Task 5: Hearing, Seeing, Talking, Writing - Getting Students' Sences Together
New media can give a teacher a whole myriad of possibilities of presenting content to students. Most important about these possibilities is using different media and methods to give the students' different receptors stimuli. This means not only using one sort of media, like audio media, at one time but also including visual media in that. This can be accomplished by using Television sets or computers with projectors. Connected to the receptive media the students are using there should be more media that challenge the students' productive skills in language learning. These would be writing and speaking skills. Each can be trained by simply analogue talking or writing but should be also trained with new media like computers (text data or talking over the microphone). Computers open up a whole world of new methods for producing and watching/hearing in the English classroom. The popular application "Skype" can therefore help a class communicate with e.g. another class in England or America with which the teacher has made a connection before and arranged times that students can talk to each other. Another possibility of producing text could be creating a website. After doing this e-portfolio I could imagine using "Weebly" with a class and produce some ingenious websites. It is very easy to learn and can be integrated in various contexts in the class syllabus.
But these possibilities need to be integrated adequately. A teacher should never use a movie over two whole school lessons because students would simply stop listening after a while and they would not take any of the input into their short term memory. The class needs to be integrated actively after watching a movie or hearing a sound file. A saving unit should be set directly after the receptive task so the students can think about what they just saw or heard, initiating a productive task. The class should be requested to be active and use the knowledge they just acquired. This procedure increases the steady rise of the class' learning curve. A meaningful placement of different tasks should also be chosen. Students do not want to do the same tasks over and over again. If the teacher chose a listening practice for the start, the lessons should end with a writing task, requesting a transition from audio-receptive to visual-productive skills. The productive skills can vary from writing essays to writing a dialogue or talking about a statement and debating it. The important thing is that there is no free space for boredom. As long as students are occupied and they have fun with what they have to do, the learning process is higher than with tasks the students are forced to do and they do not want to complete. Additionally this would kill the students' passion for the subject of English or even other subjects of language learning.
But these possibilities need to be integrated adequately. A teacher should never use a movie over two whole school lessons because students would simply stop listening after a while and they would not take any of the input into their short term memory. The class needs to be integrated actively after watching a movie or hearing a sound file. A saving unit should be set directly after the receptive task so the students can think about what they just saw or heard, initiating a productive task. The class should be requested to be active and use the knowledge they just acquired. This procedure increases the steady rise of the class' learning curve. A meaningful placement of different tasks should also be chosen. Students do not want to do the same tasks over and over again. If the teacher chose a listening practice for the start, the lessons should end with a writing task, requesting a transition from audio-receptive to visual-productive skills. The productive skills can vary from writing essays to writing a dialogue or talking about a statement and debating it. The important thing is that there is no free space for boredom. As long as students are occupied and they have fun with what they have to do, the learning process is higher than with tasks the students are forced to do and they do not want to complete. Additionally this would kill the students' passion for the subject of English or even other subjects of language learning.
