Using Technology to Learn and Teach Writing Skills

Hi everyooooooooooooone! 

Today I want to introduce you two wonderful ways to teach and develop Writing Skills. Writing is considerer the most difficult for the L2 learners. So, is important look for different strategies to teach this skill and also, that students could feel able to develop their knowledge related to writing. 

  

 One of them is TitanPad. TitanPad is a website which offers the opportunity to create a collaborative writing in just one document. 

This is a great opportunity, as you can see in the image, you can invite to everybody to write a collaborative writing and create stories, essays, letters, etc. 

TitanPad is a great opportunity to creat collaborative teamwork between students and I will use it with high school students because they have more access to technology and they should have more English language knowledge. However, the collaborative writing allows you, as teacher, create a diverse group with four or five students and this group can be compused by a student who has good grammar, other who is good in creativity, other who is good punctuation and other one who can be good in coherence.

Task Based Language Learning would go very well with this website because a teacher can give to the students interesting task to do in the class and the students will able to do at time and they can include the teacher in the platform and receive instant feedback. 

Limitations: One of the possible limatations is that this platform can use to write task not related to the class as the example that we saw in classes the last monday and other limitation is that could happen is the non - collaborative writing and that one student writes all the task. 

By Vanessa Martínez :)

Kahoooooooooooooooooooooot!

Kahoot! What is Kakoot? Kahoot is a platform in which you can create a kind of questionnaire but is characterised for being a game. The participants, in this case the students are the participants, have to go to this website -> kahoot.it and then, they have to enter a PIN, this PIN is given by the professor or the owner of the questionnaire created. 

This particular tool can be useful for language learning because can help to make more dynamic and interesting classes for the students. Thus, Kahoot! can be useful because in nowadays, students are technology's dependent. According to Vera Katyshev, Kahoot! does the teaching/learning process more efficient and productive because a student can receive instant feedback and is a tool that allows create classroom community because students can work in teams. 

This tool I will use it in any school context because you are able to adapt it to the needs of your students. This platform could be an excellent form to teach Vocabulary or maybe, do a review of what you had taught before. Furthermore, Kahoot is a game and this is part of "Gamification" and as Figueroa (2015) mentioned in his research, the main objective of Gamification is to increase the participation of the students within educative context.

Limitations: Reflecting on the possible limitations, I found that Kahoot games can create dispute between students because as it was mentioned before, Kahoot is a competitive game. 

I invited you to look for this platform and use it with your students! Click here to discover a little more about Kahoot!

By Vanessa Martínez :)