How I use Fronter when teaching adult learners from around the world
I´m teaching adult learners from all around the world who come to our municipality to study swedish for immigrants (or swedish as a second language). I´ve used Fronter for about two years now and at first I had a hard time knowing what to do with it and how I could use it with my group of students. But that changed when one of my collegues who´d used Fronter for some time gave me access to her room. She teaches science and I language, but from what she had done, embedding youtube-clips and modifying the start page I got a lot of new ideas.
The thing is, that there are already a lot of web sites that offer free resources for learning swedish online, but the problem is that it sometimes gets a bit too much. Also sometimes it´s difficult for the students to know how things are related to the course material.
Therefore I started working a lot with the start page in Fronter where I created blocks after the chapters in the course books. In each of the blocks I gathered links that I found online and put it inside the blocks so the exercizes correspond to the topics covered in the book.
I put embedded Vokis in the room to welcome the students and help them navigate. (voki.com).
I also made a Prezi where I listed the goals of the course for the students. I also embedded the Prezi in Fronter inside a learning sequence.
In the course book we have, there is also some grammar training and I created games on classtools.net that I also embedded in Fronter.
For the beginners course we practise the clock, how to tell time in swedish and for that I worked with both photography and the sound recorder inside Fronter.
I started making short screenrecordings about a year ago and use it more and more. I use a service called Jing to make screenrecordings and then they are hosted on screencast.com. I also embed these screenrecordings of different things inside our Fronter room.
I try to create a vibrant place where the students can log on and find a mix of exercises. I recently tried recording sound with an mp3-recorder and uploading it to the room. I also started photographing the board so the students can take a look at the topics covered in class one more time at home or log on and see what we did in class if they miss school for various reasons.
Last year we created animated stories using Creaza and we also embedded Glogs that the students made on edu.glogster.com.
I´m still learning new things and next I want to start testing the brainstorming function with the students.
About the author
What inspires you?
Seeing what other teachers created, listening to my students to hear how they want to use Fronter, finding new services and programs that I feel could work in class.