Authentic Listening with EduCanon
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EduCanon is such a straightforward and effective tool for making listening practice within and outside the classroom more interactive. If I had a pound each time I hear a classmate or tutor say the words "use authentic materials", I would be pretty loaded (I'm currently taking an MA in ELT if you don't already know). Yes, I'm on board with the whole idea of using materials that are not originally designed for language learning or teaching purposes on the condition that their difficulty level is just high enough for students to comprehend (hence Krashen's comprehensible input theory) and contextually-relevant enough that students would be able to relate and respond personally to the content. But how do we go about tweaking these authentic resources for learners to process and deduce its linguistic patterns to be able to reproduce later on? EduCanon will take this heavy load of material design off your shoulders.
With EduCanon, students watch a video from YouTube or one that you've uploaded yourself, and questions would pop up (the video pauses when they do) prompting students to predict what they'll hear or reflect on what they've just heard. Usually, right off the bat, EduCanon would be associated with a flipped classroom where students would in advance study snippets of what will be discussed in class. That way they would come into the classroom with some background knowledge of the theories or context of the lesson.
From a language learning point of view, I'd say this is especially useful for extensive listening to practice listening for main ideas or inferring opinions expressed by speakers in the video. For intensive listening, you can choose to create multiple choice questions for students to identify key details mentioned, or have True/False statements to test whether they've grasped implied meaning. Apart from that, I've been quite interested recently in using tasks for grammar input, and I recommend EduCanon for modifying or adapting these authentic materials to showcase real-life use of a specified linguistic structure. This noticing or consciousness-raising activity is great for students to see in context the meaning, form and pronunciation of an otherwise daunting structure if merely presented visually through a formula (a.k.a the generic Presentation, Practice and Production method).
How do I make my "Video Bulb"?
The video lessons or listening exercises that you'll create on EduCanon are called "Video Bulbs". I have no idea why it's called that way - I got pretty confused the first time I logged in to the website and was scouring the page for some kind of "Make Video" button. Once you log in to the site with either your Google, Office, Clever or Edmodo account, you can start off by viewing what other teachers have used EduCanon for or watch an insightful little introductory clip of flipping classrooms on the home page - you can tell that EduCanon is specially designed for flipping classroom from the log in service of collaboration tools like Edmodo. Simply click on the "Design Video Bulb" button and you're set to go.
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| This is what the Dash or homepage looks like once you've logged in. If you're a first-time user, you won't have any videos on the Recent Video Bulb row, but you can browse the pre-made ones and even use them in your classroom. |
How do I upload a video?
You can pull in videos from all sorts of sources, from the trusty YouTube, TeacherTube, Shmoop, to uploading your own through Google Drive. Just one thing to bear in mind is that when you have something on Google Drive to use, you need to change the settings to Public for it to be searchable through search engines. All you need is the link to the video for EduCanon to access it. A downside to this is that when you preview the quiz, it might lag a little and in need of a few seconds buffering because it is retrieved from the web. A good source of videos is Ted Ed channel on YouTube - they've got some interesting videos with a nice narrative voice and pace, not to mention the adorable animation.
How do I make questions that "pop up" while students are listening?
When you've successfully uploaded your video, you will be brought to a kind of video workspace. Play through the video until you get to the section where you want to insert a question, and click on "Add Question". You can choose from quite a selection of question types with the exception of dragging and matching, but you should be aware that for the free version, you can only have multiple choice, free response and reflective pause. I suppose it is compensated by the fact that you can insert pictures, audio and tables. Another useful facility is that you can crop out unnecessary parts of the video to avoid it loading for too long. The "Preview" button is really useful if you want to keep track of how your students will view the bulb when listening in progress.
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| the question types you can choose from |
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| This is how your students would view the multiple choice questions, |
How can I assign my students to watch this video and answer the questions?
When you're finished creating the questions, the Finish Build button will lead you to a window showing how you can share the bulb with your students or assign it to a class to complete before a deadline. You can monitor your students' answers to the questions to ascertain that they do watch the video before class (if you're opting for a blended or flipped classroom approach). |
| You can create a class where students can join and set a date for when they must finish viewing the video and answering the questions. Another way to share the bulb is through the link. |
Are there any potential problems for ELT classroom use?
EduCanon is a good option for designing an interactive listening, but at times it's difficult to find authentic materials that suit the learners' needs, in terms of linguistic input, interest, level of difficulty, the lexis used, and so on. Another point is that if you want to have the listening during class, the pre and post activities must be structured coherently so that the listening doesn't take up the whole session - the students will most likely feel bored as the questions can get quite monotonous (multiple choice, long answers, reflective pause). For flipped classroom or blended learning, specific feedback on free-answer questions are also not available and this lack of immediate feedback could potentially have a demotivating effect. Although students' answers can be recorded, I reckon students prefer to receive feedback as soon as they answer or synchronously with the supervision of a teacher or peers.Due to the absence of detailed and specified feedback for students freer answers, I lean towards using EduCanon for a more whole-class teaching during the English lesson as opposed to a flipped classroom approach. Have a look at this video bulb I've made on EduCanon:
I downloaded the video from BritLab, the BCC Channel on YouTube.
Thanks for reading! Stop by EduCanon to see what it has to offer for your ELT classroom.
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