People nowadays can hardly lead a life without the help of technology. Potentially we have been used to, and addicted to, visual and audio stimuli fed by online tools, and so are students in school. The participation of online materials somewhat catches students’ attention and improves both teaching and learning quality. Thus, in my teaching practice in the past few weeks, I tried to integrate some activities that require not only hands-on practice but online learning, including using YouTube videos and Kahoot!.

 

Videos on YouTube (YT) are abundant resources teachers can take advantage of. In my class, because helping students to distinguish different phonetic features is one of the teaching objectives, I present YT videos right in the first class. There are two reasons why I think YT videos are suitable for teaching this subject. Firstly, the stress-timed features in spoken English are imperative but often ignored by Taiwanese students. Most of them can only read a passage or deliver a speech in a boring, laborious manner. By successively presenting two videos, one with monotone and the other with vivid and native tones, the comparison shall clearly point out the different feelings of the audience and remind students what kinds of speakers are to be appreciated and what kinds are not. Secondly, a “native input” seems necessary considering some researchers’ suggestions. Because most English teachers did not receive professional and systematic training in pronunciation, wrong sound patterns can presumably occur in class, which influences students’ recognition of how to pronounce the words in the long run. However, if we can use videos with native speakers that we are originally not able to touch if there is no online network, students have a chance to listen to the target language in the most native way and immerse in the foreign context. For these reasons, I suppose YT videos are a convenient way to achieve my teaching objective.

 

At the beginning of the second class, considering students in Minxiong Junior High have access to iPad, I added Kahoot!, an online game-based learning platform, to my review section. Firstly, I have to admit that the game is so enjoyable that I spend too much time on it. Nevertheless, it reveals that Kahoot! is really a brilliant online tool that engages both teachers and students quite easily. I think the charm of Kahoot! is its perfect decoration for competition. Positive competition is an important engine that triggers students to willingly improve themselves, but stressful contests (i.e. midterm and final exams) always make students suffer and daunted. Because Kahoot! is positioned as a “game,” when students are struggling to pick up an appropriate answer to the question about the content in the previous class, they show no dissatisfaction or any other negative attitudes while they indeed are joining a competition to win their peers. After students finish the game, the game also offers statistics of each question, which helps teachers check students’ problems. A few minutes later, reviewing process ends, and all the students recollect the knowledge and are ready for the following course.

 

YT videos and Kahoot! are both presented as an opening of my class, for they can focus students on the class and engage them in constructing their own knowledge. Next time I would like to try more online platforms (like Facebook, Wix, blog, etc.) to see if they can also work well either in physical or online classroom.