New digital trends in Education
Nowadays one of the most frequent reason for change in education is the fact that there has been a technological evolution. That means, that education needs to progress and there are lots of profitable digital resources that can help us to achieve our educational goals. Honestly, I consider that the secret remains in the fact that a teacher must know when a resource can fit in a learning situation.
For that reason in the following page I will provide a Symbaloo where you can find different digital resources that can be used to enhance learning.
Moreover, you can find bellow a grid where five of the digital tools of Symbaloo are explained. Also, there is an example of a learning situation in which a concrete digital resource could fit.
In the following text I will provide an example of a language learning situation where Voki, one of the resources explained above, could fit. As mentioned before, Voki offers us the chance to create characters and personalize them. Once you have the character you can write the speech that you want the character to say or record yourself with the speech. So, what I propose is take advantage of this digital resource to create an activity with the kids.
The purpose of the activity is to encourage the students to record themselves in order to give instructions to classmates. The following activity has been thought of doing it with the third cycle of primary education, however, I consider that the activity could be adapted to other levels. The activity consists in the fact that the kids need to plan an activity that they can teach to classmates, for instance, drawing a flower in a paper, making a paper plane. The students will have to prepare the instructions for teaching and record them through Voki. So, they will have to create a character that explains the instructions because in the next session they will play the instructions while the other mates follow them and do what the character says.
So, the students will need to create a character by making the effort to explain themselves appropriately. Because their purpose is that the other classmates understand him/her and can perform the instructions that the character is saying. The way to see if the student has created a proper Voki and given correct instructions using English will be by looking at if the classmates are able to perform or create what the instructions say.
All in all, this activity provides us the chance to create a dynamic in which the students will perform as the teachers for the other students. Thus, the activity motivates the students because they are free to choose the activity for which they will give the instruction. In fact, that activity is and English language learning situation, but it will possibly be interdisciplinary, because the student will teach different disciplines (painting, dancing...) while practising English speaking.
All this goes to show the fact that there are many options in which a resource could fit in a learning situation. The one explained above is just and example of using Voki but the digital resource offers plenty of possibilities that could enable the students to learn in a more meaningful and engaging way