Digital tools in the English classroom in elementary school
In this interview with elementary school teacher Anna Lena Lutz, you’ll learn about the digital tools available for teaching English and how they can benefit your students.
In this interview with elementary school teacher Anna Lena Lutz, you’ll learn about the digital tools available for teaching English and how they can benefit your students.
Your new online professional development is about digital tools in the elementary school English classroom. How can elementary school students benefit from the use of digital tools?
Anna Lena Lutz: Digital tools can make the learning process more varied and interesting. It is well known that the use of digital media in the classroom can be very motivating. Digital tools can individualize the learning process and make it more efficient through automatic feedback methods. They increase student activation and open up new ways of working together.
Anna Lena Lutz: Digital tools should above all be easy to use, if possible even self-explanatory. To do this, they need a clearly understandable user interface. This is the only way to continue to focus on strengthening the four basic competencies.
Anna Lena Lutz: Storytelling is a popular method of teaching English. Unfortunately, the learning group’s experience and vocabulary do not always match the authentic literature in the target language. When that’s the case, I like to write my own short stories for my study group. In my text, I can embed the vocabulary for the unit and meaningful sentence structures in a repetitive way. Using SimpleShow, I can generate a digital story from the text, with appealing pictures, which I can play for the class.
Anna Lena Lutz: For each unit, I decide whether to use analog or digital resources. The focus is on the learning objectives of the unit. The learning objectives determine which methods and tools are effective for learning. Of course, reality also plays a role in the selection process: What digital resources do I have in my classroom? How much preparation and follow-up does the assignment require? What added value does the use of digital media bring to the classroom? These issues should not be ignored and should be considered in the planning process.
In this online professional development, you’ll learn how to promote the basic skills of teaching English in elementary school using digital tools and analog ideas.