In the distance, both teachers and students are still looking for ways to innovate teaching and connect with their learning communities, now more than ever. At ELT Think Tank, we believe in working with learning communities to come up with educational strategies that can motivate and engage students. As part of our social engagement, ELT Think Tank has been supporting a local rural public school since the beginning of 2019, and despite the current pandemic, we have been trying to find new ways to continue supporting the children’s learning process.
After brainstorming with the English teacher from the school, we came up with the idea of creating a digital learning environment with learning stations. We’ll be documenting every step of the process in our upcoming short articles such as the set up , the students’ reaction, overall engagement, as well as the impact on the community. This is a small-scale project that we hope helps students to connect more with the language as well as promote autonomous learning skills.
We’ve decided to set up our digital learning stations focused on vocabulary enhancement by cross-referencing it with the school’s curriculum. The content will be updated monthly in what we are calling cycles. The stations were set up in the following way:
Learning Station
Students will find videos and other input to learn the assigned vocabulary for each cycle. These videos will help them to understand not only the vocabulary but basic commonly used phrases when using the target vocabulary.
Practice Station
We’ve partnered with Cool English and are integrating their interactive games into our digital learning environment. These games allow students to recognize, practice, and learn new vocabulary in a fun and interactive way. We have divided this learning process into five stages: engage, explore, explain, extend, and evaluate.
On my own Station
In this station, students can enhance their language learning by practicing other skills like reading and listening, according to their preferred skills or practice.
Teacher Help Station
Here students will find a forum where they can write questions about what they’ve been learning and get responses from their teacher or one of our volunteers.
Learn together Station
We want to promote collaborative learning spaces, so in this space, students will be able to share their explanations of the topics covered in that topic to explain to their classmates.
Once students have access, they will be able to join in at any time from any device and participate in the different activities at their own pace and in any order they like.
We will continue to document our progress and hope you will tag along for the ride!
