How do I teach communicatively in an online course?

Just because you do not see your students face to face, you can still deliver a highly communicative class with a variety of activities and tools found in your language program’s Supersite online course:

• Partner Chat: activities allow two students (or teacher and student) to establish a synchronous online
  communication via message, voice, and webcam to practice their speech and conversational skills.

• Virtual Chat & Video Virtual Chats: provide students with opportunities to develop their listening and
  speaking skills as they answer questions with a voice recording or video recordings of native speakers.

• Instructor Created Content – Create and assign your own Student Recording, Partner Chat, Composition, and Video activities. While many of these different types of activities already exist in the program, you may wish to create your own, more personalized activity to get your students communicating:
  ○ Student Recordings are a great tool for production practice, as they require students to record themselves speaking in the target language.
  ○ Partner Chat: Create customized Partner Chat activities that allow students to participate in collaborative activities and practice speaking in the target language.
  ○ Composition: To practice their communicative writing skills, use the Composition tool to create customized, open-ended writing assignments for your students.
  ○ Video: With the Video tool, you can assign a YouTube video for your students to watch on their own, whether it is one you have created or discovered online, and have students submit a review of the video using one of the previously mentioned instructor-created content activities.

• Audio-Recording Activities:
  a. Watch the video and record the answer repeating what was said in the video.
  b. Listen to a question, record an answer, and then review the recording.
  c. Listen to audio prompts and repeat. Then review and compare the recording with a playback of the audio prompt.
  d. Makes one or two long recordings answering one or more questions using complete sentences. This can involve using some provided vocabulary.

• Forums – Online discussion boards where students can asynchronously post text or audio information
  and respond to their classmates’ posts.

• Audio Hotspot Vocabulary – The student plays audio of words and letters on the page to learn pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling.

Visit us at vistahigherlearning.com to learn more.

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The new Assessment Builder brings all of our assessment editing tools together to save you time with assessment preparation and give you a little more peace of mind.