We all know that educators don’t just teach! There’s a whole raft of additional time spent on other related activities, such as preparing lessons, counselling students, marking assignments and meeting with parents or other staff. Much of this work happens outside of normal school hours, so it’s vitally important that Sanako’s teaching solutions work to make educators’ lives easier and help them save time.
In previous posts, we’ve looked at how Sanako Connect can powerfully support educators when they’re delivering language teaching remotely. But, there’s so much more that Connect can do! This blog post outlines how Sanako Connect can really assist language educators in planning and preparing for lessons (in face-to-face teaching and remotely) and how it supports them with student feedback and assessment.
Fast and effortless lesson set-up
Sanako Connect’s support for educators begins as they prepare for every lesson with different groups of students. Teachers create a new lesson directly in Connect’s teacher’s dashboard then and simply circulate a unique URL to all participating learners. Students just have to click on that link to join the online class – no login details are required, so there’s no data privacy or data storage issues for the educator to worry about either! Alternatively, each lesson is associated with a unique QR-code that can be scanned with any modern phone’s camera app. A student then simply scans the code and they join the lesson.
This video shows the sessions the teacher has created and how they can access the unique session URL and QR-code.
Enrich your lesson with diverse elements of your choice
Having set up the language lesson, the teacher can now use Connect to prepare for the lesson and get their learning resources ready. It is easy to use Connect to provide all students with text instructions detailing key learning objectives. Alternatively, these can be easily spoken and recorded directly into Connect as required.
This video shows the in-built content authoring tools that make it fast and easy to create any language learning activity.
Educators can also easily upload their existing learning materials for students to use during the lesson. Any number of PDFs, presentations, videos and web pages can, for example, be easily attached to the online lesson plan. Connect is the perfect platform to share these materials with students wherever learning is taking place.
Such learning materials can also be attached to specific assignments or tasks for students to complete during the lesson. An embedded local language web page could, for example, be attached to a specific translation task. Connect also provides educators with easily-adaptable templates for common language teaching activities. This includes multiple choice quizzes, text entry, or gap fill exercises.
Sanako Connect also enables educators to quickly set up a variety of speaking tasks. Students can either be tasked to record themselves speaking to a prepared piece of content. Or alternatively, the educator can use an original soundtrack, which the student then attempts to emulate via an advanced, two track recording.
Review your students’ work with ease
Once the lesson has been completed by all students, educators are then able to use Connect’s unique functionality to easily review the materials submitted. In the above speaking task, for instance, Connect’s advanced recording functionality allows educators (and students) to easily compare intonation and pronunciation to the original and pinpoint areas for improvement.
Educators are also able to review all of the tasks that students have completed. They can switch views to review the work submitted by individual students or use a whole class view of their collective performance in specific assignments. The latter enables educators to clearly identify where the class is struggling and where additional work is needed to clarify or consolidate learning. Importantly, these precise feedback mechanisms enable educators to carefully target / personalise subsequent lessons and enhance ongoing academic attainment.
This video shows the submissions menu from the teacher’s point-of-view and how they can give feedback for their students.
Feedback can also be easily shared with students via Connect’s messaging functionality. Educators can give feedback directly to individual students or simultaneously to the whole group via a text-based message. Teachers can also record and send voice feedback.
Reuse your content with exercise or session duplication
It’s also worth noting that educators are able to save and organise all of their lesson content on Sanako Connect. These resources can then be easily reused and repurposed for other age groups or for future classes. The lesson content can also be easily downloaded from Connect at any time and stored according to the policies of each individual institution.
This video shows how to duplicate an exercise or the whole lesson.
Click below to learn more about the features and benefits that Sanako Connect offers for language teachers and students and book a FREE remote demo with one of our experts.
