Revista simpozionului Eficiență și calitate în educație - 19 mai 2017 Eficiență și calitate în educație | Page 22
by a lot of people and the students’ satisfaction and motivation will be increased when they
can be proud to say ”I did it!”
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” This
quote credited to Benjamin Franklin sums up something that we now understand better
than ever. It is only by being actively involved in any activity that we can make it
worthwhile. Students’ ability to make powerful resources for one another often surprises
adults, as they make them relevant to themselves and develop in so many ways. It is
widely known that the best people to solve problems are the people who face them. In the
field of education, those people are students. And so they should not be left out of the
equation.
The wide range of online applications with free plans can bring variety to the
teaching process. Experimenting them in class and in various extracurricular activities has
convinced me of their benefits, even more so as they had been recommended to me by
educational partners from Western European teaching contexts. I came to know about
most of the applications I am now recommending through the contact with teachers that
were my school’s partners in the Erasmus+ project “Sustainable Consumption and
Production”, a programme financed by the European Commission. This contact was my
starting point for individual research that has opened up new paths and helped me
diversify my teaching methods. Here are, therefore, some ways in which students and
teachers alike can explore and exploit technology to their advantage, as well as a list of
sites and apps that my students and I have tried and found to be of use and of interest:
1. Video-making/editing
Short videos are already part of everybody’s life, as they can easily pack in a lot of
information that is engaging and will be entertaining to watch. But the challenge lies in
turning the activity of video watching into that of video-making. By choosing to illustrate a
concept or even a grammar issue in a video, teachers can use that resource as teaching
material to be watched at home by students and replace the face-to-face teaching time
with face-to-face interaction time. This is the concept behind the so-called “flipped lesson”,
in which the transmission of information is done via some technological means, giving
teachers and students more time in class to discuss the topic and practice some more
meaningful activities.
As for students’ contribution, they can be assigned the task to create themselves
videos that explain certain concepts and topics, giving them more scope to study the topic
in depth and present their take on the issue. Students with different abilities can contribute
when the video is made in groups, so that the end product is the best possible output.
Here are some apps for video making and editing that are quite easy to use:
www.mysimpleshow.com – enables the users to transform a text (essay, article,
speech) into an animation, using a very simple 4-step method. The app is quite
intuitive and the users will benefit from watching the extremely useful video tutorials
provided;
www.powtoon.com – allows the creation of animated presentations, combining text,
visual (images, videos) and audio materials. It is more complex app than
mysimpleshow, with a lot more freedom of choice for the user who can rely on their
experience with PowerPoint and take it one step further;
www.videoscribe.com – complex programme of whiteboard animation, allowing
users to explain phenomena by including drawn images, pictures, text and audio
narration – unfortunately, the free plan is only a trial version.
2. Infographics / visual organisers
Infographics and other visual organisers are ways in which information can be
structured into manageable chunks, so that complex data can be transmitted through
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