The MFL Classroom of the future
Cutting edge technology for a chat?
KLOO has been exhibiting at the Frankfurt Book Fair since Wednesday. At the weekend it gets a bit quieter so I took the opportunity to look around some of the other exhibition halls. I noticed one had people exhibiting the “Classroom of the Future”. There were some very expensive pieces of kit in there. Some of the equipment would not look out of place on the bridge on the Starship Enterprise.
It made me wonder what the ideal MFL classroom would be like. Well I listed some of things the technology should enable a student to do:
- It should help students build vocabulary through discovery learning. This is a difficult process to replicate – but essentially students should receive the information (translations) when they are looking for it rather than providing vocabulary lists for them to learn by rote.
- It should provide an intelligent system to help students understand how words work together to make sentences. Sentence building should become intuitive and easy.
- It should make students speak their sentences out loud. Too much learning is on screen and on the page but not actually spoken.
- It should be incentivising – create scores, targets and achievements. People like to measure their progress and be rewarded for success.
- It should be engrossing and retain attention.
- It should simulate real situations as if interacting with real people. That is after all what language is for!
- It should, if possible, be fun.
That’s not a bad wish list and I suppose technology will get there……but I wonder at the cost (don’t we all). I also wonder in the case of languages, in particular, if it is all necessary?
I mean we get all of the above with KLOO at a cost of £29.99.
KLOO is a language board game, unashamedly low tech and very inexpensive in the scheme of things. It is also a multi-award winning game, loved by nearly everyone who plays and a great way to learn a language.
Our love of technology is quite understandable but it is not always the answer – and maybe especially so in the case of language which is the art of communication between humans. It reminds me of the way people (myself included!) often email others who are working round the corner. Emails fly back and forth until a small book is written. And yet if we just popped around the corner, we could just talk and sort it out in seconds. Old fashioned talking! Who would have thought of such a thing!
Anyway if you are interested in KLOO Games you can buy on Amazon or at our KLOO store .You can learn French, Spanish or English. See below how easy it is to make sentences using KLOO’s uniquely colour coded cards:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSredolIRhE&feature=g-upl]
