Wordwall, Learning through Games!

During the process of peer teaching in term2, one of our group members used Wordwall to assist in teaching and I found it really interesting with lovely sound effect. So here's what I'd like to recommend this week - Wordwall!💞

The website link is here.👈

🔖Introduction

Wordwall is a platform for teachers to design new interactive activities. It can be used both in and out of the classroom. It focuses on using the form of games to help students review and recap the knowledge points they have already learned in an interactive way.

🔖How to use Wordwall? --- Please see the following video for details.

🔖Advantages

• Making learning enjoyable

As mentioned before, Wordwall helps students to consolidate their memory of what they have learnt. This is a subconscious processes.

In addition, Wordwall also shows students a ranking after completing the game according to on the length of time consumed and the percentage of correct answers. Therefore, students who are more competitive may play many times just to get a better ranking. This increases students' autonomy and motivation to learn.

The cute sound effect in the games could also make students feel relaxed.

• Easy to use and provide more options

There are 18 different templates available for teachers in Wordwall. Teachers can design activities and games on the basis of needs in the classroom.

Moreover, Wordwall is easy to use, as the slogan goes "The easy way to create your own teaching resources". There are only three steps to design an activity: Step 1, select a template; Step 2, add content to the template; Step 3, play on the screen.

• Powerful community

The Wordwall community is a great place to see various topics designed by teachers from different countries around the world. Any activity design that has open access to the public can be used directly or adapted.

🔖Limitations

• Cannot practice students' listening skills. 

Basically all the activity templates are based around reading skills, which is not too friendly for students at the novice level.

• Cannot be used to learn new things. 

The functions are more geared towards assisting students to review knowledge, otherwise teachers would have to seek help from other tools.

• Only 5 free games and activities can be designed per account.

If users want to dig more in Wordwall, they have to pay for it.

In conclusion, choosing Wordwall to design classroom activities can not only stimulate the interest of students, but also make the class more interactive, so as to improve students' classroom participation. Try it with me!😎

There is my example of Unjumble. If you have any interest, please click here.👻

YouGlish, Your Pronunciation Corpus

Fluency is the key word for this time. YouGlish, the tool I want to recommend, help people with their pronunciation. The link is here. 👍

🍎Introduction

As the slogan on the homepage of YouGlish's website says, it uses YouTube to help people improve their English pronunciation. However, the power of its function is not limited to pronunciation only. YouGlish can help people learn "how English is spoken by real people and in context". Ultimately, users could speak fluent and authentic English.

Here is a short video about how to use YouGlish, enjoy!👏

🍎Advantages

• Easy to use

Whenever you search for a word, you can see the related video that contains it. The tool will firstly provide a video that will be automatically stop at the time when the word appears. Once the play button is pressed, the first sentence the user hears is the one containing the keyword. If you don't like the first example sentence (maybe the accent of the person in the video) or if you want to hear more example sentences, you can press the button at the bottom of the video to go to the next video.

• Convenient to search for phrases and collocations

The correct usage of phrases and collocations is essential for fluent spoken English. For example, there are 542 entries for "take temperature" and only 58 entries for "test temperature", which means that the former one is more commonly used in daily life. 

     

• More Authentic

Whether you are looking up words or phrases in YouGlish, it will provide their using context, which helps people to become familiar with the specific usage of each word or phrase. 

🍏Limitations

• Distracting

Because YouGlish is based on YouTube, one of the world's largest video websites, the users, especially younger students, will easily get distracted by the ocean of videos resulting in ineffective learning.

• Difficult to in select useful information

Similar to the previous disadvantage, YouGlish provides users with so much information at once that it can be a challenge to filter the information that is most useful to them. It could be time-consuming to find out how to use a word in a specific area.

• Regional restrictions

It is a pity that YouGlish is not available in China mainland now.😢

Overall, YouGlish would be a rather good choice if you want to practice pronunciation and speaking skills as well.💕

H5P, Make Activity More Interactive!

The key word this time is INTERACTION. The website I want to share is H5P! The link is here.💖

🏃Introduction

Teaching or learning a foreign language is a constant exchange of information and teachers need to create a variety of opportunities for interaction in and out of the classroom. Thanks to the development of the Internet, even under the influence of COVID-19, teachers can still use various tools to interact with students through online teaching and H5P is one of the best.

H5P is an open source tool based on cloud network, which allows people to create HTML5 e-learning content and publish it to popular platforms such as WordPress, Moodle, Drupal and so on.

🏃How to use H5P?

This video explains it in detail! Enjoy!

🏃Advantages

• Easy to use 

There is no required technical skills while using. The tutorials associated with each activity design in H5P make it simple for many people to get started designing, greatly lowering the barrier to use.

• A wide range of interactive e-learning activities

H5P provides users with over 30 activity types to choose from. Everyone can find a design template that suits their classroom content and interaction mode, such as Flashcards (answer questions while looking at pictures) and Audio Recorder (which can be used to check students' pronunciation and practice their speaking skills).

• Is Mobile - friendly

H5P can be easily operated on mobile phones not just on computers.

• Allow collaboration

Encouraging students to collaborate in and out of the classroom stimulating their inspiration of learning. Meanwhile, H5P could promote interaction among students ( also the interaction between teacher and students).

• Instant feedback

In many activities, taking Flashcards as an example, students can get feedback immediately after answering the question (i.e. whether the answer is correct or not), without waiting for teacher's correction (which sometimes could be time-consuming). This, in a sense, improves the efficiency of teaching.

🏃Limitations

• The privacy setting of H5P determines that all activities designed by users are visible to the public. Maybe some people will think it is not acceptable.

• It is only free for one month! People need to pay for the service if wish to continue using H5P to design activities.

All in all, H5P is worth trying, so what are you waiting for?💪

There is the simple quiz about weather that I designed as an example, please click here if you have any interest 😎