In this week’s webinar, teacher trainer Deirdre Cijffers looks at how we can design valuable online communicative tasks that will encourage your students to interact, foster independence and further their language skills while giving you insights into your learners’ capabilities, interests and lives.
As teachers you will know how to create a communicative task in the classroom but moving that into an online environment may not be as easy as it seems. Online and offline have the same objectives but technology can slow things down and visibility of what your students know may not always be clear. Cijffers discusses her four principles to create engaging online task design, which are:
Principle One ‘Eyes on the Prize’
Cijffers asks us to think about what a task is and a task’s characteristics. This careful planning of the task’s features and outcomes as well as the appropriate location of the task, whether it’s face to face or online is extremely important in getting the most out of your students and will help you pick the correct tool for the task whether it is a forum, a wiki or blog.
Principle Two ‘Focus on Interaction’
Interaction is the key to everything! To get appropriate meaningful interaction we need to use the correct tool to facilitate that interaction. For example, a task that asks your students to create a story based on a brief outline would work well using a wiki (although the list for online tools is exhaustive). Make sure that when you are with the class the time spent together is interactive, Cijffers also suggest that is a good time to practice using the technology in the class to reduce technical queries during the online task.
When picking the tool to use for the online task always make sure the affordances (or advantages) outweigh the restrictions of the tool to facilitate interaction in a meaningful way, for your class. For example, conducting a task in a forum encourages considered responses by allowing more time to answer.
Principle Three ‘Reality’
This is broken into three areas:
Relevant: make sure the task is relevant to the student and to their learning objectives; does the task help them meet these objectives? For example, if the student is learning a language for business then a task asking the student to talk about ice cream flavours is not be relevant and engaging for the student.
Fit in exam practise: create a task that also fits in the curriculum’s learning outcomes and make this clear to your students so they can see the relevance to taking part in the task.
Immediacy: if you link the task to what you will be doing in the next class this means that if the student doesn’t take part then they will find participating in the next class session difficult as they haven’t completed the appropriate prep for it.
Principle Four ‘Plan teacher actions’
Deirdre asks us to consider what actions you would have to take whilst the task is going on? Facilitator, monitoring, setting it up, offer examples etc. It is important to plan in these actions prior to the task so your hands are free for you to respond to your students as people during the task. If you have a lot’s of classes, pre-planning your actions helps you remain consistent and offers your students a comparable experience.
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