Category: blended

Motivating Students for Online Learning

Posted on | by Pearson
Ken Beatty
By Dr. Ken Beatty

Motivating Students for Online Learning

Every teacher knows tricks to keep students motivated in a face-to-face classroom: a word of praise, an encouraging smile, a well-timed challenge, and grouping students to promote friendly collaboration or competition. But usual ways of motivating students may be less effective in an online classroom. Teachers need to adapt some strategies while adopting new ones.

Here are seven strategies for motivating online English students.

1 Expect participation: In many online courses, students rely on video recordings, watching them later. Students claim advantages for doing so. They can watch when they’re most alert and not distracted by other concerns. They can also watch a video more than once, to better review difficult topics. But language learning classes need to be interactive. Students need to ask and respond to questions, and listen to and speak with other students. Expect all students to participate in each and every class.

During class, students may not wish to appear on video, leaving the teacher and the rest of the class looking at a grid of blank tiles. Maybe it’s privacy concerns about a home environment, especially for students studying in their bedrooms. But most conferencing platforms allow students to create virtual backgrounds. Tell students to use these because facial expressions and body language are essential to communication.  

2 Build social groups: Why do students drop out of online courses more often than face-to-face ones? A key reason is that online students don’t have the same feeling of commitment that comes from connecting with others. When dropping a face-to-face class, students are aware they might bump into fellow students whose first question will be Why? It’s not the case for online students.

The solution is to build relationships, engaging students in frequent pair and group activities. Encourage study buddies but maintain privacy by asking students to get class-specific email accounts.

3 Personalize assignments: Students need language that is personal to them, such as to discuss things about their families, experiences, and food preferences. Give students language tasks that ask them to reflect on their own lives. Personalized content and assignments are more motivating and allow students to learn new specific content. 

4 Create pair and group assignments: Schools have long had a focus on individual learning, even though most things we do for work and pleasure are group-oriented. Here’s a task from StartUp, Level 2, Unit 3, What are you doing today? It starts with a video example that students can watch multiple times online or on their phone app, and then asks students to make a video of their own, talking about things they like and don’t like to do.

Example task from StartUp, Level 2, Unit 3
Media Project (StartUp, Level 2, Unit 3)

Although it’s an individual task, the final step is to share and get peer feedback. It’s also an easy task to adapt by asking students to make additional videos in which they interview each other and comment on others’ likes and dislikes. Pair and group assignments get students using the language they’re learning.

5 Ask students to show what they know: A lot of assessment is based on asking students to repeat what a teacher or textbook has said, using set phrases. Yet we know language is flexible, and there are many ways to say the same thing. Asking your English learners to memorize information can be demotivating, especially if they are more focused on passing a test than improving their competencies. Give students a chance to show what they know in ways they are comfortable sharing. It might be a recording, a speech, a play, or some other genre. The freedom to choose is motivating.

student studying outdoors

6 Encourage long-term writing and speaking: An ideal task for language students is to keep a diary, but few do, often finding writing about themselves too repetitive or embarrassing. However, there are alternatives. Encourage students to write a few sentences or a paragraph on a different topic each day. Start by suggesting topics related to the content of your classes, then let students suggest other topics as days go by.

Or ask students to each take a photo with their phones, and write three sentences about it. Share these with the class through a group social media account. If your focus is on listening and speaking, students can record voice memos.     

7 Predict the future: Learning English opens up academic, social, and work opportunities. Ask students to imagine a time when they will be fluent English speakers. What will their lives be like? How will they use English? Imagining the future and having goals helps motivate students.

Some of these strategies, like personalizing assignments, are forms of intrinsic motivation that come from the students’ hearts; they’re motivated by personal interest and ambitions. Extrinsic motivation, outside the students’ own interests, comes from making them aware of the academic, social, and work opportunities that better English language skills give them. If the content and context of learning online is not intrinsically motivating for each of your students, make sure you find ways to extrinsically motivate them.

Dr. Ken Beatty has worked in secondary schools and universities in Asia, the Middle East, and North and South America. He is author of 77 textbooks for Pearson and has given 500+ teacher-training sessions and 100+ conference presentations in 33 countries. His most recent books are in the LEAP series, and he is Series Consultant for StartUp.

StartUp is the new general English course for adults and young adults who want to make their way in the world and need English to do it.

Exploring Engagement in ELT Teaching

Posted on | by Pearson

Part II: Behavioral Engagement

By Christina Cavage

We are bombarded by the term engagement these days. While it was challenging to build engagement under normal classroom circumstances, building engagement in remote environment and sustaining it is even more challenging. In the last issue, we broke down exactly what it means to be engaged. You may recall that engagement in learning is simply about “the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught” and how motivated they are to learn and progress. We delved into emotional engagement—how we can break down those walls and create a comfortable learning space. Today, we are going to examine behavioral engagement.

What is Behavioral Engagement?

When we think of behavioral engagement, we have to consider our students’ behaviors in class.  Are they participating? Are they working in groups effectively and efficiently?  How attentive and active are our students? Essentially, how involved are they in the learning process?  Now, in a traditional face-to-face class we might be able to clearly see this. We know the students who come to class with their assignments completed, with their books open and ready to go, with their hands up to answer the questions we pose to the class. However, in a remote or hybrid setting, this can be extremely difficult to observe especially when many of our students have learned to Zoom with their cameras off. So, what can we do to foster and maintain behavioral engagement in this new normal?

Strategies to Build Behavioral Engagement

Very much like emotional engagement, it’s all about leveraging our traditional teaching methods and the tools we have. Often times selecting the right tools and using them at the right times can actually lead to a greater amount of engagement. Let’s unpack this a bit more by looking at four effective strategies.

Strategy #1: Make Learning Active

Set the expectation early on that you will be asking your students to do rather than just receive. Imagine you have asked your students to begin to develop a thesis statement for a writing assignment. Rather than have them submit the assignment to you, consider using a tool like Nearpod, to have students post and share their thesis statements. When students know that their work will be shared, there are fewer excuses and fewer long moments of silence as you call on names via Zoom or some other vehicle.

Collaborative board on Nearpod

Strategy #2: Build in Peer-to-Peer Learning

Being an active learner, also means being an active partner or group member. Whether you are using breakout rooms, or discussion boards, it is important to set clear guidelines as to what you want students to accomplish. Using a model is often very helpful, especially for our lower levels. The below example is taken from Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod. Here students need to share with a partner, then post their findings.

Read-Pair-Share in Nearpod

Peer-to-Peer learning may also mean peer-to-peer competition. Students love to ‘race’ against one another. I have found that warming-up with a race is a great way to get class going. It is also very effective in setting the tone for the rest of the class period. It communicates many messages—from how prepared I expect you to be to how active I expect you to be.

Time to Climb Activity, a race for students
Time to Climb activity: a race for students

Strategy #3: Break Learning into Small Pieces (Microlearning)

Microlearning is not a new term. However, it really has been coming to the forefront during these unprecedented times. Attention spans are dwindling and seem to be more so with the distractions of sitting in one’s own home taking classes. Microlearning is about presenting learning in small manageable pieces. This makes learning more accessible. The best practice is presenting content in small pieces, and then building in active tasks so students can immediately apply what they have learned. A great example of microlearning exists in Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod: Grammar. Within each grammar lesson there is a short video lesson on the grammar structure. Within these lessons, there are formative questions that students have to answer to move on. It makes their learning real and immediate.

Grammar lesson in Nearpod

Strategy #4: Personalize Learning

Lastly, in an online environment it becomes even more important to create lessons that are tailored or personalized. Tailored or personalized learning allows students to make greater connections to course content. How can you personalize lessons? Well, most simply, incorporate students’ names into lessons and include information about students into learning materials. What about personalizing or tailoring learning on a more global scale, or in other words, tailoring to your specific program or course?

Well, using a tool like Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, you can add, modify, or delete content. This allows you to customize the content to best meet the goals, objectives, and student learning outcomes of your course. By doing so, you are able to give your students exactly what they need to master your course and programmatic goals.

Personalizing with Nearpod

Overall, engaging students online is not much different and more challenging than engaging them in the classroom. Engaging students when they are learning the English language remotely is even more challenging. It is about selecting the right tools and implementing those tools strategically.

References: Student Engagement Definition. (2016, February 18). Retrieved January 05, 2021, from https://www.edglossary.org/student-engagement/

Christina Cavage is the Curriculum and Assessment Manager at University of Central Florida. She has trained numerous teachers all over the world in using digital technologies to enhance and extend learning. She has authored over a dozen ELT textbooks, including University Success, Oral Communication, Transition Level, Advanced Level, Intermediate Level and A2. Recently, Ms. Cavage completed grammar and academic vocabulary curriculum for the new Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, which is now available. Learn more here.

The Importance of Student Involvement When Learning Online

Posted on | by Pearson
By Mario Herrera

“Give pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results.” – John Dewey

Correct teaching strategies and structures actively engage students in many ways. They should be hands-on, interactive, and generative by nature, encouraging students to critique, construct, and produce knowledge through meaningful involvement. In the classroom, students teach each other; they develop new knowledge with teachers as co-learners. Because teachers are following the principles of Assessment for Learning (or they should), they are continuously analyzing and synthesizing what their students are doing. Therefore, conducting a more adequate, efficient, and reliable process allows them to decide interventions as they go, and thus also learn. But what if this process is applied online? How can we keep the interaction and generative nature of students alive and well, so they can continue being the engine that allows them to get involved, interact, critique, construct and produce in a meaningful, proactive way? This article explores the options we have.

Now that we are so avidly busy teaching online, what about the learners?

Dependent vs. independent learners

Dependent learners don’t do well online, but because it is not for the teacher to choose, he/she must promote independence as the ongoing learning style. They both need to understand that to be successful in online courses, they need to include a process in which learners will have to act in more independent ways compared to what is common in in-person sessions. Teachers have to design activities with learners working on their own, and students need to learn to be more responsible in independent scenarios. Although teachers can only do so much online, many times, their teaching can have more positive repercussions on students’ learning than if they were teaching them in-person. Teachers need to know how to design activities that will carry their students from just attending a session to carrying on unsupervised activities with the caveat that they should not be challenging to assess.

Keeping learners involved

To engage your students, always remember to segment the presentation of your teaching activities into shorter sequences and regularly check comprehension by asking quick questions that test whether students understood the key point in each of the short segments. Remember to keep the interaction going. Always give examples and use gestures and your tone of voice to present. Go through those examples step-by-step. Also, maximize access to material for all students. Assigning offline tasks is also a great way to engage students who don’t always have mobile devices or internet access, or who can’t sit still in front of a screen for too long. When students bring their schoolwork into the real world, they practice self-directed learning and build valuable skills. Plus, you might be surprised at your students’ creativity!

When planning, always ask yourself if there’s enough call for creativity. The more you set up your students to being creative, the more attentive they will be.

There are two broad categories of activities to keep in mind when wanting to keep our learners involved with online classes:

  1. While the students are sitting in front of their screens participating in a class.
  2. When the session is over but not the lesson per se.  

The best way to present a concept is by showing examples and describing them. Let’s explore the possibilities of involving students when taught online, using a reading activity from Big English, level 3. The analysis that follows the story will be more useful if we first read it.

Big English: Story

1. While the students are sitting in front of their screens participating in a class.

chart: while students are sitting in front of their screens participating

2. When the session is over but not the lesson itself

Parents’ role in involving students appropriately

Parents can be your greatest ally in this “new normal.” Connect with them early and often to send home assignments, share login info for any online platforms students need to use, and find out what kind of resources students have available to them.  It’s better to over-communicate than under-communicate. Like everybody else, parents are overwhelmed, and many feel ill-equipped to support their child’s learning at home. When you make it clear you’re available to support them in any way you can, they’re more likely to become active participants in their child’s learning. Turn it into a win-win situation!

Big English, a six-level English program for primary school learners, delivers comprehensive English language acquisition alongside CLIL and broader life skills, supported by unique online digital teacher and student resources.

Mario Herrera has a degree in education and an MA in EFL. He has taught English for more than 30 years at all levels, from young children to adults. He is the author and co-author of many acclaimed ESL/EFL series that are used in levels ranging from pre-primary to junior high schools, including Big English and Backpack. As an international consultant and teacher trainer, Mario Herrera travels the globe, directing seminars and delivering professional development workshops throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Get Students Working Together Online

Posted on | by Pearson
By Dr. Ken Beatty

Think. What’s a common job that someone does individually, never working with others? It’s a surprisingly tough question. Astronauts, surgeons, and even star athletes don’t work on their own. Instead, they work with partners. Why then, is there such an emphasis in schools on students learning on their own and being assessed individually?

astronaut

Part of the answer is the traditional purpose of schools. In the last century, schools were sieves, sifting out more-able students from less-able students. The best students would go to universities, and the best graduates would get the best jobs. But many of those so-called top students left school without the people skills necessary to work with others. But language learning is–and always has been–different.

To learn a language, students need to use it. Students need to use critical thinking and communicate with others in speech and writing, just as they need to communicate with partners when they enter the world of work.

Your student textbook doubtlessly features many pair, small group, and whole class activities. Some of these are easy to do online using breakout room features found in Zoom (integrated into StartUp) and other meeting platforms. But there’s always much more you can do to promote student collaboration and increase students’ opportunities to use language. Here are six practical strategies you can use to get student engagement with English and with each other online. To better imagine them, consider a sample unit from StartUp, an eight-level English course for young adults and adults. Level 4, Unit 10, What will the future bring?

1 Change pairs tasks into group tasks: The following task asks students to remember things they’d learned, done, or decided by certain ages. Beyond comparing the answers with one partner, how could the task be expanded to include more partners? One way is to ask students to rate the most impressive one and then discuss in a group, ranking achievements. A second way is to ask students to talk to other members of the group in a rapid fashion, finding other students who had had the same achievements, perhaps at different ages, e.g., learning violin at ages 5 and 12. A third way is to ask students to create a group timeline and then talk about it: “When I was five and Emily was six, we each learned to swim.” The aim is to get students talking more.

Try it yourself activity from StartUp

2 Read and reflect: Each StartUp unit features a reading and each one is a topic that students can further research. Ask them to search online for related articles or stories, and share in central online file, such as a Google document. Make students responsible for making sure there are no duplicate readings. Each student then chooses two of the readings and reports on how they are similar or different. It’s a task that will naturally encourage students to read and reflect more widely.

3 Argue the opposite: The writing tasks in StartUp come with graphic organizers like the one below. In this task, students brainstorm about advice. Once students have finished filling in their outlines, they can photograph them with their phones or computers, and share them with the rest of the class. Each student then chooses one and argues the opposite, suggesting, in this case, why the advice might be bad. This helps to develop critical thinking skills.

4 Watch and explain: In StartUp Levels 1 to 4, an end-of-unit Put it Together project inspires students with a video, after which they answer a few comprehension questions to make sure they understand. They then go on to take or choose photos, or record a video, using their phones, then share it with the class to get feedback. One way to expand the activity is to have each student watch and explain another student’s photos or video, ensuring that they understand perfectly.

5 Take apart the test: Besides pairs of mid-term and final tests, each unit of StartUp offers two tests. Having two tests means that one can be given as a practice test, as formative assessment. Rather than just give students the answers, let them work together, comparing their own answers to see where they agree and differ. They can then peer teach the points that some students may not have understood. It’s not just about getting the right answers, it’s about making students more reflective and providing opportunities for them to use their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in an authentic way.

6 Connect students: The above tasks are all suited to classroom discussion, but to get students working together outside of class, they need to connect online, by email. However, privacy can be a problem; students should not be asked to share their permanent emails with the risk of them being shared with strangers, leading to cyberbullying. A solution is to ask each student to get a unique email for the class, such as a .gmail account. A sample email format might be studentfirstname_coursename@gmail.com. After the course is over, students can delete the accounts and continue communicating with trusted new friends on their permanent emails. 

Online learning is here to stay. Getting students comfortable with it is a great way for them to continue along the path of lifelong learning, personalizing their studies, making use of virtual resources, and connecting with other English language learners.

StartUp is the new general English course for adults and young adults who want to make their way in the world and need English to do it.

Dr. Ken Beatty has worked in secondary schools and universities in Asia, the Middle East, and North and South America. He is author of 77 textbooks for Pearson and has given 500+ teacher-training sessions and 100+ conference presentations in 33 countries. His most recent books are in the LEAP series and he is Series Consultant for StartUp.

Advantages of Implementing a Learning Management Platform

Posted on | by Pearson

Do you know the main benefits of implementing a learning platform in your school? Get to know them in this article.

A true e-Learning platform is one that provides support, offers educational solutions, and makes hybrid and remote instruction easier to implement. It is also an educational portal that offers digital materials and tools as well as analytics and reports all in one place.

>>> It may interest you:   What is an LMS platform and what is it for?

Advantages for students

  • All materials that support learning at anytime, anywhere on one platform
  • Different forms of evaluation for different forms of learning
  • Accessible on all devices in different learning environments
  • More engagement and interaction during classes
  • Easy way to keep in touch with teachers and other students via one platform

Advantages for schools

  • All materials for all classes in one place
  • Easy way to post assignments, check progress, and communicate with students and families
  • Analytics and performance scores to track progress and address issues

Advantages for teachers

  • Materials and guides in digital format for easy access and download
  • Flexibility to rearrange content and add your own content
  • Ability to reach students and run synchronous classes from the platform
  • Tools to encourage engagement and participation
Features of Pearson Digital Hub

Introducing Pearson Digital Hub

In the current environment of distance learning, many programs struggle to reach their learners and engage them in a meaningful way. We at Pearson understand these challenges and have developed a learning and teaching management platform where teachers can provide interactive classes and monitor performance, and students can have access to the information they need from any device. This powerful tool is called the Pearson Digital Hub, and it’s an excellent tool for programs that do not currently use a learning management system.

Keep students engaged and avoid dropouts

Pearson Digital Hub goes hand in hand with current trends in virtual education, providing the same academic level of face-to-face classes, avoiding distractions, and keeping students engaged.

Improve results

By having an intuitive and friendly virtual environment, Pearson Digital Hub offers great advantages in supporting face-to-face or distance teaching, modernizing courses, and improving students’ academic results. In addition, the platform provides analytics and progress tracking, so teachers can easily identify which students are struggling and need more help and attention.

Save time

Each week, teachers spend a great deal of time creating the activities and assignments. With Pearson Digital Hub that time can be reduced since the platform contains all the materials you need to teach your classes.

Improve communication and collaboration

Our platform includes interactive tools where students can communicate and share their questions quickly and easily. This creates an environment conducive to participation and fosters collaboration. In addition, Pearson Digital Hub allows you to conduct lessons in real time via streaming and a message delivery system, all within the platform.

Add your own content

Pearson Digital Hub provides the flexibility to adapt your courses in any way you want. In addition to the Pearson eBooks and digital practice, you can also add your own content such as videos, images, downloadable documents, and more. Here, creativity has no limits, and learning becomes engaging and collaborative.

Learn more about Pearson Digital Hub here.

To learn how to implement Pearson Digital Hub in your program and to request a demo, please contact your Pearson ELT specialist.