Introduction
Triptico is one of the best multi-functional interactive tools I have ever seen that can be easily used (better with interactive whiteboards) for classroom activities. Important to note that it was a downloadable application before but recently, the developers have re-designed the Triptico website, not only making it good-looking, but adding a Cloud service which allows you to access everything you have created from everywhere (a big trend of technology huh!) Just think about it! If you are teachers who have to teach in different classrooms using different computers, you will never have to worry about whether you remember to save which activities in whichever classrooms, just go to the cloud and find it!
Implementations in ELT
Since there are numerous gadgets you can find even if you only have a free Triptico account, I shall briefly only introduce two, Word Magnets and Order Sorter, and some others not mentioned can also be brilliant and we shall discover in the future posts.
Word Magnets
The first way of using it can be creating word magnets and having students order them into correct sentences. It makes once boring grammar lesson rather interesting and efficient as well. See my example (picture above), I ask students to match the magnets into correct orders which should be "Mary gives Tom a gift. & Peter lends his book to Jack." Because students often get confused when they firstly learn such language forms as "give somebody something / give something to somebody", by using this, you can create more examples to have them practice (adding verbs like show, present, etc. or increasing the difficulty by adding other forms like "borrow... from ...")
Another way of using it can be adding a background like a map or a picture of a room, a garden, anything you need, and putting names of places, vocabulary on magnets, making students moving magnets that match the objects on the background. This can be used for vocabulary learning, or any other tasks (e.g. two students moving two magnets representing themselves respectively, describing to each other where they are on a map background).
Order Sorter
Order Sorter apparently is used to sort order, like the picture above (a triptico demo), sorting the procedure of making a cup of tea. I believe it brings a great affordance for language teaching when students are learning different genres of writing or doing intensive reading comprehension.
The first use I am really excited about is in reading comprehension activities, in which you can put either the main ideas or detailed information appearing in each paragraph of the article in mixed order and have students sort them, a good way to train skimming and scanning skills respectively.
The second use is in learning writing genres, showing learners which part of writing comes after another (e.g. abstract, introduction, background, literature review, case study, implications, problems, conclusions, references, etc. in academic writing) or having them sorting them on the IWBs after you have taught to strengthen such memory. It is quite helpful, as I have mentioned before, such multimodal way of learning including kinaesthetic, visual and verbal aspects, as Paivio (2006, cited in Walker & White, 2013) explains, “facilitates memory and helps learning by building redundancy into a multimodal message”.
There are also some other useful gadgets you can use in classroom activities like Flip Timer, Group Students, etc. that can easily liven the classroom.
Problems
Although there are numerous colourful gadgets you can choose to be used with or without IWBs in the classroom, it is important to bear in mind that the use of new things or high techs do not necessarily guarantee an enhanced learning environment, nor better learning outcomes. The focus is never on what kind of tools they are like, but how they are being used in a best suitable way, how the tasks or activities can be truly improved using the tools. It is also true that although students' motivation may be activated the first time they encounter these new things, they will feel it dull if their focus is always on the tools instead of the activities carried out livened by the tools. As learners' motivation is supposed to be made an enduring drive instead of a sudden surprise, finding new tools is just a pre-step before a long march.
Link to Triptico: https://tripticoplus.com
Tips
After registering a free account, in the "Activity" section, you will be able to see people discussing how some problems they encounter can be solved and you can also post your questions waiting for someone brilliant to answer. Demoi will also be shown when you try any new gadgets on the site.
Don't forget to save your great works in the cloud! Good luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment