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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 57
got a class Facebook page, so we had toupload these into an album on the page.Our teacher then split these up on thepage so that there was one album ofabout six photos for each pair ofstudents. We worked together, and wehad to write a story which linked all thephotos together. We could then sharethese with other groups, and we all votedon the best story. I was really pleasedbecause a photo that I had taken of agraffiti picture in my neighbourhood wasin the best story! It was great fun, and wedecided that we would do a class projectin the same way, telling the story of theneighbourhood our school is in. Weprinted out the results and did apresentation of this at school – theother teachers loved it and couldn’tbelieve we’d done it through Facebook!(This is a fun way of using photos,although you could simplify theapproach with the students buildingstories from photos they’d takenthemselves and using the visuals as aprompt. This can be much moremotivating than giving them cut-outphotos from magazines as the contentcomes entirely from them, and theinstructions can be as specific – egtake a photo of an interesting piece ofarchitecture in your city/neighbourhood– or as vague – eg take a photo ofsomething beautiful/interesting – asyou like.)
So this is what a great deal of studentsthink about m-learning. Some dismiss itas yet another ELT fad, but a fad onlybecomes accepted because many peopletry it, enjoy it and keep doing it. Itseems ridiculous not to exploit the factthat almost all our students have theirmobiles with them all the time and theycan use these as cameras, voicerecorders, browsers, dictionaries, gamesconsoles …
Here are some tips for using m-learningin your classes:
● Find out what your students use theirphones for and exploit this. In somecountries, smartphones will be [email protected]
Nick Cherkas is a ProjectManager for the BritishCouncil in Morocco. Hemanages ‘English for theFuture’, a programmecovering 17 countries inthe Middle East andNorth Africa which aimsto help young peopleachieve their educationaland career aspirations by strengthening theteaching and learning ofEnglish. His previousexperience includesteaching, teacher training and academicmanagement in Australia,Russia and the UK.
Bilbrough, N Dialogue Activities:Exploring Spoken Interaction in theLanguage Classroom CUP 2008
common and internet access easilyavailable and cheap. Use this to youradvantage!
● Do some study skills work with yourstudents. Show them how they canrecord themselves speaking and usethe result to improve theirpronunciation. Show them ELT appswhich are available – the BritishCouncil have a wonderful suite oniTunes and Android which are free,fun and easy to use.
● Talk to your superiors at work aboutwhat you’re doing. Share yourexperience with your colleagues inyour school and with any professionalassociation you’re a member of. Writeabout it on a forum. Often,principals, school governors andeducation ministries are keen to investin technology for the classroom, butnot in training on how to use or applythe technology. It may become moreand more apparent that m-learning isa way of incorporating ICT into theclassroom which doesn’t needexpensive hardware and is, therefore,worth investing in through training tosee instant positive results.
ImagineImagine your students talking abouttheir English lessons to their friends,comparing how fun they are to howdrab their other lessons seem. Imaginethem carrying on enjoying Englishthroughout their studies, learning moreand more, and ascribing a great deal oftheir success in English to theirwonderful teacher who showed themthat learning English is fun.
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