Make your textbook interactive with Glogster Edu

In my country pupils start learning English language at age of 8 (the second grade). The main skills they have to get through this stage of their language learning are basic: speaking and reading, comprehensive listening and writing . According to pupils’ age it is not required writing transcription of new vocabulary and because of that the remembering of it happens trough a lot of repeating of new words, sentences, texts. Pupils need audio and visual aids as much as it’s possible . In fact they could get them in the real classroom during the lesson but in my opinion it is not enough.

For a long time ago I have been wondering how to facilitate the self-training of my students at home, supplying them with more audio and visual aids which they could easily use at home, too. Thus the idea for a virtual classroom and an interactive textbook was born. Glogster Edu as a main tool and educational platform helped a lot for both. On Glogster Edu I made my virtual classroom with kids (click 1) . Using tools of the site I could make my textbooks interactive (click 2) and to share them widely with my pupils and colleagues (click 3), (click 4).

Making my real textbook interactive was found to be a simple task: I needed only to scan the pages of my real textbook as pictures (png, jpeg files), to find audio files of my English lessons as mp3 files, to find some interesting links in a connection with the topic and main aims of the lesson I was making interactive and put them together on a one page (glog). Fast, easy and very pleasant activity which takes no more than 15 minutes to create one unit interactive. All units I have put in a contents page (click 5) and the whole interactive textbook have been set up. The link to it, I put onto my wiki (click 6), connected to my Skype info and to the site of my school (click 7). Thus my students can enter it and use it freely at their homes, and my facilitating task was completed – kids can listen lessons and do exercises online . In real this led to improving reading and listening skills of my students and made their learning more fun and engaging activity. It helped not only kids but their parents as well, saving their spare time on giving language aid to their children.