Virtual Reality and Oral Skills: ELSA

AI technology is now being used to teach and learn English. Let's explore how AI can be applied to the EFL classroom and what's the impact of it with ELSA as an example!

ELSA is an English-speaking learning platform that provides learners with speaking practice by creating a virtual dialogue environment, voice recognition and delivering feedback.

Advantages

Personalized learning: ELSA creates personalized learning scenarios and dialogues based on the learner's level and needs, helping to target oral communication skills.

Speech recognition technology: ELSA uses advanced speech recognition technology to accurately recognize learners' pronunciation and provide instant feedback to help learners improve their speaking skills.

Flexibility: Learners can study at their time and pace, accessing the platform anytime, anywhere via mobile phones or computers for convenience and flexibility.

Wealth resources: ELSA provides diverse learning resources for the EFL classroom. Through ELSA, teachers can feed students with speaking topics and exercises in various scenarios, and then get real-time analyses of students' progress, which helps to reduce the pressure on teachers' curriculum design and also helps them to effectively grasp students' study path.

(All of the above images are from ELSA)

Limitations

Lack of humanized communication: Although ELSA provides voice recognition technology, the learning process lacks humanized communication and interaction, and cannot completely replace face-to-face teaching and communication.

Poor correction of pragmatic and contextual errors: ELSA relies heavily on speech recognition technology, which makes it challenging to correct students' pragmatic and contextual errors and requires further guidance and counselling from the teacher.

ELSA in Learning

The application of ELSA to language learning can bring a lot of convenience, but it is needed to consider its advantages and shortcomings and use it wisely in the practice. If you'd like to find out more, just click through to ELSA's website

DISCLAIMER: This post references the ChatGPT.

Thank you for your reading and look forward to more reviews!

Language teaching and learning with mobile phone

The use of smart devices and electronic materials in language teaching contexts has become a favored teaching method for many educators. So, what are the implications of using smartphones for teaching?

Advantages

🚌Convenience: Smartphones are portable and can be used to study anytime and anywhere without the constraints of time and place. Learners can take advantage of fragmented time to study, such as on the bus, while waiting in line, etc.

(Image from Nearpod)

📱Diversified resources: There are rich and diversified English learning resources on smartphones, including word memory apps, grammar practice software, listening practice websites and so on, and learners can choose the right resources for learning according to their needs.

👏Highly interactive: Smartphone apps and platforms for learning English are usually highly interactive, with features such as voice recognition and instant feedback, which can help learners practice speaking and listening better.

💽Organizational learning: Access, storage and retrieval of learning behavior records and outcomes (eg in Moodle, Kahoot), sharing and recycling of material, cost efficiency (Week8's PowerPoint).

(Image from my Moodle learning recording)

🔎Interesting: Based on teaching experience, teaching and learning with smartphones allows learners to experience a new mode of learning without the use of paper textbooks, and generally speaking, learning resources and platforms on smartphones are designed to contain more pictures and videos, which can be more appealing to learners.

Disadvantages

📳Distraction: There are many other apps and social platforms on smartphones that can easily distract learners from their studies.

👓Eyesight fatigue: Spending a lot of time looking at the screen of the mobile phone may lead to eye fatigue and vision loss, affecting the learning effect and health.

📡Network limitations: Learning English on a smartphone relies on an internet connection, so if the internet signal is unstable or there is no internet connection, learners will not be able to learn.

🚨Security Risks: Learning English on a smartphone may involve security risks, such as personal information leakage and online fraud, which require learners to pay attention to personal information protection and network security.

Personal reflection

In my opinion, the benefits of utilizing smartphones for teaching and learning English outweigh the drawbacks, and addressing the shortcomings is achievable through targeted measures. For example, developing effective learning programmes, specifying the number of hours of mobile phone use in the teaching and learning context, and setting graded learning tasks. Additionally, educators can meticulously evaluate and cherry-pick learning platforms and digital resources, thereby eliminating potentially hazardous learning materials when introducing them to students.

DISCLAIMER: This post references the ChatGPT and Week 8 slides.

Thank you for your reading and look forward to more reviews!

Blended learning: H5P

Incorporating blended learning into the EFL classroom has emerged as a prominent trend in language education. Let's delve into how blended learning can be effectively integrated into language learning and the significant impact it can yield, with H5P serving as an illustrative example! 

H5P is an open-source interactive content authoring tool, it supports the creation, sharing and reuse of interactive html5 content in the browser.

How blended learning can be effectively integrated into language learning?

🔍H5P provides an intuitive user interface and easy to follow steps that allow users to easily create various types of interactive content without the need for programming or specialized skills. Users only need to register for an account to get a free thirty-day trial, and guidance for new users is provided.

📝H5P supports multiple types of interactive content, including multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, drag-and-drop, multimedia presentations, interactive videos, etc., catering for content creation for different learning contexts and needs. Users only need to upload raw materials and make personalized edits to generate various types of interactive content to choose from, which enriches the teaching and learning activities in the language classroom and saves creation time.

💻H5P generates interactive content that can be embedded into web pages for desktop computers, iPad, smartphones, etc. H5P employs open-standard technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript and can be used in integration with other Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Content Management Systems (CMS). For example, H5P can work with Canvas and Moodle, which are commonly used in educational institutions, to achieve blended learning.

💡H5P is a free and open-source tool that allows users to freely use, modify and share created interactive content, facilitating the sharing of educational resources and innovation. Teachers' use of H5P for teaching and learning activities in the classroom can promote teacher-student interaction and student group interaction.

Does H5P have any shortcomings?

Although H5P provides a user-friendly interface, it still requires some time and effort for beginners to understand its various functions and operating procedures.

H5P, as an open-source project, may be subject to maintenance and updates, and has some instability and reliability issues that require users to update and maintain it.

(All of the above images are from H5P)

More information

Some practice of The Best Content of 2024: First Annual H5P Academy Awards | H5P

Some guidance on using H5P: H5P Tutorial - Create Interactives for Your LMS or Website

If you'd like to find out more, just click through to H5P's website

Thank you for your reading and look forward to more reviews!

Diffit: Learning resources for all

 Diffit

Diffit is a powerful tool for creating lesson plans that can bring innovation and efficiency to an educator's teaching journey.

What can you do with Diffit？

🎤Diffit simplifies the lesson plan creation process by generating graded materials for different levels of learners based on the original text or keywords, such as topics or questions, entered by the user. Users have editing rights to the generated materials, so for teachers, especially beginners, Diffit can provide inspiration for course design and ease administrative tasks, while teachers still have the right to review the materials for accuracy and appropriateness.

🏃Diffit is able to provide students with a variety of exercise types, which can be used by teachers to select exercise sheets for the students to suit their learning needs and preferences, or by students to create learning accounts and add exercises for weak areas they need to strengthen.

🎡Diffit can generate lesson plans in different languages, which are not only suitable for EFL classrooms, but can also be applied to the learning of other languages.

Are there any limitations on Diffit's use?

🌀Diffit is only available with a free trial and limited free features, you need to pay if you need to unlock more content. For example, Diffit for schools, a tool that provides personalised lessons and increased teacher-student interaction, is available for a fee.

💙The use of Diffit is restricted by network and region, for example, in China, a VPN is required to access the platform.

🙋For educators using Diffit, this may result in an over-reliance on the platform's auto-generated courses to the detriment of innovation in course design and self-professionalization.

(All of the above images are from Diffit)

😀PS:

You can try out the free trial version of Diffit to check if it will help you in your EFL classroom. If you'd like to find out more, just click through to Diffit's website.

Thank you for your reading and look forward to more reviews!

Collaboration on Conceptboard

 👫Conceptboard: A Collaborative Tool

Conceptboard is a feature-rich online collaboration tool for teams to share and work together. For example, when a project gets to the design part, and everyone has different opinions but may not be very clear about each other's ideas and progress, Conceptboard allows everyone to communicate the design together using annotations and images, which will reduce a lot of trouble. In practice, however, the tool is not entirely user-friendly. In practice, however, the tool is not entirely user-friendly. The complexity and limitations of the operation make me reluctant to give this tool a high rating.

💪Strong Points

1. Visual Collaboration: Conceptboard offers real-time collaboration, allowing team members to work on a same stage at the same time. This helps teams quickly share ideas and co-ordinate work.

2. Multimedia Support: The tool supports a wide range of media types, including images, text, charts, etc., allowing users to create flexible and rich designs.

3. Cloud Storage: All work is saved in the Cloud and can be accessed and edited by team members anytime, anywhere, increasing flexibility and accessibility.

😷Weak Points

1. Limitations of Functionality: There are some limitations on the free version, including the time of the trial, the number of participants, storage space, etc. Larger teams or users who need more functionalities must upgrade to the paid version.

2. Operational complexity: For first-time users, it may take some time to get used to Conceptboard's interface and functionality. Based on my experience with peers in classroom practice, Conceptboard is not suitable for collaboration on iPad or mobile phones, and the functions and instructions on the interface are not clearly labelled and described, making it difficult for beginners to quickly familiarize it, and will likely require the assistance of other tools.

3. Dependence on Internet Connection: Conceptboard is a cloud-based tool and requires a stable internet connection. In the event of an unstable or disconnected network, the experience may be affected.

Some of the problems our team encountered due to unfamiliarity with the operation.

🙌Group Works

Images from the collaboration with my group members using Conceptboard in ICT classroom.

👀More Information: 

A warm word of advice: The best practice is to try the free or trial version first to determine if it fits the team's needs and workflow.

If you'd like to find out more, just click through to Conceptboard's Website.

Thank you for your reading and look forward to more reviews!

A New World of Free and Certified Learning

 Learner Autonomy

Autonomy is not an innate characteristic of students and generally needs to be developed through proper guidance and education. Enhancing autonomy can help students identify their own learning needs, set up learning goals, seek learning strategies (Holec, 1981, as cited in Benson, 2011), and ultimately develop the ability to learn independently and efficiently. However, strict external constraints may promote students' progress temporarily, but in the long run, it will lead to students' dependence on and obedience to the teacher and external stimuli. The advantage of some online learning platforms happens to be that they give users more freedom to choose courses that match their interests and arrange own study plan, while the eventual provision of certificates can largely increase their motivation to learn.

Alison's strengths

💓Global accessibility: The platform serves a global audience and supports multiple languages.

💓Free courses: Alison offers a large number of free courses covering a wide range of areas, including business, technology, languages and more, enabling learners to gain a broad range of knowledge.

💓Variety of topics: Alison has a wide range of courses, from the basics to specialized skills, to suit every learning need.

💓Gaining certifications: Upon completion of Alison's program, learners can earn certificates of accreditation, which may be helpful to some in the job search process.

💓Learning planning: by entering your dream career position, Alison can automatically match and recommend suitable courses, and can provide free career tests to guide professional choices!

💓Earn on Alison: Alison is a resource sharing platform that allows users to upload learning resources and created lessons and get paid for them.

Some limitations

💔Adverts and sales pitches: Some learners have reported excessive adverts and sales pitches on the platform, which can be quite disruptive to the user experience.
💔Lack of interactivity: Compared to some other learning platforms, some of Alison's courses may lack interactivity and practicability, as many of the courses are mainly presented through text-based PowerPoint, and learners may feel bored or fatigued.
💔Authority of certificates: While certificates of accreditation may be available, some employers may be skeptical about the authority of these certificates, especially when compared to certificates issued by reputable academic institutions.

Summary

Overall, Alison offers a free learning opportunity for those seeking self-directed learning and access to basic knowledge, and as such, it plays a positive role in fostering learning autonomy to a certain extent. However, for those seeking higher quality and deeper learning, it may be necessary to consider other more professional and well-known learning platforms.

More information

All of the above images are from Alison.

If you'd like to find out more, you can click through to Alison's website: Alison | Free Online Courses & Online Learning.

And Alison's New App is now available on iOS and Android! Download now!

Thank you for your reading and look forward to more reviews!

Games on EFL Classes---Voki

Why games?

English teachers need to design learning situations in EFL classes that enable students to engage in the creative and self-relevant interactions. In addition to professional knowledge, digital games with a certain degree of entertainment can make students bored and actively participate in the classroom.

Why Voki?

(Image from Voki )

Voki is a platform for educators and learners to create speaking roles for fun activities.

😀There are lots of interesting characters to choose from, including different humans, animals, and sprites!

😄Choose clothing, accessories, hairstyles and facial features according to preference!

😁Record your own voice or type in a message then choose from male and female voices and it can be paired with different sound effects!

😍Design different backgrounds for characters as needed!

😛Many publishing and sharing options to choose from!

😗Creators can use it for free, and some features will be offered a 15-Day-Trial.

Try to start your exploring on Voki!

(Image from Youtube)

Check out our site to find out more: Voki.

Thank you for reading!