Make Your Lessons Interactive!
As most of us have a teaching background, our group (Annelies De Pelsemaeker, Veronique Cordier, Ilse Voet, Bianca Morgan and Anubha Goel) decided to make a beginner level English Course, which can be used by both children and adults. The interactive lessons are woven around everyday themes. Our themes are:
 |
| A collage of learning units |
- Talking about family
- Going to a doctor
- Transportation
- Going to the supermarket
- Travelling
- Asking for and giving directions
- Going to a restaurant
Our focus is on vocabulary and useful phrases as well as conversation. We have addressed all four language learning skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. These themes are based on actual course material used in the Flemish centers for basic education and can thus be used in classrooms right away.
E-learning Environment
We looked for an appropriate software to design our lessons, and considered many, like Udemy and P2P, but finally settled on Xerte. We liked Xerte for its many interactive features that are useful for teachers, like Dialogue, Drag and Drop Labelling, Gap Fill, Matching Texts, Categories, Button Sequence, Model Answer and Quiz, and games like Hangman and Memory. It also enables the user to link within the document as well as embed hyperlinks to the Internet. For detailed instructions on how we went about creating our project, please visit our wiki.
We used freely licensed materials available on the Internet for images, videos and audio. We also did our own audio recordings and edited them with Audacity. We saved our individual Xerte projects in the SCORM format. SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) is a set of technical standards which enables communication between online learning content (like Xerte) and Content Management Systems (like Chamilo).
Content Management System
We uploaded our educational content on the Chamilo platform in the Course Catalogue, with the name 'Basic English Course'. We also propose to use the features of Chamilo to add assessments to our units.
Chamilo is an open-source e-learning and collaboration platform that provides many benefits, especially in an educational context. Several resources and interactive activities that teachers can design and implement themselves can be included. A student forum link or page could allow students to ask questions, discuss problems and solutions. It can be used to initiate group discussions or collaborate on group assignments. Teachers can offer conversation exchanges through links to websites or create partnerships with an English speaking group to arrange language exchanges.
Collaborative Platforms
In order to create this project, our team worked together on various forums and collaborative sites where we could interact, share and discuss ideas and assign tasks. Most of our discussions took place on the VUB Pointcarre forum. We also arranged virtual meetings, assigned tasks and set deadlines on Wiggio, a collaborative website where anyone can start a group and add members. Wiki served as a platform for developing a final report that could be accessed by the public. We chose wiki as it enables discussions, easy editing and preserves an editing history. Google docs was also used to co-write specific documents.
Making the Video
To assemble our video, we used slides prepared in Impress, screen shots taken by Screencast-O-Matic, audio files recorded in Audacity as well as camera videos taken by us. We assembled it all using a freely downloadable version of Windows Movie Maker. We uploaded our video on YouTube. However since the maximum duration allowed is 15 minutes, we did it in three parts. We also uploaded the complete video on Dailymotion.
You can enjoy the first part of the video presentation of our project here. For Parts 2 and 3, please select the links below.
Making the Video
To assemble our video, we used slides prepared in Impress, screen shots taken by Screencast-O-Matic, audio files recorded in Audacity as well as camera videos taken by us. We assembled it all using a freely downloadable version of Windows Movie Maker. We uploaded our video on YouTube. However since the maximum duration allowed is 15 minutes, we did it in three parts. We also uploaded the complete video on Dailymotion.
You can enjoy the first part of the video presentation of our project here. For Parts 2 and 3, please select the links below.
Basic English Course - the full course
Keywords: Basic English Course, interactive lessons, educational, Chamilo, Xerte, wiki, Wiggio, collaborative platform, Content Management System, e-learning environment, SCORM, Screencast-O-Matic, Impress, Youtube, Dailymotion, Windows Movie Maker
Group Members: Veronique Cordier, Anubha Prakash Goel, Bianca Morgan, Annelies De Pelsemaeker, Ilse Voet
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
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