An innovative technology to self train and assess primary school students in speaking languages.
The following study is an innovative technology made specifically for private schools in UAE to provide self-training and assessment for primary school students.
Do you have enough time in the classroom to conduct oral training or tests for primary students? Do you need a tool that will help train them outside the classroom? MakeMeTalk is exactly what you need!
What is it about?
Nowadays, children tend to spend their time on digital tools occupied by the doing and forgetting about the talking. In this paper, we will present a project that trains primary students to engage in a discussion with an interactive screen. Our project will be an intelligent and customized training system that aims to engage primary students in a virtual training to speak, be part of competition games and practice some literacy like training for a spelling test. The basics of this training are to engage students in an open-space training activity that allows them to improve their concentration and how to focus for a long time even when many distractions are set around.
The project will be using an interactive screen with an application that can be moderated and adapted by the teacher/school for the convenience of curriculum requirements. The app will include customized training in different languages according to the school needs. A headphone/speaker will be provided to the user for crowded places.
The development of visual and learning technology has aided in the contribution of learning tools and techniques. Our project aims to motivate the learners to achieve short and long-term goals through undertaking interactive sessions to facilitate better teaching activities.
We will discuss the aspects and applicability of MakeMeTalk; the interactive screen, to enhance training activities in primary schools. An introduction to Gestalt’s Theory of learning is used for better results especially at the age of primary learners. A discussion regarding the literacy support, interactive board, speech support has been performed with regards to MakeMeTalk interactive screen.
Training with Tech
The method in which children receive knowledge has changed from last time we were in schools. It is becoming more specific for their individual differentiation and customized in a way that facilitates perception and hence practice of knowledge. Our project is based on learning theories that enhance the perception of knowledge and make it easier and faster. We are focusing with this product on the visual learning as one of the most powerful ways to present different information to the student to support learning. Visual learning has a psychological basis that we refer to Gestalt’s theory which developed the visual learning principles.
Literacy training that our project is providing to the students is based on a very known application game called WORD. It is based on four pictures to describe the usage of one word. It is a way to make the brain collect information from 4 pictures to make it focus on one single word. Students with literacy problem will go through a visualization of the word then a thinking activity before writing the word. The letters that compose the word will be mixed with other letters and the user must find the letters that reflect the meaning he is getting from the 4 pictures.
How Does it Work?
Interactive board
MakeMeTalk is an interactive board provided with an application that helps students interact with a virtual speaker. This latter will be used to call out for the student, greet him and ask him questions about a specific topic. The virtual speaker will launch a gallery to show to the student some pictures related to the topic for guidance. Those pictures will help the student speaking with more fluency and construct meaningful sentences.
The smart board is a touch screen that helps the student interact with the virtual personalized learning. He can use touch feature to: call the interactive speaker, to choose the topic he wants to talk about, or even to play an interactive game with his/her peers. The screen can provide a range of options like to connect the parents for instant watch. It can generate detailed report about the fluency of the student or the time spent on the activity or even a comparison between the child's competency and his peers. MakeMeTalk can be adjusted according to the schools’ curriculum to accommodate the screen’s content according to the school needs for assessment.
Speech Support
If your child or your student struggles with speech and spelling tests, this Tech allows parents or teachers to provide speech training at home or in the classroom. Our device is a personalized and symbols-supported conversation tool. It is designed to foster language use and conversation skills for those who don't feel confident to speak in front of their peers. It is built to replace the real teacher by a virtual one who asks questions to the learners and provides help in sentence building and articulation. It is an easy tool to use by primary learners and has features and benefits that allow fun competitions with different learning games.
MakeMeTalk system can support the learner with pictures to organize ideas, applications of spelling games to create words to match with the given clues and pictures supported with hints to help learners with different abilities. In addition, the system can foster the sense of curiosity in looking, asking and searching to win the given quizzes. Visualization of learned words can enhance memorization of the given spelling words to be stored in their long-term memories. There is also a recording feature that allows the learner to listen to his training session and work on it with his parents at home.
What I have learned from my teaching experience throughout the years in teaching a foreign language (English), is that there are many parents who are not able to help their primary children at home to do simple literacy tasks like reading and writing. Thus, student’s outcome can be very unsatisfying compared to another child that has the right help at home. At this stage, our tool can provide all necessary training at home as well as it has a cloud storage online connected to provide the required help at home similarly as a home tutor. The training can be personalized by the teacher to tailor it according to the learner’s need.
Literacy Support
MakeMeTalk influences literacy development in primary students. It gives students the opportunity to engage in different virtual games which encourage them to compete with their peers while learning. It encourages students to practice spelling activities through engaging app that the interactive board will provide. The purpose of this tool is to enhance their independent training. Writing and reading literacy can be provided based on 4 pictures one word. It is a visual-based learning that enhances writing skills and makes spelling assessment an easy activity for learners at school.
Technology
Speech and conversation skills are core elements in human relationship. MakeMeTalk offers the potentials to meet the needs of visual literacy with technology. This latter is carving out a special role in boosting those skills and how machines/devices are helping young learners to make themselves understood. Speech depends on ideas, thoughts or visuals stored in our brain to be interpreted by symbols and words and in order to make a logic conversation. Based on this theory, we tried to connect the whole system to the network rather than just focusing on getting learners to speak. Our technological tool can motivate the learners with pictures, games and different activities that would help them with forming words and sentences as a result of a significant progression on learner’s conversational performance. Such progression can be generated automatically to a students’ report for teachers use and parents as well.
Technology is one of the most important tools that can motivate young learners and open for them the chance to have a personalized learning with no extra cost. Our technological tool has an extra application downloadable on any individual device so that students can enhance their training by at home practice.
Student Interaction
Our tool helps students to interact with the virtual personalized learning. There are many features for student’s interaction such as writing, speaking, and listening. The aim is to increase the students’ interaction and motivate them to learn and make them more comfortable to speak in an open space. The smart screen allows them to play interactive games with peers inside the school and outside which encourages the collaborative learning as well.
Teacher's Management
MakeMeTalk has many ways to help the educators in guiding their learners to the right training. Their tasks can basically be described as follows:
Adding the students lists to the training program;
Creating a student’s personal profile and connecting the parents;
Personalizing the learning level for each student;
Rewarding and motivating the students;
Providing the right instructions for the use of the training tool MakeMeTalk;
Prepare effective levelled competitions and games to allow all students to engage.
Teacher’s management describes the teacher’s efforts on assigning the exact learning activities to the right student to enhance learning outcome and social interaction of the learner. The teacher can share reports with the school board, colleagues and parents and manage communication strategies of the technological tool (MakeMeTalk) according to the curriculum of the school. The teacher can also track students’ progress through the automatic report generating system.
The gamification system can encourage the engagement of the learners and can be supervised regularly with the notifications that the technological tool can send to the teacher whenever a student signs in for practicing or accomplishing an activity.
MakeMeTalk is supported with an immediate rewarding system sent to the parent in a form of massage directly and to be added automatically to the student’s progress page attached with positive phrases and comments from the teacher. The feature to print daily, weekly and monthly learning progress reports available, for individual student or for the whole class.
Cloud Storage
MakeMeTalk is a place where all reports, virtual discussions, speech training and literacy practices are stored. These tracks can be reviewed by teachers, educators, parents or school leaders whenever it needs to measure students’ progression. Schools using cloud platforms can help the parents to access to their children’s training at any time. They can make a collage of the most successful training and post it on their social media platforms as an advertisement. They can give access to the students to practice at home on how to use MakeMeTalk virtual screen and familiarize with the application before going to the school for onsite practice.
Consistent reports can be provided automatically or manually by the teachers to help them evaluate their students’ progression and know their gaps and how to direct the training to improve their outcome.
Student’s Report
MakeMeTalk can be managed in a way that generates personalized reports for each learner. It is a feature that can make customized learning an easy task for the teacher. The report will be updated after every session conducted by the learner. Similar report will be delivered by e-mail to the parents for a close-up following with the learners’ improvement. However, learners with problems in fluency or problem speech delay will be reported directly for assistance. In the same time, a personalized program based on speech technics will be assigned to those learners with a specific high frequency in sessions. And again, their reports will be generated accordingly.
Parent's Interaction
MakeMeTalk is a cross-platform mobile application that includes a parent’s most needed functionalities in a single app. It supports parents in following up their children’s performance and their speaking improvement at the same time. In addition, MakeMeTalk enables parents to access to their child’s live training using the same application. It allows parents to stay well-informed about the progression of their child in matter of speaking and spelling literacy. A detailed report can be generated automatically to show the child weaknesses and strengths compared to his peers. This will allow parents to detect any speech delay as soon as possible and provide the required support for their child.
Learning Objectives and Goals
From this technological tool, we hope to engage primary students in a virtual training, and enrolling them in a specific topic to speak in an open space (canteen, play area, gym) for the following objectives and goals:
Training primary students for speaking with no fear or shame;
Teaching new topics outside the classroom in a limited time;
Providing the learners with new ideas about several real-word problems like pollution, healthy food, saving water, clean energy…etc.;
Encouraging the learners to engage in literacy games during their brake time with partners from the same school or from other schools (online collaborative learning);
Provide a one training tool to improve speaking of different languages taught in the school;
Be able to tailor leaning and training according to the needs of each learner;
Be able to generate reports to track the progress of the students without making assessment or tests that can be a source of stress for both parents and students;
Involvement of the parents through the online connection and accessibility available while the learner is conducting his training/assessment.
Technology has made school education less complicated than before. It has given to the educators a large range of work strategies that enhance the outcome of the learner in a short time. Our choices of technological tools are made according to the learner’s advantage. We cannot teach nowadays students with old teaching methods. Our students are becoming better than us in technological usage and they count on it in their daily basis activities, that is why they consider it a comfortable tool for learning: they learn to write and read from it, they but till now they cannot use it for making conversations. We developed our individual ideas and professional observations to create a conversation training tool that is usable specifically in schools to create self-reliance and independence of work for all types of learners.
This was a group project made by students from HBMSU, 2019, HERE.
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