Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Guanyunlingangchanyequ? Are you interested in teaching English in Lianyungang Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Take a look around you – at least one person is connected to a smartphone. Perhaps you are reading this essay on your computer – another type of technology. Technology is everywhere. It is “more interactive” and it makes doing work “much easier” and “less time-consuming” (Raja, Nagasubramani 2018). Since technology is designed to make everything easier, there should be a technological product that boosts learning the English language. Because technology has integrated into our everyday lives, the hyper-interactive teaching technology (H-ITT) can assist EFL teachers to promote student learning by building up student-student interaction and student-teacher interaction. According to its website, H-ITT, which stands for hyper-interactive teaching technology, is an audience response system. It is a system that allows teachers to present the PowerPoint lesson with study questions on the board and students respond by using a clicker. The questions can have up to ten choices in correspondence to the clicker, which has ten buttons to select. When the lesson reaches a question, the system will begin a countdown timer and collect all of the students’ responses. When the timer runs out, it will reveal the correct answer in green and incorrect answers in red. It also presents the class response in a bar graph and shows the number of students (in percentages) choosing each specific answer. H-ITT assists EFL teachers to promote student learning during the lesson. As the teacher presents the lesson on H-ITT, the teacher can insert study questions to keep students focused and measure the students’ understanding. The teacher can make practice questions such as true or false, gap fill, matching, or multiple-choice. In the study conducted by Eastman in 2007, students paid “more attention in a course” when interactive technology was used. The teacher can organize study questions by the level of difficulty in conjunction with the lesson. For example, if today’s lesson was on pronouncing the letter “s”, the teacher can propose this study question: “What animal does “s” sound like when pronounced?” The answer choices can be bear, snake, lion, mouse, etc. The next question can be: “What happens when you sound out ‘th’?” Students will need to select the correct answer that says “the tongue is placed between the teeth” (Unit 13, p.17). By arranging questions based on difficulty, students can recall the material they have learned previously and see if they get the right or wrong answer. When H-ITT presents a study question on the board, it begins a countdown timer and collects all of the students’ responses until the time ends. H-ITT allows all students to participate, even the “reluctant” ones (Unit 20, p. 5). During this time, students should answer the study question by working together, which increases student-student interaction. Class size does not matter because Carnaghan and Webb found “increasing interactivity” between students when working with interactive technology (Eastman 2007). While working together, students can speak English openly without the fear of being corrected by the teacher. So, they can share their ideas freely. After discussing, students will input their own responses via their personal clickers. It is effective because students know that they are all being “heard equally” when they input their answers and see the result of the class (Eastman, 2009). When the timer is up, students can see the correct answer automatically highlighted in green. When they see their own answer is green, they gain confidence from answering correctly. Simultaneously, students who got the wrong answer in red can learn from their mistakes. Because they saw their wrong answers “visually”, these students will be more “vocal” in class to eager learn why their answer was incorrect (Eastman, 2007). H-ITT provides “instant feedback” for EFL teachers to review (Guide, p. 4). The teacher should commend students who obtained the correct answer. As for the students with incorrect answers, the teacher should explain in class why the other answers are incorrect. It is more fruitful for students if the teacher explains why the wrong answers are wrong so they can learn to solve the problem correctly. This increases teacher-student interaction and enhances students’ learning experiences. Students showed “improvement” on exams when some exam questions were taught as study questions in the 2005 study by Carnaghan and Webb (Eastman 2007). Because students improved on the subject, students’ attitude toward both the subject and the usage of interactive technology “increased overtime” (Eastman 2007). However, if the majority of the class got the question wrong, the teacher must change his or her teaching method until students understand the topic and practice another question similar to the current one to ensure comprehension. Because H-ITT collects students’ responses and provides data, it is a great tool that involves all students to participate in class. It gives feedback to both teachers and students by showing how many percent of the class got the right and wrong answer. It gives confidence to student who got the right answer. It also provides a chance for the students who got the wrong answer to learn and improve from their mistake. Thusly, all students can learn, retain, and recall the learned information to perform their best on the exams. Citations Eastman, Jacqueline K. “Enhancing Classroom Communication with Interactive Technology: How Faculty Can Get Started”. College Teaching Methods & Styles Journal. Volume 3. Number 1. 2007. Eastman, Jacqueline K., Iyer, Rajesh, Eastman, Kevin L. “Interactive Technology in the Classroom: An Explorative Look at Its Use and Effectiveness”. Contemporary Issues in Education Research. Volume 2. Number 3. 2009. H-ITT. 2020. https://www.h-itt.com/index.htm. Accessed 02-01-2020. H-ITT. H-ITT CRS V2 Quick Start Guide. Revision E. http://www.h-itt.com/images/pdf/H-ITTCRSV2QuickStartGuide.pdf ITTT. Unit 13: Teaching Pronunciation & Phonology. International TEFL and TESOL Training. 2011. Unit 20: Troubleshooting – Common Problem Situations. International TEFL and TESOL Training. 2011. R. Raja, P. C. Nagasubramani. “Impact of Modern Technology in Education”. Journal of Applied and Advanced Research. Volume 3. Suppl. 1. 2018. Pages S33-S35.
