Adapting online materials to suit your students

Our Online Practice and Workbooks (listed below) offer a variety of useful activities for students which help improve their skills, but did you know that as a teacher you can also upload your own content?  Join Michael Man in his webinar Adapting our online materials to suit your students on 23rd October 2014 from 10:00 – 11:00 or 15:00 – 16:00 BST when he will show you how to add a personal touch to your online course.

Online learning provides teachers with extra materials and students with opportunities to study further as they extend their learning out of the classroom. But what if a teacher wants to introduce his or her own reading text, speaking task or link to a website or online video? What, exactly, is possible to add and what are the advantages?

Let’s start with a scenario: you have been working on a unit on family life and your students are keen to learn more about family life in other cultures. You have a fantastic reading text you are sure the students will love, but you are already above your photocopy quota and three students are absent. Using our online teacher tools you can upload the text and any worksheets you’d like the students to work on. Students can access them through their account, and you can even send a message to the absent students to let them know the worksheets are there.

Let’s imagine that in the next lesson, a student comes in and tells you about a YouTube video she saw online that gives another view of family life in a little-known culture. She thinks it would be interesting for other students to see. You view it and agree with the student, so you insert the link. Students can now log in, click the link and view the video.

With students buzzing with ideas and things to say about how different family life is in their culture as compared to the others they have read about and viewed, you seize the opportunity to create a speaking task. You upload the task to the Dropbox, tell student A to work with B and off they go to record their conversation, which you can then listen to (and mark) later.

This scenario is not hypothetical; the ability to do just that is achievable and simple when teachers take advantage of the ability to add their own content to the Online Practice and Online Workbooks for their course.

Adapting our materials and adding your own content is suitable for students at any level and the tools to do it are available on every course that uses the Online Practice and Online Workbooks:

• Aim High
• American English File, second edition
• Business Result DVD edition
• English File, third edition
• English Plus
• Headway Academic Skills
• insight
• Network
• New Headway, fourth edition
• New Headway Plus, special edition
• Oxford Online Skills Program: General English and Academic English
• Q: Skills for Success, special edition
• Reach Out
• Solutions, 2nd edition (International, Nederlands and Maturita)
• Speak Now
• Stretch

Find out more about teaching and learning online.