DIDACTIC MATERIALS

Teaching materials are one of the most important tools of teaching, since by inducing the child to create his own knowledge through the handling and manipulation of materials and to confront the problems with the daily activities that they perform, they will help appropriate knowledge, concepts and consolidate their learning, helping to make it meaningful for each student. As teachers in front of a group, it is very important to know and analyze what kind of students we have in the group, and in the environment that the community is in which they develop in order to choose the corresponding materials and adapt the class to the common interest of the students, always looking for each material to fulfill an established purpose.

Piaget confirmed that children are curious by nature and constantly strive to understand the world around them; to motivate this curiosity, it is necessary to use the materials that awaken in the child the interest and desire to learn, this is where the work of the teacher presents a great variety of experiences to students, generate situations in which curiosity is stimulated, the discovery of new situations, creativity, innovation, experimentation and decision-making.

For Vigotzky it is important the participation of the teacher in creating the necessary conditions that provide the student with essential experiences for the formation of concepts. For this, the didactic materials become mediators directed to the accomplishment of this function.

According to meaningful learning, new knowledge is incorporated substantively into the student's cognitive structure. This is achieved when the student relates the new knowledge to those previously acquired; but it is also necessary that the student is interested in learning what is being shown.

To be able to know the knowledge that the children have on some subject is necessary to make an inquiry of the previous notions before addressing it; based on the answers obtained, the teacher can start planning for his class, taking into account the method to use and the materials that support his classes to get children to take ownership of each knowledge.

The means or didactic resources encompass all the didactic material at the service of teaching and are essential elements in the process of transmitting knowledge from the teacher to the student. The way of presenting the information is fundamental for its assimilation by the receiver. The didactic means constitute the series of resources used to favor the process of Teaching-Learning.

Taking into account that any material can be used, in certain circumstances, as a resource to facilitate teaching and learning processes

FLASH CARDS

Flash cards are a simple, versatile, yet often underexploited resource. I would like to offer some reasons for using flash cards and a selection of activities for use in the Young Learner classroom, although some of the activities could also be used with fun-loving, lower level adult classes.

Why use flash cards?
Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory reminds teachers that there are many types of learners within any one class. Gardner's research indicates that teachers should aim to appeal to all the different learner types at some point during the course. It is particularly important to appeal to visual learners, as a very high proportion of learners have this type of intelligence. Flash cards can be bright and colourful and make a real impact on visual learners. Many of the activities outlined below will also appeal to kinaesthetic learners.

For children at reading age, flash cards can be used in conjunction with word cards. These are simply cards that display the written word. Word cards should be introduced well after the pictorial cards so as not to interfere with correct pronunciation.


Flash cards are a really handy resource to have and can be useful at every stage of the class. They are a great way to present, practise and recycle vocabulary and when students become familiar with the activities used in class, they can be given out to early-finishers to use in small groups. I sometimes get the students to make their own sets of mini flash cards that can be taken home for them to play with, with parents and siblings.

Where to get flash cards?

Buy them. Some course books provide a supplementary pack of flash cards or they can be bought in sets.
Make them yourself. If you don't have access to professionally produced flash cards, don't worry, it's really easy to make your own even if you're not very artistic. You can use pictures from magazines, draw simple pictures or copy from the internet or clip art. The most important thing is to make sure they are all of the same size, on card (different colours for different sets) so you can't see through them. If possible you can laminate the sets as you make them and they will last for years. The advantage of making your own, apart from the fact that they're cheap and yours to keep, is that you can make sets for your specific needs. You may like to make a set to use in conjunction with a story book or graded reader, or even to accompany project work.

Students make them. I have recently begun to incorporate the production of flash cards into the classroom. After introducing a new lexical set, using realia or the course book, ask students to produce the flash cards for you. Give each one an item to draw. They can be mounted on card to make the set.

THE BLACKBOARD

The need to provide information to a large audience at one time led to the evolution of teaching boards. The whole class or group of students can visualize the information provided on the board. Globally, the classrooms of universities, colleges and schools use blackboard, green board, white board (dry-erase board) or the smart boards.

In Europe and United States (US) during the 18th century, teachers and students used clay tablets. The teacher went to each student and wrote the lesson on each student's slate/tablet. In 1801, in Scotland, James Pillans, Head of the school and geography teacher, hung a large piece of slate on the wall to teach the students [6 ]. George Baron, a mathematics teacher from the US used the first wall-mounted blackboard of connected slates. In the US by mid-19th century, every class room had a blackboard to teach students. These were made of dark grey or black slate stone [7-10]. Calcium carbonate or calcium sulphate sticks were used to write on the blackboard. The use of the blackboard by a teacher depended on his/her ability to draw and write on the board. It provided variety of opportunities for modifying the presentation of the subject content. The introduction of blackboard was a new innovation that was well accepted by the teachers and it gained popularity across the globe.




Whiteboards:


The whiteboards or dry-erase boards came into use during the late 1980s. They have a glossy-white surface for writing. Instead of chalk pencils, whiteboard pens were used to write on whiteboards. Considering the health reasons and cost-effectiveness, by 1990s most of the class rooms were replaced with whiteboards instead of blackboards

REALIA

Realia in EFL terms refers to any real objects we use in the classroom to bring the class to life.



Why use realia in class?

The main advantage of using real objects into the classroom is to make the learning experience more memorable for the learner. To give a couple of simple examples, if you are going to teach vocabulary of fruit and vegetables it can be much more affective for students if they can touch, smell and see the objects at the same time as hearing the new word. This would appeal to a wider range of learner styles than a simple flashcard picture of the piece of fruit or vegetable. (With very young learners, classroom management can become trickier if you bring in real objects as excitement levels tend to rise. Last year one of my students bit into an onion we were passing round. I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten that class!)

A second example would be if you are going to teach some functional language for asking for the timetable for a train. You could use a fictitious timetable or you could use a real one from the local train station, one from the internet, or if you’re really organised, some you brought back from your last trip to the UK. This way you expose students to more language than simply the times and destinations. They will see information about prices, discounts, bank holidays etc.


Here is a selection of activities involving realia.

Tourist information
Gather some city/town maps from the tourist information bureau wherever you are. Use them to create role plays that could happen with English speaking visitors to their town or city. Give students a scenario for them to build a role play out of. If you had trouble finding your way around their town/ city when you arrived use your own experiences to create situations.

Collect brochures of places of interest (in English if possible but not vital) and ask students to use them to plan a trip for a group of students who are coming to their town for a week. They can plan the itinerary, work out the budget etc.

Concentration


Instead of using students’ names put an object, such as an item of clothing or a classroom object, in front of each student and that is what they say instead of their names to pass the turn around the circle.

TEXTBOOKS

As you visit classrooms, you probably notice that most, if not all, of those classrooms use a standard textbook series. The reasons for this are many, depending on the design and focus of the curriculum, the mandates of the administration, and/or the level of expertise on the part of classroom teachers.

Textbooks provide you with several advantages in the classroom:

Textbooks are especially helpful for beginning teachers. The material to be covered and the design of each lesson are carefully spelled out in detail.

Textbooks provide organized units of work. A textbook gives you all the plans and lessons you need to cover a topic in some detail.

A textbook series provides you with a balanced, chronological presentation of information.

Textbooks are a detailed sequence of teaching procedures that tell you what to do and when to do it. There are no surprises—everything is carefully spelled out.

Textbooks provide administrators and teachers with a complete program. The series is typically based on the latest research and teaching strategies.


Good textbooks are excellent teaching aids. They're a resource for both teachers and students.





Use Textbooks Wisely

A textbook is only as good as the teacher who uses it. And it's important to remember that a textbook is just one tool, perhaps a very important tool, in your teaching arsenal. Sometimes, teachers over-rely on textbooks and don't consider other aids or other materials for the classroom. Some teachers reject a textbook approach to learning because the textbook is outdated or insufficiently covers a topic or subject area.


As a teacher, you'll need to make many decisions, and one of those is how you want to use the textbook. As good as they may appear on the surface, textbooks do have some limitations. The following table lists some of the most common weaknesses of textbooks, along with ways of overcoming those difficulties.

Using the OHP

Of all the technological resources that are available to teachers, in my opinion, the one which is the most underused and sometimes misused is the OHP, or overhead projector

What is the OHP?

The OHP is a small machine designed to project an image onto a small screen or whiteboard. If you have a screen, which can be placed above the whiteboard and pulled down accordingly, it will stop the glare. The materials we normally use with it are pens, which can either be permanent, or cleanable. In addition to these there are transparencies (OHT), which you can write or draw on, and a special type of transparency which a text or image can be photocopied onto.

The advantages of using an OHP

Obviously the OHP, being economically and ecologically sound, can dramatically reduce the amount of paper used for photocopies: anything that can be photocopied can also be photocopied onto an OHT.

Then again, if you want to give your students a record of the lesson, you can give them a photocopied paper version later.
If you use an OHP you are effectively telling your students that your lesson has been well prepared and not something you thought of just before class.
Your students can prepare visual stimuli themselves for presentations or class talks, or work together on separate strips of an OHT to put together an article or story, giving them a sense of achievement.
You can photocopy a student’s work or a model composition onto an OHT and discuss its merits with your class. Similarly you can quickly present the answers to an exercise or a text which has been dictated for students to compare with their own, just as you can project the tape script after a listening exercise to point out anything of note such as new vocabulary to your students.

The OHP also accommodates different learning styles and multiple intelligences as you can use colour for the text or drawings. Not only are colours and shapes attractive but they will appeal to and help your more visual learners and those who have a higher visual or spatial intelligence.

Techniques

Use progressive disclosure technique: mask what the students don’t need to see, in order to focus and control their attention and get them to speculate on what they can see or predict the content of the parts they can’t. Adapt your course book in this way to make it more interesting.

Alternatively use silhouetted pictures or show them out of focus, or even small pictures of items in one vocabulary field (e.g. clothes) which can be thrown casually on top of each other and ask the students to call out what they can see. Memory activities can also be employed if you show them a picture and then ask them to describe what they saw or what was happening, or show them another which is similar but ask them to describe the changes.

Using audio and video in teaching

Audio and video materials can be used to enhance learning resources by showing real life scenarios, explaining concepts, observing social groups, and acting as triggers for discussion. They are also able to bring experts and viewpoints to the student learning experience and are excellent at bringing subjects ‘to life’ to engage discussion and inspire learning.

As Deakin moves into the cloud, you are encouraged to learn more about creating your own audio and video resources to ensure you have the skills to deliver rich, engaging content. Both audio and video have been used to support learning for some time, but as new technologies have become available and the cost of making media resources has dropped, it is now possible for individual educators to capture their own audio and video using every day, accessible technology.

Benefits of using audio and video in teaching 

Having audio and video available to your students can support their learning in the following ways. It: 

• provides diverse teaching techniques for learning

 • gives the teacher a voice – this can reduce the feeling of isolation for cloud based students, but also helps located students feel connected 

• can be used to simplify and explain complex problems 

• can allow students to access the learning materials as often as required • allows students to learn at their own pace, with instant playback, rewind and pause • reduces frequently asked questions from students 

• can be re-used.

ICT (information and communications technology, or technologies)

ICT, or information and communications technology (or technologies), is the infrastructure and components that enable modern computing.

Although there is no single, universal definition of ICT, the term is generally accepted to mean all devices, networking components, applications and systems that combined allow people and organizations (i.e., businesses, nonprofit agencies, governments and criminal enterprises) to interact in the digital world.

ICT commonly means more than its list of components, though. It also encompasses the application of all those various components. It's here that the real potential, power and danger of ICT can be found.