International Exchange Students Using the Echo Dot for Learning
Project Voice was last week and I had the honor and privilege of presenting to the voice community about how our English Language Learning (ELL) students are using the echo dot to support their learning. These five students, with their Director of the International Program (Lorraine Hoffman) bravely stood in front of a room full of adults and shared their story.
Ms. Hoffman shared that the following things are very hard for students with being immersed in the English environment and these are the things she is working to teach them in their ELL class:
Limited Vocabulary & Definitions
Difficult Pronunciation
English Writing
Synonym Use
Idioms & Slang
Grammar Tenses
Storytelling
When I met with Ms. Hoffman earlier in the year, I felt that using the echo dot in their classroom might have benefits for this niche of students. She wholeheartedly welcomed the opportunity and we worked together to create opportunities for voice to enhance the learning happening both in her classroom and in other classes these students were enrolled in.
At the conference, each student shared their thoughts on using the echo dot for learning. This in itself was a big step out of their comfort zone because they were a little intimidated with sharing on stage to strangers but they rocked it!
Alisa, a 9th grader from China, shared “We did many things with Alexa last semester. At CCS, There were two challenging classes because of the English content, the Wellness and Biology classes, so we uploaded the study guide into the Voicelets skill, so we can use the Alexa to help us to review the exam on this Wellness and Biology class. Alexa asked us questions from the study guide and we answered them.
We also enjoyed playing games and we thought that was helpful for our english pronunciation. We have much fun with it.”
Then, I asked Mint, an 11th grader from Thailand, what went well when using the echo dot in the classroom. Her response was, “Alexa helped us learn English words that we did not know. At first, Alexa spoke too fast, so we asked Alexa to speak slower and that helped us understand better. Alexa helped us in class to practice for the test.We played games with Alexa during the final exam week which helped us relax our mind.”
To give a fair case study, we followed up with Kevin, a 9th grader from China, who shared what didn’t go well. He shared that “sometimes Alexa did not understand us well. A funny story was that often my classmates would try to answer Alexa and she would not understand them but when I answered she almost always would understand. This made my classmates a little mad and jealous. We also had problems when the answer might be really long because Alexa did not always understand long responses. Lastly, we learned that we really had to speak up for the device to hear us.”
After Kevin spoke, I mentioned that as users we had to learn to adjust to using this device. One thing I did to make the experience easier for these students was to slow down the speed of talking. I also created a routine that allowed the students to say “Alexa, study now” instead of “Open Voicelets” because the word Voicelets was very hard for our students to pronounce. I’m thankful to Garrick Gauch, co-founder of Voicelets for suggesting this work around. I also learned that the shorter the answer to questions, the more likely the echo dot would understand our students.
We ended our panel discussion with Loc, a 10th grader from Vietnam, sharing what he would like to see the echo dot be able to do in the future. He said, “With Amazon Echo’s capabilities and technology, I think we can use it as an academic problem-solving tool.
I remember how shy I was at the beginning of the year as a new student in this country. Especially when I wanted to ask a stranger about a problem in school. I believe that does not happen only with me.
We had the idea to create an on-boarding skill. We realized that would be helpful if all the school life common questions could be uploaded into Amazon Echo and when a student struggles with simple trouble he or she could find a solution with Alexa.”
We are currently planning to work with Paul Hickey of Data Driven Design to create the on-boarding skill for future international students so that the transition into our school culture might be a little easier in the future.
When working with these students, I had them use Voicelets for helping them learn their study guides but I also created a skill using the Flashcard Blueprints in Amazon as well. The students preferred the Voicelets option because it gave them the ability to pause the question if there was confusion.
As we enter this new semester, I hope that we can continue to create opportunities for these students using voice. I believe wholeheartedly that there is value in allowing these students to hear the correct pronunciation of words and being able to speak to the devices takes away some of the embarrassment if they say something incorrectly.
