Teachers often spend a lot of time and energy in the classroom trying to transmit information from inside their expert heads into the novice heads of their students. This is the tradition view of pedagogy that needs changing. Here’s why…
Students learn to write better by writing more often. That’s why I have added a new automated evaluation to Labodanglais.com and Labodefrancais.com. It’s a self-scoring writing assignment to evaluate English and French writing. The teacher simply sets thresholds, scores, and feedback messages. Students write, submit, and receive their scores seconds…
Wouldn’t it be great if a student could instantly receive a score and feedback, after watching a video and explaining to a classmate what he or she heard? An evaluation like that would be much closer to the way language is actually used in the world. Labodanglais.com makes it possible. Students watch a video and then record themselves summarizing it. The assignment plugin scores their oral automatically. Doesn’t that sound so much better than giving students a listening quiz?
Saying words and phrases aloud has several benefits. Here are some oral practice strategies that work well. Did you know that it is 10% easier to remember items that you say aloud compared to items you read silently (MacLeod & Bodner, 2017). And practicing difficult to say words will help to improve your pronunciation and rate of speech. Also, you will gain confidence in your ability to communicate complex ideas as your memory, pronunciation, and rate-of-speech improve.
Writing compare and contrast essays takes time, but evaluating them need not rob teachers of their weekends. Labodanglais and Virtual Writing Tutor can evaluate this type of essay in seconds, hundreds at a time, draft after draft, promoting revision and better engagement.
Competency-based education does not mean that teachers should select a listening test at random or suppose that introducing the theme the lesson before the test is likely to be adequate preparation for our weakest students. Demonstrating a ministerial competency is achieved by performing a predictable complex task after step-by-step instruction.
Teachers like me want an online test that measures all four language skills and arrives at the same level placement recommendation as expert teachers would arrive at. With our innovative new evaluation tools, I think Labodanglais.com is getting closer to that goal. Here’s why.
A pedagogical narrative is a highly structured story that includes context, characters, a series of dramatic events, and their consequences—creating obligatory meaningful contexts for target grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics.
Would you like to start using the automated evaluation tools on Labodanglais.com with your students—but without a book? You could spend your summer developing a course for your students. Sure. But one summer might not be enough. If only there were some content that you could use! Well, there is.…
A semester is like a journey. Wouldn’t it be great if we could cement this useful metaphor with a course format?