Practical tip: Distance teaching using conferencing tools
Effective teaching activities using conferencing tools
Using conferencing tools as a synchronous online element in blended or online learning is now an integral part of the portfolios of Goethe-Instituts and other language schools. These tools can be a sustainable approach to group learning – provided they are used in certain ways, as presented in the following practical tips.
By Stefan Häring and Christiane Bolte-Costabiei
Group learning
Learners to be committed to actively participating in order for distance learning to be effective. To ensure that learners don’t regard conferencing tools as merely a flexible option that can be used ad lib whenever they feel like it and have time, it’s important for teachers to create a setting in which they can learn actively from and with one another. To this end, we need to kindle a sense of group cohesion and, from the very outset, boost motivation and concentration by establishing camera-based activities in which learners talk to one another, find common ground even while noting differences and particularities, and learn to regard themselves as a group. “Getting-to-know-you” activities can be used to get learners to talk about themselves and their everyday lives. Ideally, learners should be free to choose the content and form of these activities so they’ll feel they’re relevant and meaningful to themselves. Most of the time, these activities can be conducted in groups of various sizes. In an activity called Zeigen Sie uns … (essentially: “Show and tell”), for example, after a brief plenary round with the whole class, you can have learners talk about objects they feel like showing the others in “breakout sessions”.
Introductory classes: creating a positive learning atmosphere
Wo sind Sie im Moment? (“Where are you right now?”) is an activity that gets learners involved via the chat function and can be used repeatedly in a language course. The questions shown in the example below serve to provide orientation and a sense of learners’ surroundings and their state of mind at the beginning of the class. It’s a good idea to follow them up with one or two questions that call for reflection.
Combining in-person and distance learning methods
When using conferencing tools, the teacher and learners are in different physical locations connected up by audio and video conferencing, which yields some new opportunities for effective teaching. In addition to online conferencing supplemented by Web 2.0 tools, the teacher’s and learners’ individual personal spaces can be incorporated to produce creative learning methods that not only appeal to all their sensory channels, but also train skills at the interface between in-person and distance learning. This works particularly well with the standard topics covered in A-level teaching. Distance learning can be combined with the participants’ respective personal spaces to apply teaching methods such as personalization and learner activation, which are essential for teaching with conferencing tools in particular.
Exercise and assignment: personalized and action-oriented practice
The following example on the topic of “food and drinks” shows how exercises and assignments can be personalized in classes using conferencing tools and also rendered more action-oriented as a result.
Exercises and assignments: success-oriented conferencing
Success orientation is particularly important in classes using conferencing tools, in which teachers have more limited means of providing direct support than in in-person classes. One way of applying this principle in the above example is to give learners short sample dialogues to work on as well as selected vocabulary and “chunks” for weaker and stronger learners alike to draw on.
Interactive practice and action
Many of the standard methods employed in in-person teaching can be transferred to distance teaching using conferencing tools. For example, learners can dictate texts to one another in breakout sessions, which they can then display at home a few metres away from the computer, or they can work with partners to fill in the blanks on various worksheets, sitting “back to back”, i.e. with their backs to the camera, whilst working on the assignment.
Last but not least: writing with pen and paper
Many people learn more effectively by actually writing down words, sentences and whole blocks of text with pen and paper. This can be done whilst conferencing, too. Besides pen and paper, physical tools like post-its and notebooks can be used to draw on various learning channels and senses. In Ich habe gestern mit meinen Freunden gechattet (“I chatted with my friends yesterday”), the teacher forms groups that divvy up the various elements of a given sentence amongst themselves in a breakout session and write one element per learner on a card. Then they put the elements in the right order and present their results to the whole class, holding the sentence elements up to the camera one after the other.
