"Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire" -William Butler Yeats
The quotation above is true to some extent that learning solely out of a sense of obligation is less effective than learning for one's self. Nothing is more fulfilling than to help instill a sense of joy in students in their learning process. Therefore, ClicknLearn, which also hold the same principle of education above, may be helpful to make the process of teaching and learning filled with a lot of joys and fun!
ClicknLearn is an interactive website that provides many interesting lessons and exercises for learners. it is an educational language website developed in Spanish and specially designed to meet the needs of modern language learners. It is interesting site which provides four different language versions -English, French, Spanish and Valencia.
HOW TO USE CLICKnLEARN?
- Go to the ClicknLearn's homepage. Then, click 'Enter site' and the tool will come out in a Flash version.
- Then, choose a language that you want.
- Shoot at menu and then choose your level at the top left of the side.(Screenshot 1)
 |
| Screenshot 1: choose your level and topic |
- Choose a topic that you want and start learning!
HOW CAN TEACHERS USE CLICKnLEARN?
This website accommodates all students' needs as it provides exercises ranges from easy to advanced. Therefore, it can be used for all learners ranging from beginner to advanced. In general, students will have interest in learning if there are a lot of colours and images included. Taking this advantage on the ClicknLearn's website, it can act as a'catalyst' that trigger students' to learn better. Teacher can use the illustrations in the website to pre-teach the beginner students about new vocabulary items that is used on the road for example. Visual is helpful in such activity as brains capture word better if the words are contextualised through images.
Teacher can also use this website for what we called as a 'blended' learning, which means the lesson in the classroom is integrated with the use of technology. Here, teachers can use this website as a supplement activity, for instance, teachers may ask students to spend twenty minutes on the site, doing the exercises after introducing a topic such as clothing or aneroxia nervosa in the classroom.
Since the exercises in the website are printable, teacher may print them out and give them to students as an extra exercise for them. However, teachers should bear in mind that it is not worth and may be wasteful to give students a lot of exercises to do as they may become demotivated and may even end up not doing it. Therefore, give only a few exercises(two sheets would be good) that you really think are good for their comprehesion.
Since the exercises in the website are printable, teacher may print them out and give them to students as an extra exercise for them. However, teachers should bear in mind that it is not worth and may be wasteful to give students a lot of exercises to do as they may become demotivated and may even end up not doing it. Therefore, give only a few exercises(two sheets would be good) that you really think are good for their comprehesion.
Teacher may also use the website as online test. What can teachers do is get the students to do a test on the topic given in the website in the class by taking about one and half hour for students to complete the test. By doing this, teachers can give summative feedback about the students' performances and evaluate between weaker and smarter students.
- Interesting-level of interactivity might be a bit interesting as students need to deal with kinesthetic learning style (click and learn).
- Multi-skills- The website includes different exercises that integrate different skills such as problem solving, reading, analysing that helps students to develop these different skills in their learning process.
- Printable handout- The exercises on this website are printable for teachers as classroom activities or students if they prefer paper rather than on screen exercises.
- Various topics- this website provides various topics that are categorised asccording to students' level for example, child labour for advanced students.
- Less thinking- Some of the activities in the website rely too much on memorising which eventually impedes the language learning process as students do not really think to find the answers.
- Instructions- Instructions in this website are mostly in Spanish, thus, it might be quite difficult for other language learners.
- Unnecessary sounds- There is a lot of sound included in unnecessary places, such as the starting of the website, and some odd noises added into the games. This may be distracting to some language learners when doing the exercises.
- No assistance- There is no assistance if the students find it difficult to answer a question and there is no button to go back to the previous page. The absence of such important aids for language learning will eventually degrade such a high potential language teaching-learning website.
- load of texts- Students may get bores or demotivated with all the texts presence on the website. Not all students prefer to read such an overload of visual texts. There are not many pictures included, taking language learning to the old days of drilling and grammar focused.
0 comments:
Post a Comment