English Teaching and Learning & Online Assessment during the Covid-19 crisis
It is almost 2 years that all aspects of human life, worldwide, have been affected and severely impacted because of the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic not only affected the health systems and the economy across the globe but also had a great impact on education systems. Because of Covid-19, schools, colleges and universities were closed and face-to-face education was suspended for certain periods of time, whereas a shift to online teaching was instituted.
English language teaching and learning took its share in this transition. Following the pandemic outbreak several studies were conducted to investigate the effects of the pandemic on online teaching/learning and assessment of English. Findings show that the online teaching and learning of English created challenges because of the internet connection problems and students’ access to computers or smartphones. On the other hand, this situation enhanced the educators’ digital literacy skills and highlighted the significance of online teaching and learning in case of emergency situations.
Study: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/1677427
Meanwhile, English teachers need to evaluate the achievements of their students and assess the knowledge they gained on a regular basis. According to a study, the teachers had a negative perception about online assessment during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is due to the fact that they faced some obstacles during the online assessment, some of which include:
– the internet connection;
- the validity of the assessment;
- and the low level of students’ enthusiasm.
However, in practice the use of online assessment helps the teachers in distributing the material and assessing students’ achievement.
Study: http://ejournal.uki.ac.id/index.php/jet/article/view/2770/1912
How Can Children Learn English Online?
Start off with exploring websites together and learning how to use the games or activities together. The more you’re involved with the learning process, the more your child or student will eventually be motivated to explore independently.
Make sure you spend time with your children or students to figure out what they’re personally interested in the most and cater website resources to what they like, as well as to what they need to work on the most.
Find a way to make websites as interactive as possible. Try turning games into friendly competitions between adults and kids, and you might see that this can help revive interest in learning English.
Sometimes all it takes is a change in scenery to motivate children. Take a mobile device or your laptop to places like a park or even your back porch, and watch children get excited about practising their English.
Children have shorter attention spans than adults. If you’re doing lessons, limit activities to 10 minutes or less. For activities where they’re reinforcing skills already learned, spend no more than 20 to 30 minutes a day doing these, depending on their age.
Discover our Online Exam Creator!
As the main result of the project ASSESS, Inercia Digital has developed an Online Exam Creator platform. It consists of a virtual place where teachers have access to 4 spaces.
Firstly, teachers can obtain ready- made exams divided into 2 levels, A1 and A2, and into 24 topics, among them we can find animals, countries, school, routines…etc. These exams include reading, writing, listening, speaking and vocabulary exercises.
Secondly, on this platform, there are materials useful for English lessons, teachers have flashcards, images, worksheets and coloring pages to download in a click.
In third place, we find the main tool of this platform, the exam creator. Teachers can use this tool to create their own customized exams modifying questions, answers and images.
Finally, the section “tools” presents different sites where teachers can create different activities such as crosswords and word search.
If you want to know more about the Online Exam Creator you can contact us in our social networks:
