Thursday 17 November 2011

Learn English Through Sound and Media

The NFSA (National Film & Sound Archieve) offers educational community a very good website which has lots of digital resources like videos and audio clips that are available for streaming as well as downloading, to be used by teachers and students. 

There are several steps to be followed in using this website. Firstly, go click on the link below to get into the website : http://nfsa.gov.au/learning/digital-learning/.
You will see this page will be coming up on your computer screen:







Then, you can scroll down through the page and you can see various topics are served in the tool:
The topics are in blue with some details below it.
We can just click on the topics to get into the activities. For example, I choose for on the rails because I'm interested in mapping and some historical as well as geographical knowledge:

You can choose your group, either a student, a teacher or a Rail Enthusiast.


We can see at the big map of Australia and know the names of the places there with the attractions for each place.


For this specific topic, the activities are more on listening with visual aids. Students need to listen to the listening material first and then proceed answering questions based on the listening activity.


While analysing and evaluating this technology, there are noticeably several advantages as well as disadvantages of this tool that I can address. The first good thing is it provides learners with learning language through using the language; which is more of practicality rather than theoretically.  

Learning through language
not really systematic
For exploring issues rather than language.

Lots of websites which consist of:
1. Game, 
2. Geograpical knowledge (Australia), 
3. some Cultural elements intoduced (Fashion, what kind of clothes are suitable to be wear according to different situation/place).
4. Health (Nutrition, Diet, Disease like Osteoporosis) 

What level of students?

How to use it?

What would students learn?

Advantages:
1. Visual + Audio aids
2.Of advantages for learning Geography ('The ghan'). 
3. Each of the website

Disadvantages:
1.Need to have Shockwave Player plug-in
2. It's only about Australia 
3. Only content-based activity with no language point. But, teacher can use it as a material rather than rely on the tool itself to teach language. 

no consistency
organisation of the web
unable to control the info= info overload
combinations is good cognitively, study by Richard Maya
long video with only one question= no balance. students might be demotivated
being forced to watch everything

Audioboo

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