborative learning with the "Comment" function. The teacher can add in the description section questions for students to respond to and hopefully start a discussion. How collaborative this task can get may depend on how the teacher structures the question! :P 

Blendspace is quite flexible and suits different needs. If you're a busy teacher and have no time to create your own lesson, you can use the ready-made materials and modify it to match your students' needs. If you cannot find anything that fits your syllabus, you can use this template and create an online lesson with your own materials and exercises to share with your students to complete at home. By integrating blendspace into your class, you'll save yourself time from providing the input that the students can gain on their own at home and focus on more practice, communicative, constructive and/or meaningful tasks in class.