Combining Language with Technology: What and How

    

        Source: Twinery (https://twinery.org/)

Welcome, welcome, welcome! How have you been? Have you been trying some interactive tools lately? Well, I hope so!

You know what they say? Experience is the best teacher. So, we are going to talk a lot about experience in this post! I'm going to tell you a story about the use of technology in the classroom based on my own experience.

This took place when I was in the second semester of my study. The course was "Recount and Narrative Writing". Just like the name suggests, we learned how to write recount and narrative texts. What made me like that class was how the lecturer presented the materials. She prepared a lot of fun activities that includes technology.

One tool she used was Padlet, the interactive tool we discussed in the previous blog post. She used Padlet to gather the students' answer of a question. Firstly, she gave us an instruction to add more adjectives in a sentence to make it more dramatic. Then, she gave us time to think and discuss before submitting the answer in Padlet. It was engaging as we could discuss with our friends, and we could see the others' answers in the interactive tool. So, not only did we have fun, but we also shared our answers with the whole class to learn from each other.

Later in the same course, we had to create an interactive game using the website Twinery. Basically, the game was similar to the mobile game "Episode". In Twinery, we were taught how to create a "web" of possibilities for the choices. Every choice led to an alternate story and ending. Below is an example of the "web of possibilities".

I was so intrigued to learn this as it's not an everyday thing even though it was quite confusing. Finally, my group and I came up with an interactive game entitled "The Tragic Escape". Looking back, it was a great experience to combine language and technology to create something new.

All in all, I think everything was done perfectly. I wouldn't change anything even if I could. Our lecturer presented the materials using a "more modern method", and it did positively affect how we learned. I found the course fun and meaningful; hence, I felt motivated in paying attention and finishing the tasks.

So, that is one of my favorite experiences in using technology in language learning. What do you think? Will you try to use these tools? Let me know in the comment section, and I'll see you next time!