Ipad In Esl

Using iPads in ESL is of interest for teachers of English as second language. That’s because students need to be stimulated from all points of view and need to be convinced to interact as much as possible with their peers and leaders. Using the iPad as tool, some of these goals will become easier to achieve. Here are a few reasons why my sayings are true.

First of all by using an iPad in ESL classes you will be able to bring challenges to your students. For instance you can initiate a vocabulary race and then divide your students in teams so that you can hand each team an iPad. You should then ask each team to choose a captain and use the Notes app in order to write down all the words in English related to a certain topic that they can think of in a certain limited amount of time. Such an exercise forces the teams you create to cooperate if they want to win the challenge.

You can also use the iPad in ESL classes in order to help your students to improve the quality of their academic and business e-mails. Especially for older students, the ability to write such e-mails in English is an important skill that needs to be acquired as fast as possible. To help students master this skill you can once again divide them in groups, have the team captain open the Mail app and ask them all to collaborate in order to create an e-mail on a certain topic. You can then ask all the teams to send their work to you and use a projector in order to analyze along with the entire class the results of their work. By helping them discover what’s good and what’s wrong about their work, you will make sure that official e-mail writing skills are headed in the right direction. This is actually an exercise that you can repeat until you are satisfied with the results.

The iPad is also useful during ESL classes when it comes to handouts. That’s because you can create those handouts in advance and in PDF format and have them already available on the tablets your students use. That means you will avoid wasting time making available the study material during class and you will avoid using paper and creating hundreds of copies of the same document.

You should also consider using the iPad’s internet capabilities in order to help your students interact with native English speakers. Another interesting activity involves requesting your students to use the Voice Memos app in order to record speaker accents and inflection. An iPad also brings closer audio and video content in English.

11

Watch tweets on: