Assemble Materials
Making a lesson starts with the material. What do you want to teach, what do you want to learn? Start by clicking the “make a lesson” button. That will move you to an empty lesson page. Here you can start jotting down the material you want your new lesson to cover. You can begin entering full dialogues or just start with a list of words, phrases, or pictures; whatever you want to use when building the lesson.
The new lesson page works a little like graph paper or a spreadsheet. Each item you want to focus on in your lesson should be placed in a new row. If you want to add more information about these items, you can add that information next to them in new columns.
For example, if I want to learn the word " 猫” in Mandarin Chinese, I would put " 猫” on a new row and then add a column next to it with the English definition: “cat”. That would give me enough material to build a flash card. If I wanted to build a picture choice lesson instead, I would add an additional column and put a picture of a cat next to the definition. If you don’t know what kind of lesson you want to make, then don’t worry about columns just yet and focus on getting all the material you want in rows.
Once you have a collection of materials, it is time to start thinking about how you want to interact with that material by building your collection into one or more lessons.
Picture Choice Lessons
The resources provided by Wikiotics are meant to help both teachers and students involved in language learning.
So far, we have built a “picture choice” lesson type (see a sample English lesson), which is a flexible format for helping to improve a student’s vocabulary and naturally introduce basic grammar.
If you want to create a new picture choice lesson, simply add a new link to any existing page by doing the following:
- Go to the page you want the lesson linked from and hit the “edit button” at the top of the page
- Add your lesson name inside square brackets like so:
[[My Lesson]]anywhere on the page that you want the link to appear. - Save the page.
When you follow that new link you will be presented with a series of options about what kind of page you want to create. Select the “picture choice lesson” and start filling in your lesson information into the form that will appear.
The form asks for the sentences you want to teach and for the pictures you want to use to teach those sentences.
Community tips on lesson building are collected on the Lesson building tips page.
Once you have built a lesson, consider adding your information to the Community list page so other people can more easily find your new materials.
Editing
This is a wiki so each page has an edit button at the top. From there you can rearrange in what order the individual picture choice groups are presented to students. You can also add additional materials to the lesson or change the text accompanying any existing pictures. We are working to improve the capabilities of this interface to make editing more powerful and allow you to remove picture choice groups from existing lessons.
Translate
If you want to translate a page, simply load it and use the “copy” tab at the top of the page and move it to a new location. Once the lesson has been moved, click on the “edit” button and replace the text with corresponding text in a new language. When you’re done, share your lesson by adding a link to some of the pages listing lessons by language like English lessons, Spanish lessons, or Chinese lessons.
For example, I liked the English lesson about different weather types and I wanted to make a Spanish version. So I went to the lesson page and clicked on “copy.” When it asked me where to move the lesson I entered “es:El tiempo” and hit enter, which brought me to the new Spanish weather lesson. At this point my Spanish lesson was still in English so I hit the “edit” button and started translating. Since I want to share this new lesson I added it to the Spanish lessons page. That’s it.