Teacher’s Handbook - Student’s Guide

Introduction: Your Classroom

The interactive activities are basically divided into two parts: teacher’s handbook and student guide. The teacher handbook suggests ways in which teachers can exploit our on-line information to teach their students. The activities designed encourage interaction between teachers and students (i.e. teacher-student interaction), and between students themselves (student-student interaction). Suggestions from teachers using our website are most welcome. Please e-mail us. We look forward to interaction between the designers and users of this website.

The student guide suggests ways in which information in this website can be used independently on a self-access basis, i.e. outside the context of a classroom. Activities are also designed to be interactive, since students can interact with other users on line. When they discuss their ideas with their peers and teachers on line, interaction occurs. When they make their own videos and ask for feedback from other people, interaction occurs too.

The teacher’s handbook is further divided into three sub-sections: pre-teaching activities, class activities and follow-up activities. Pre-teaching activities refer to the work that the learners can do before learning takes place in the classroom, e.g. looking up relevant information in advance, thinking about specific questions, recalling personal experience, etc. Class activities refer to the work done in class, with guidance from the teacher and discussion with peers, or carrying out in practice (e.g. delivering a speech) our suggestions. Follow-up activities refer to the work after classroom learning, e.g. writing a speech in the students’ own time, asking for feedback from teachers and peers.

The student guide is also divided into three sub-sections: pre-viewing our information on line, during the viewing and follow-up work. Before using our information, it is always useful for the student user to reflect on his/her personal experience, to find relevant information from other sources such as the library, to attempt answering the questions we set in this section. While reading on-line information, he/she can jot down some comments regarding relevance, usefulness and feasibility of our suggestions, and then get back to us. After reading our information, the student user can implement our suggestions, to see for himself/herself whether these suggestions work or not. Activities set out in the student guide are also interactive as the student user can communicate with other users and us, the designers.