Saturday, March 21, 2015

ICT Tools, Roles and Application in Education and Language Learning



ICT Tools and the Role
Nowadays, ICT is something that can’t be separated from our life. One of its utilization is in educational life. What is meant by ICT tools here is a technology that is useful for supporting learning and teaching process in education like PC or laptop, projector, interactive whiteboard, LCD, monitor and so on.
The use of ICT can give good impact to the learning process, especially for the student learning and the teaching methods. As cited from http://www.elmoglobal.com/en/html/ict/01.aspx, “A report made by the National Institute of Multimedia Education in Japan, proved that an  increase in student exposure to educational ICT through curriculum integration has a significant and positive impact on student achievement, especially in terms of Knowledge - Comprehension, Practical skill, Presentation skill in subject areas such as mathematics, science, and social study.” For teachers, ICT helps them to present the material and organize the class activity interestingly, dynamically, and effectively. For example, teachers can use interactive board, video, power point, blog, e-book and so on. For students, ICT helps them accessing information easily, doing their assignments in more fun way, and gaining the information or the material in more interesting way. It also makes the lesson more enjoyable, which could improve students’ attendance and concentration. Students will be more enthusiastic in doing their assignment if the teacher can make use of the ICT tools appropriately. For example, watching or making a video as the assignment, posting the assignment to their blogs, doing an online quiz, and so on.

ICT in English Class
            In English class, ICT also has an important role to support the learning and teaching process. For example, for the teaching process, a teacher can make use of an online or offline dictionary which is supported by the sound of how to pronounce a word in teaching pronunciation. Then, she/he can also make us of video to give the students example of how native speaker speak in listening class, to measure their understanding of a story or speech in the video by asking the students to retell or rewrite them and many others. For the learning process, a student can also make use of the online or offline dictionary to help them in pronouncing or translating something. Then, many websites that provide some material about English can also help them in learning English. For example Zenius English, BBC Learning English, VOA Learning English, and so on.

The ICT application in Education and Language Learning
            For the detail, here are some examples of the ICT application in Education and Language Learning.
1. Prezi
This is a kind of presentation software or what we previously known as PowerPoint. But I think it is more interesting than PowerPoint. Prezi provides us a virtual canvas upon which to pin text slides, video clips and images and to present our ideas. In term of style, Prezi can engage the students’ attention who is bored with the cheesy slide transition on the white board.

StudyBlue is an online studying platform for high school and college students. The website allows users to upload class study materials, create electronic flashcard to study and share with others, and practice quizzes. StudyBlue allows students to store their notes in the cloud and connect with other students studying the same subjects. StudyBlue content can be accessed online or on mobile phone application.

Google Docs offers online word processing, spreadsheet creation and presentation package. If students use Google Docs forward processing, for example, their work is accessible from any computer connected to the internet. Better still, when they add their teacher as a collaborator to a document, not only can teachers add real-time comments to pupils' work, but they can monitor every revision made by a pupil or group.

4. Edmodo
Edmodo is a social-networking website for teachers, students, and parents. This website appearance is similar to Facebook. Teachers can invite students into private groups that can be used for online classroom discussions, but in a format that keeps the teacher firmly in control. Teachers give students a class signup code, which can be deactivated once all students have signed up, and students in turn are encouraged to share the code with their parents, allowing them to monitor their own child's activity. The applications are Discussions, Learning Communities, a Parent Role, Analytics, Security, Groups, and many more. Edmodo has the right features, without there being so much to learn that teachers get overwhelmed and lost.

5. Cambridge Learner's Dictionary
This dictionary has two versions, online and offline. For the online version you can visit here.  You can also pin it to your website or blog. As the example, you can see it in  right sidebar of this blog. For the offline one, you can download and install it from here. This dictionary is completed by the phonetic transcription and the sound of how to pronounce a word, thesaurus, word building (to find out the part of speech of a word), extra example, verb ending, and collocations. It's so complete that can help you learning English better.

Sources:

0 comments:

Post a Comment