GREAT WAYS TO TEACH ENGLISH WITH TECHNOLOGY

By Cristina Nistor
“Gheorghe Rosca Codreanu” National College, Barlad
The 16th of November 2020
The latest technology trends are transforming our learning and teaching
ways.

Teaching English online is getting more popular as it enables teachers to

adapt classroom activities and provide an interactive and fruitful
distance learning process for their students.

On the other hand, teaching online can be challenging when it comes to

students’ engagement, class management and motivation.

However, teachers can overcome these obstacles by getting equipped

with practical online tools. Here we have some stunning online tools that
modern teachers enjoy using.
1. Edmodo 

Edmodo is an online social network platform that allows teachers

to create groups, share materials and activities with their students
or check their progress. Thus, Edmodo enables them to enjoy
personalized and enriching online learning.

2 . TED-Ed :
TED-Ed is a great educational platform which allows teachers to
create and share interactive lessons with their students and track
their progress.  TED-Ed provides a library of a large number of
original animated videos that teachers can use in their lessons.
3. Socrative

With Socrative tool, teachers can easily create a variety of online

engaging activities such as exercises, games, etc. … which students
can work on using any devices (smartphones, laptops, …. ) What’s
more, Socrative allows teachers to monitor their students’ results and
track their progress.
4. Quizlet
Quizlet is an easy tool for boosting vocabulary.  It offers a library of
millions of flashcards for teachers to use with their students. More than that,
teachers can edit or design their own flashcards, short tests and spelling
Quizzes and easily share them through links or Google Classroom.
5. Kahoot

Kahoot is a free game-based learning platform for teachers to create

personalized quizzes and use pre-made games with their students.  Via their
account dashboards, teachers can check their students’ game scores and quiz
answers.

6. Google Classroom

Google Classroom is a free web service that allows teachers to share files,
create assignments and communicate with their students online.
7.Lyrics Training 

This tool allows teachers to take videos from Youtube and ask
students to fill in gaps while listening.  Lyrics Training platform
provides a number of settings for teachers to create different types of
blank-filling quizzes. Teachers can choose the appropriate level of
difficulty and the way they want their students to answer.

8.Canva
A stunning graphic design tool that teachers can use to create
anything such as visual aids, worksheets, presentations, posters, etc.
Canva platform provides a large number of premade templates to
make the task fast and easy.
9. AWW App Online White Board

AWW APP  is an amazing online whiteboard

app for tablet, smartphone, or computer.
 Teachers can use it to draw mind maps, explain
lessons, correct exercises. You can share your
board and collaborate with your students in
real-time. AWW APP not only allows you to
screencast your board live, but also to create
recorded videos so you can use them later.
10.Get Pocket

GetPocket is an outstanding organization app which allows you to

organize everything you come across on the internet. For example, if you
come across a post on social media, an article, or a video that you never
want to miss, this practical tool helps you save them all in once place
with a mouse click.

11. WeTransfer

Are you suffering from sending large files? WeTransfer is another highly

useful platform for teachers who do a lot of sharing.  It enables you to
transfer large files effortlessly to your colleagues or students.  More than
that, it’s free and no registration is required. 
12. Grammarly

Grammarly is a must-have tool for students

and teachers. It helps them write clearly and
effectively. Grammarly analyses writing,
corrects errors and shows editing suggestions.

13. Storybird

Storybird is a creative language arts platform

that seeks to promote young learners’ writing
skills.  This tool allows teachers to create visual
stories in seconds to inspire their students to
write.
.
14. Quizziz
Quizziz makes it super-easy to create great
quizzes in no time.

15. ClassMarker: Class Marker’s secure,

professional web-based Testing service is an
easy-to-use, customizable online Test maker
for business, training & educational
assessment with Tests & Quizzes graded
instantly saving you hours of paperwork.

16.Whatsapp Web: This app was created

to enhance communication, you can use it
to send all kinds of information to students,
you also can use it as a forum in specific
moments.
 You can also send dialogues so students go
around the classroom talking to others.
17. Google Forms & 18.Microsoft Forms You can create surveys and
quizzes that students can answer from their phone browsers and you will
see all the results in a spreadsheet.

19. Your StocK Music Player

Your Phone Stock Music Player When you have a Whatsapp group you
can send tracks so students listen and answer questions.
20.Your Collage Maker App: You can tell your students to describe a
picture or make conversation around a collage you sent via Whatsapp.
Another idea is that you tell them to make a collage with the vocabulary
you just introduced.

21.Your Phone audio recorder: Use those things that most people don’t
use, tell students to record a conversation  or to answer questions orally
 and send them to you via Whatsapp.

22. GoConqr is a personal learning environment that allows students &

teachers to create, discover and share learning resources.
23. WordSalad is an app for generating “word clouds” from text that you
provide. It lets you tweak the word clouds by changing colors, fonts and words
orientation.
The app detects the language your text is in, does some magic and draws a pretty
picture.
Once you have finished crafting your word cloud you can export it on your
device or share it with your students.

24.Quill 
Help your students advance from fragmented and run-on sentences to complex
and well-structured sentences with Quill Connect !
Using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining, students combine
multiple ideas into a single sentence.
They then receive instant feedback designed to help them improve the clarity
and precision of their sentences.
25. Crossword Labs is a very nice website to create your
own crosswords, don’t expect others to do them for you.
Students can solve them online.

26. Plickers  is a wonderful tool for teachers to create quizzes

and collect formative assessment results in real-time. This app
also offers an amazing feature that allows your class to share
their answers without using their tablet, smartphone, or any
device!
27.Powtoon: Make cool animated explainer videos  and animated presentations.

28.Pixtoon: The world’s most popular and easy to use comic and storyboard creator.
Based on creativity, you can teach English through comics, definitely a nice way for
students to become artists.
29. Memrise makes learning
languages and vocab so full of joy
and life! Create your own courses
of rich, multimedia flashcards.

30. My Free Bingo Cards has

the best Bingo Card Generator and
Bingo Games in the world to print
or play online, and a growing
selection of beautiful bingo cards
for all occasions.
All their bingo cards can be
customized by changing the title,
words and even the colour and
background.
31. Duolingo for Schools brings the
world’s most popular language-learning
platform to your classroom. It is 100% and
free and it can complement your classes.

32. Vocaroo is a shiny new service for

sending voice messages across the
interwebs. Sometimes you can’t listen to all
of your students because of time
constraints so why not sending them to
Vocaroo so they can record an audio and
send it to you?
33. Flippity

Easily turn a Google Spreadsheet into a Set of Online Flashcards and

Other Cool Stuff such as:
1.Online Flashcards
2.Trivia Game Show
3.Random Name Picker
4.Memory Match Game
5.Word Search
6.Spelling Word Manager
7.Crossword Puzzle
8.Bingo Game
34. Quik creates awesome videos with just a few taps.
Students can choose their favourite photos and video clips to create an
awesome video that they can show in class.
35. Instagram  You can easily use Instagram to make students practice
out of class.
You can create an account for educational purposes, publish some
photos about a particular topic and ask students to comment on them.
You can also upload short video clips explaining a particular aspect of
language.

36. Youtube has proven again and again to be really helpful to teach

language.
You can send a video before class so that they can watch it and get
ready for what they are going to study.
You can also use videos in class for presentation and practice time.
37.Padlet You can make beautiful boards, documents, and web pages that
are easy to read and fun to contribute to.

38.Voki is a fun tool that students can use for homework, classwork or
projects. You can Customize their appearance and what they say, and
share with others!
39. Mentimeter
With Mentimeter you can make your audience feel involved by enabling
them to contribute to presentations with their smartphones and show the
results live.
Add polls, word clouds, Q&As, slides and more to your presentations and
create an interactive experience for your audience.

40.Word it Out
Another creative way to teach English with technology is using word
clouds to teach vocabulary.
Word It Out lets you transform your text into word clouds. You can then
save and share them, so everybody can find and enjoy them.
Wordless can also be used to introduce a topic, you can create a wordle
around any topic you want.
41. Fake Chat Conversations Apps
Fake Chat Conversations app can be really helpful when you want to make
sure that students understood the topic.
Let’s say that you just taught them about Greetings and Introductions and
you want to make sure that they understood the lesson.
You can ask them to create Fake Chat conversations that they can submit
using a Dropbox Link.
42. Prezi is an online application for creating presentations, a canvas
with unlimited possibilities. Prezi is a non-linear tool that allows you
to start a presentation on a white canvas or from a predefined format.
Just like Powerpoint, Prezi lets you insert photos, text, sounds,
animations and video files. The difference between them is that a
Prezi is more dynamic, but also more airy than a PPT. The
presentations obtained can be run directly from the internet, if you
have a connection or saved on your computer and run offline, without
depending on the internet connection.
43. Blogger is a platform that allows students to collaborate and create content
related to the subject you are teaching. Students can consult blogs created by other
users, including teachers, but they can also create their own blogs on various topics,
such as grammar, literature or culture to learn for themselves.

In the same direction we can talk about 44. Wiki which is a platform where users
can create various content for free, you can edit web pages using any web browser.
The wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple syntax. These two platforms can be
used to get an overview of the subject studied, which allows the branching of the
information presented in an extremely simple way.
 45.Animoto

Animoto is one of the best animation and video creation tools , an ideal tool to
create video files and presentations in just a few minutes, to enliven the lessons
you teach. All educators can use a free account to use this software in the
classroom. Its powerful features can be used to create stunning presentations that
incorporate images, videos, video, music and text.
Blended learning is one of the new teaching strategies in a modern
classroom, it is a hybrid method in which students learn online, but also
in a building intended for the educational process. Usually teachers teach
lessons directly, face to face with students and then use a platform such
as Moodle or 46. Easyclass to support the learning process. As the name
suggests, Easyclass is an easy way to create and manage a class, post ads
on ClassWall, add homework and set deadlines, create tests and allow
notes to be added to the electronic catalog.
But there are other interesting resources that can be used in blended learning in
language teaching, such as using songs to increase students' enthusiasm and
motivation. There are many music videos on Youtube that can be linked to
worksheets that can be downloaded from
47.http://busyteacher.org/classroom_activities-listening/songs_and_lyrics/.
It is an interesting way to teach the elements of culture and vocabulary, but also to
understand written or heard text. Another advantage is that the use of these songs can
contribute to mastering the rhythm and intonation of the language studied.
Another resource that can be used are sites that promote English
language learning: 48. VOA Learning English
(http://learningenglish.voanews.com/) for American English or
Reality TV on the BBC website (https: // www
.teachingenglish.org.uk / article / reality-tv-1) - for British English.
These are ways to attract students' attention and increase their
motivation. The first of these sites also has the transcription of the
news that can be found in video form, these news being divided
into 3 categories of difficulty (the texts have a length of around 500
words).
A captivating educational platform that eliminates hours spent searching
for videos on Youtube, FluentU is a must at any modern time.
49.FluentU takes real-world videos such as music videos, motivational
speeches, news, cartoons, and commercials for movies and turns them
into personalized lessons.
The materials are classified on 6 levels of difficulty from beginner to
native speaker, and by categories of interest from arts and entertainment
to society and politics, there is something interesting for every student.
Each word comes with a definition in context, with image, audio and
many examples. You can even click on a word to see how it is used in
other videos on the site. FluentU's "learning" mode then takes the
authentic videos and turns them into completely personalized lessons, so
that the history of the student's learning style is taken into account when
the questions are created. The algorithm used by FluentU involves
teaching based on what the student already knows. With the
"homework" function you can give various videos as a theme and also
the progress of each class and each student can be tracked, without the
need for grading.
Podcasts (for example, 50.Real Life for English)
are available to anyone and offer a variety of
topics. They are useful for learning pronunciation,
vocabulary elements, also offering exercises for
understanding written or heard text, adverbial
verbs, expressions and slang, grammar, English
lifestyle (learning with music, TV / movies, etc.) ,
psychology of language learning, cultural fluency.
Real Life for English is a promoter of the social
learning of a foreign language and the only way to
develop a real fluency throughout life. This
learning can also be done in the context of
authentic relationships established in the online
educational community offered by the site.
Traditional teaching methods can be reversed in what
in English is called a flipped classroom: students
receive the topic and recorded material online, while
the time spent in class is devoted to solving exercises
and discussing the topic. This strategy will allow the
teacher to use more time for problem areas. One
resource that can contribute to education in this way
is a site provided by the BBC, with its section called
51."Bitesize" where students can test their listening,
reading, writing and conversational skills.
Another strategy for invigorating lessons or learning a foreign language is
to get students to play computer games while learning! Obviously, not just
any games. Those provided by the British Council 52.
(https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/games/) are structured on
vocabulary or grammar elements.
We can conclude that a teacher's life is too short
for all the strategies and methods she/he can use
to shape minds and lives, but a dedicated,
passionate teacher will use them all “to awaken
joy in creative expression and knowledge” as
Albert Einstein stated.