What’s around the corner in education? COVID has led to a huge number of new companies, ideas and technologies, and education is just one of the sectors that are ready for an upgrade!
The new school year is not too far away now and with it, lots more opportunities to bring fun and exciting new ideas into the classroom. Check out the rest of the article to see what new technology and toys English teachers could start to use this year.
Whether you join us online or at our academy in Valencia, classes with RKA Valencia are always fun, engaging and help you to speak English with confidence. Check out our classes here and learn more about the academy here.
Toys
1. Online games and competitions – It doesn’t matter if your students are in the class with you or sitting at home (online), there’s so many different game and competition platforms that can really modernize and energize your classroom. More technology orientated students will have an expectation of seeing technology used in the classroom as much as in their normal lives.
A. Live polling and voting - pages like Challonge, in the image below.
These pages allow you to interact with students in a fun and unique way, showing them a great visual space to understand ideas and give opinions. You can completely personalize the content, and use whatever themes or ideas that you need for a lesson.
B. Drawing and idea sharing apps - technology based solutions don't always need to be complicated and difficult to work with. There are plenty of excellent drawing and online idea sharing apps that let multiple people draw, write and use the same space simultaneously. Check out programs like Aggie or MalMal, which both work very well.
Technology
Roblox – if you haven’t heard of this game/platform, Roblox allows anyone to create a world with any shape or design with your own text, actions, rules and challenges. It’s quite hard to describe the amount of things you could use Roblox for, but I’ll try to give you a sense of what could be possible.
Younger kids love to play games and have grown up with them like no other generation. In your unique Roblox world you can quickly create obstacles and multiple choice questions that the gamer must interact with the pass to the next stage.
You can carry out a traditional verb quiz or vocabulary test, but instead of your students writing down then answers, they can jump on them, hit them or transport onto them in the Roblox world. Engaging younger learners in this way will be so much more successful. When we’ve tested out some ideas in Roblox with our classes, the response has been very positive and engaged.
It does require a lot of investment from the teachers, but there are already lots of games that have been built by specialists, so teachers don't have to do all the creation themselves.
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