Motivating and Engaging Students During the Pandemic
Covid-19 pandemic has forced many students to home-school around the world. In many countries, schools are closed, extracurricular activities are canceled and big gatherings are not allowed. Both learning and interaction with peers have to take place online and that switch to virtual sphere has varying impacts on students.
In order to shed a light on learners’ experience during the pandemic, Cambridge University Press has conducted a survey that reached out to English language learners from various countries around the world. According to the survey results, “Together with time management and communication, learners felt that keeping up their motivation under the new conditions was among their top 3 challenges”. [Read More].
Motivation is an issue not only for the learners, but also for the teachers; motivating their students during the pandemic is one of the biggest challenges that education professionals experience at the moment.
The top three suggestions for motivating students in online learning, given by the language researcher and writer Dr. Heike Krüsemann, includes giving students feasible goals and opportunities to succeed; increasing students’ “say” in the learning process; and encouraging peer-to-peer as well as learner-teacher communication [Read More]. This video, a talk made with Dr. Krüsemann, also gives tips on online teaching, as well as motivating and engaging students.
ASSESSING EFL STUDENTS
ASSESS Project
ASSESS Project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, as a Strategic Partnership for the Development of Innovation in School Education. It aims to define innovative methods and tools for the assessment of EFL learners. Its main goal is to bring new approaches to assessment and contribute to development of evaluation consciousness. It also wants to support restoration of assessment system and share good practices among European countries.
Progress of the Project’s Intellectual Outputs
Consortium partners have been working on the intellectual outputs of the project in the past months and have successfully completed the following deliverables:
Intellectual Output 1: Report on Curriculum
All partners created a database of stakeholders relevant for the implementation, and mapped the Curriculum in their respective countries, for the purpose of arriving at the Common Curriculum.
Intellectual Output 2: Database for Online Exam Online Creator
Each partner in the consortium created 50 Tests for 4 topics each i.e. 200 Tests and contributed to the database for Online Exam Creator leading to a database of 1200 tests.
Intellectual Output 3: Rating Scale
The Partner from Greece created a Handbook for Assessments by elaborating the process of constructing scales for Evaluation. The efforts have gone in simplifying the complex and multi-dimensional testing process.
Intellectual Output 4: Online Exam Creator
Currently, the consortium partner from Spain, Inercia Digital, is working on the Online Exam Creator.
Intellectual Output 5: Teachers’ Guidebook
In the coming months, after the completion of the Online Exam Creator, the consortium will proceed to the final intellectual output, the Teacher’s Guidebook.
“ASSESS” Project-ASSESSING EFL STUDENTS EVALUATION-ASSESSEMENT HANDBOOK & LEΑRNING TOOLKIT
The project ASSESS aims to define innovative methods and tools for the assessment of EFL learners and to bring new approaches to this procedure in European countries.
One of the major outputs of this project is the development of a practical Handbook for Evaluation and Assessment Methods for speaking and writing skills. The output’s aim is to help English teachers to improve their professional skills on preparing rating scales for their exams. The Handbook will be ready by the end of November.
Moreover, as we are adapting to a new reality due to the pandemic of Covid-19, remote learning is becoming a necessity due to closure of schools during lockdown periods. Digital technologies and distance teaching and learning have become popular educational tools and methods.
To facilitate the learning & teaching process during these unprecedented circumstances we decided to adapt and upload the materials prepared by the ASSESS partners on the LEΑRNING TOOLKIT: Action Synergy’s eLearning platform. More specifically, numerous exams/exercises (vocabulary, reading, writing, listening & speaking) prepared by the ASSESS partnership for A1 & A2 Level EFL Students are now available on https://actionelearning.eu. The chapters covered include: the weather, shopping, sports, my city/town. The students have the option to read the text or to listen to the audio before completing the exams/exercises that include “fill in the gaps”, “click & drag”, “true or false” open type answers, etc.
