Flexible teaching
There are many different ways to teach language and we have designed Wikiotics to be flexible and useful for as many of these as possible. Our tips here represent the best ways we know at the moment, but if you have other ideas for how to build lessons, organize an English curriculum, or on any other aspects of this project, please take our comments as suggestions only. We encourage everyone to discuss, experiment, and build the materials that they want to use themselves or share with friends.
How To Build a Lesson
The basic plan for building lessons has three steps: 1) write sentences to illustrate a learning goal, 2) record audio of those sentences, 3) organize and explain those raw materials into lessons. How you choose to present and explain these materials depends on your own creativity and on what kind of material you start with.
For example, if I am trying to illustrate “above/below” I might write these two sentences:
The plate is on the table. The chair is under the table.
Because these sentences are easy to represent in pictures I decide to turn them into a picture choice lesson. I go to A2-Stage1, where the “above/below” learning goal is, and click the “New Picture Choice lesson” button to start working on my new lesson. Once I find matching pictures I look for or write some other sentences about the same concepts. I might end up with 16 different sentences that place tables, chairs, and plates on, below, and around each other in turn. Because of the visual nature of the concept and the interactive nature of the lesson, this may be enough for a new student to learn the relevant terms.
For less visual topics I might choose a podcast lesson and intersperse example sentences with audio explanations in a student’s native language.
A note on student languages
While all student language are welcome, we will be focusing most of our efforts on the main United Nations languages: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), French, Russian, and Spanish. Materials added in other languages will likely also be translated into one or more of those languages.
Types of Lessons
There are currently four types of lessons:
Plus, text wiki pages, like this one, serves as a general purpose fifth lesson type.
Saving Lessons
To save you new lessons click on the “Save” menu on the right side of the edit screen. You need to type a name for your lesson in the box that opens there and then hit the “save” button at the bottom of the menu. A save progress bar will appear on screen and inform you when it is finished.
Tagging
Every lesson on Wikiotics can have one or more tags that are used for categorizing and locating the lesson. It it important when saving your lesson to make sure that you have some tags set, otherwise it may become all but impossible to find on the site. To add or check the tags on your lesson, click on the “Tags” menu in the edit view. It is right above the save menu on the right side of the page. The most important tag to set is the “target language” tag, which tells the rest of the community what language you are teaching with that lesson. Because it is so important it has a special drop down menu to select the language. Above that is a text box where you can enter any other tags you want. Just hit enter and they will be added to your lesson.
If you have created your lesson using the “New _ lesson” links from any of the curriculum planning pages, we have pre-tagged your lesson for you with “LLT” and target language “English”. That should be all you need but feel free to add more tags for the particular level and stage or for any features of the material you build that you think others might want to search for. If you have created your page from some other portion of the wiki, make sure you have at least the “LLT” tag and English set as the target language.