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You’ll find students learn more, are more motivated and their writing improves faster when they’re allowed to write posts.  And the best way to get them started is by writing posts on the class blog.

By Natascha Chtena November 22, 2015 5 Comments   .blog-spacer { display: none; } @media (max-width: 420px) { .blog-spacer { display: block; height:1px; clear:both; } }   googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display("dfp-ad-story_level_pages"); }); Natascha Chtena is a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. You can follow her on Twitter @nataschachtena.       One of the challenges I face teaching a daily language class is finding novel and creative ways to maintain student interest throughout my lessons. One of my favorite teaching “tricks” is using music to motivate learning, improve concentration, create a sense of community and help my students absorb material.   Music is a wonderful tool to integrate into your teaching repertoire, especially if you are a foreign language teacher. It has a

The key is to not be too ambitious (unless of course you are teaching a language AND culture class) and to set realistic goals: one song one major point! I usually keep it to seven minutes max, which includes a song, a very short “lecture” and some time for student questions at the end.

Studies

have concluded that collaborative and cooperative learning methods improve students' time on tasks and motivation to learn. Language teachers are finding that group activities and conversational pairing have distinct advantages over individualised tasks. Students enjoy interacting with each other, particularly in speaking activities, and opportunities to do so are relished. The prospect of school exchanges, making new social links abroad, and exploring new cultures is another powerful motivator. The pairing of language students with counterparts abroad is the next logical step. Working effectively online with native speakers is a challenging and alluring proposition.

Assessment is more difficult

Role playing is an absolute blast when combined with social media. The concept is super simple and generates powerful learning opportunities. Assign students to a role and they engage other students (who are also assigned roles) in character.

Some of the most productive parts of the class were the weekly take-home assignments that asked the students to post comments on their social networking sites while using connected viewing technology

While the students learned a lot from the class assignments, they were initially anxious about letting an instructor into their social network. I felt it was necessary to preserve the anonymity of the students for the study so I wanted to keep their comments about the connected viewing private.

Unfortunately, the only way to ensure this anonymity was to create a “secret” Facebook group. “Secret” Facebook groups are one of three categories of groups that allow members of the social network to collaborate on a project. Though this setting allows all posts and members to remain confidential it also required me, as the creator of the “secret” Facebook group, to “friend” all of my students so that I could then add them to the group.

giving them opportunities to contribute to a class blog or something where their classmates will get to see their hearts and minds in this other forum. I think that really opens things up.

But Cain particularly feels for one group of introverts: the quiet kids in a classroom.

they valued the opportunities provided by the two CMC-embedded webquests to interact with their respective group members in asynchronous and synchronous modes of communication.

students appreciated and enjoyed learning about the target culture in way that they retained the information even two months after they were completed

the value of writing for real audience and establishing their digital presence.

Participating in Twitter chat is the cheapest and most efficient way to organize one's own PD