Tilly's lecture on Monday 23/1/12

Bombay TV! YEE HAAAA!

mailvu : The connected classroom

^____^

Hello readers!

Connected classroom?

Sounds familiar?

Well, connected classroom is an approach of linking activities in the cl

assroom with outside world where students might be asked to do extended or addition homework for their teachers. For this reason, I am going to tell you about how you can do this by using MailVU. MailVU is a video email that can be viewed by others. Students are able to record themselves speaking about a topic. All they need is a video camera, portable microphone or built in mic in the laptop and internet connection. Using MailVu is easy as A,B,C. Just click,record and send. Video recordings can be up to 10 minutes.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE WEBSITE: http://mailvu.com/index.htm

How to use it in the language classroom:

Using a 'connected classroom' approach, teachers can encourage speaking outside the classroom by using this activity. For example, students can talk about their favourite football team. They can do it alone, or maybe in groups or pairs where students can make it as an interview or group discussion. Teachers may give introduce the topics in the classroom and students will go home and do it on their own using MailVU. This will directly encourage autonomous learning.

Later, students send their recording via email to teachers where it is now the teachers' responsibilities to listen to the recordings and provide some feedbacks. Another way to do this is, by asking students to do some discussion in groups. Given a topic for example " studying in local universities is better than studying in foreign universities", students can be asked to give their rationale and justification to the topic and send it to other groups. Of course, other groups need to respond to the video

Other interesting ideas that might interest you:

• Students talk about their family members.
• Students do a timeline and talk about each year that they wrote.
• Students may talk about their favourite local food.
• Students may talk about their first memory entering high school.
• Students may talk about the place they would like to visit outside their country.

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT MAILVU:

• It's easy to use. You don't need to sign up. Can use it instantly.
• It has a free version.
• It's good to practise speaking outside classrooms. The principle of connected classroom makes the tool as the perfect tool for classroom lesson.
• The file can be shared via email. You can stay connected with your friends with more interactive way of sending audio mail.

WHAT I DON'T LIKE ABOUT MAILVU:

• Too bad it can't be embedded into blogs.
• Teachers need to consider the external factors in the classrooms such as background noise if they were to do their recordings in the classroom, as it might affect the quality of the sound.

Here is what Russell has to say about connected classroom! enjoy!

ELLLO ENGLISH

Hello,

I was in Russell's class today and he taught us about Adobe where you can have long distance lecture as well ELLLO English. So my focus today is on Elllo English where firstly I am going to talk about what is the website is all about, the sections, the target group, why recommend Elllo, and also the disadvantages.

What is ELLLO English?

Elllo English is an interactive website where it is one of the biggest source for teaching and learning materials. The main skill that is emphasised in the website is listening skill. Elllo has a wide range of English listening lesson activities ( they call it English Listening Lesson Library Online), where students or teachers may learn language naturally.

There are several main sections which are: Views, Mixer, Games, Videos, and News. For each sections, the listening lessons will include some activities which have multimedia, free MP3 files, vocab tasks, language notes, print page and many more. There are a lot of activities to choose from. Most of the texts are supported with audio explanations of vocabulary items. The most interesting part is that video sharing, where there are a lot of videos have been sent from people all around the world. You can listen to different accents (Korea, Canada, Singapore etc.) and their speech rate in the videos. The topics and issues are very interesting and engaging, ranging from personal issues, technology to cultures of different people.

Target group:

13- 17 years old. This is the age for secondary school students in Malaysia.

Why choose Elllo English?

1. Authenticity. The topics are mostly related to students' lives where it shows real-life situations. Moreover, the videos give students some exposure to how to use language in daily life, not fabricated English where some people do speak like a book.
2. Variety of accent. It is fundamental for students to know that English is now becoming an international language and is being spoken in many accents. It is good for students to know and be proud of their accents even though it is not RP English because as long as people can understand them, accent does not matter.
3. Accommodate students of different learning styles. The website provides both video and audio to cater students with different needs and abilities.
4. Suitable for autonomous learning.
5. The topics are quite interesting where it shows variety of different culture and its society.
6. Audio explanation for vocabulary items with examples of sentences.
7. Downloadable MP3 files and text where teachers and students are able to use it in the classroom without internet connection.
8. Personalisation. Address different preference by choosing topics that relate to students themselves.
9. Language is skill-based where it offers opportunity to practice different skills. Activities ranging from writing, comprehension, listening and communicative language.
10. Give students reason/purpose for listening through the activities that is assigned to them.
11. Context. Language is learnt in meaningful context.
12. CLIL. Be sceptical. Could be negative too.

The disadvantages:

• Too many advert. Distracting.
• Videos cannot be downloadable. =(

Overall, Elllo provides am excellent materials for listening activities. I think for classroom activities, it is quite interesting since the topics varies and interesting.