teachers guide

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TEACHER’S GUIDE English Central makes teaching English fun and effective by turning popular web videos into powerful language learning experiences. EnglishCentral allows teachers to sign up students, select video curriculum, assign goals and track students. Perfect for any blended learning, 21 st century classroom.

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Comprehensive guide to using EnglishCentral as a teacher. http://www.englishcentral.com/teachers Online version - http://bit.ly/xSAhSc

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Page 1: Teachers  guide

TEACHER’S GUIDE

English Central makes teaching English fun and effective by turning popular web videos into powerful language learning experiences. EnglishCentral allows teachers to sign up students, select video curriculum, assign goals and track students. Perfect for any blended learning, 21st century classroom.

Page 2: Teachers  guide

On EnglishCentral students learn English through our unique immersive and structured approach of

To make significant progress, we recommend each week students:

EnglishCentral tracks the progress of all the words and language that students Watch, Learn or Speak. We’ll show students their achievement and give them motivating feedback. Teachers get our free Teacher Tools, to set video assignments and goals and get reports on student learning. Come dive into an ocean of videos!

Page 3: Teachers  guide

Teachers When teachers register, they start a school. Don’t worry if you don’t have one, just put in your name. For example, “Jenny’s School”, you can make a new name later or change it at any time.

Teachers after registration get access to our Teaching Tools and will receive a newsletter every 2 weeks full of helpful tips and tricks for using EnglishCentral effectively in their classrooms.

Page 4: Teachers  guide

Students Students can register on EnglishCentral through 3 different ways. 1. Regular Log In and Sign Up - students can sign up with Facebook or by setting up an account.

2. By Teacher Invite and Enrollment in a class - students go to the class page and click “Enroll In Class” (see 8. Enroll Students) 3. By using a prepaid Premium Access Card. - students can purchase cards from their school, authorized vendors and bookstore

Page 5: Teachers  guide

After signing up, your students will go through 3 quick steps prior to enrolling in your class and starting to study (unless they were previously registered on EnglishCentral and in that case, they can jump right in!) 1. Choosing a topic to focus on and for their own study.

2. Self selecting a level for the own study on EnglishCentral.

3. Setting up their account and personal details.

Page 6: Teachers  guide

To get started, teachers have to do 3 things

1. Create a class and a class page where your students will come to study.

2. Set video curriculum and courses that your students will study (and set goals if you choose)

3. Enroll students by URL or by Invite through our emailing system.

*** It is helpful to note that you don’t have to select videos for your students nor do you have to set goals for them to achieve. You can just let them go “freestyle” and in the Teacher Tools, record how much they do on their own. The goal of education should be nurturing “self directed learning”. Just depends how much of a push your students need!

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We are now in the TEACHER TOOLS, a full Learning Management System built to give teachers the ability to both create curriculum and track their students. The first thing to do is set up your classes. Start by making one class. Each class has a unique url http://www.englishcentral.com/class/schoolname/classname Share this with students – this is where they will ENROLL and STUDY.

Create your class by clicking the green + Add button.

Page 8: Teachers  guide

We want teachers creating strong curriculum for their students. Teachers know their students best! There are 3 steps – Set the difficulty level, Select Video content, Set Goals.

On EnglishCentral, teachers have 3 curriculum options:

1. Teacher Selects A Course - we have a full variety of professionally designed courses that act just like

textbooks. Students proceed through the units and graduate from a course.

2. Teacher Selects Individual Videos - just browese the site and when you see a video suitable for your students, + Add

it to your class. Just click the + and select the class to add it to. Just like Youtube!

3. Student Selects - the student goes “freestyle” and watches what they want. We have so much

content, why not let your students be motivated by what they want to view?

Page 9: Teachers  guide

Goals will highly motivate your students and are very much recommended. However, you still have two basic choices: Set Goals or No Goals Teachers set goals based on the number of videos to WATCH | LEARN | SPEAK Goals can be set weekly or monthly. If you set a goal in the middle of a week or a month, don’t worry – the goals the student sees on the Class Page will be prorated for that week or month. When setting goals it is important to consider the levels of your students (higher levels can complete tasks much more quickly) and also the age, the motivation and interest level and the time available for the students (and you in class!). ** Note, this said, Harder videos do naturally come in a longer length, with more speak points available and will take longer to complete. A good rule of thumb is that the average number of points / video is about 1,000. Use this as a yardstick when setting goals. We recommend a weekly goal of:

Page 10: Teachers  guide

The last stage of setting up your Teacher Tools is to enroll students. You have a nice home ready for them to begin a cosy time studying.

Teachers have several options when enrolling students.

1. Simply copy the class URL onto the board and tell the students to visit the class page and enroll in the class. Even better if you do this at school, in a computer lab or with their own devices.

2. Invite students through our email system. Each student will get a secure link

taking them to the class page where they will be asked to register on EnglishCentral, input an Premium Access Code if they have one or to begin studying if they are already registered on EnglishCentral.

Page 11: Teachers  guide

When students receive the invite or go directly to your Class Page, they just need to click the “Enroll In Class” button and they’ll be enrolled and directed to register if necessary.

They’ll get a confirmation message.

Teachers will see the students’ names in their class list right away but it will be labeled “Registered” once the student has registered on EnglishCentral and is an active member. Just remember, your unique Class URL is your home base! Students can do everything there and this is the place they should locate to start studying your assignments / curriculum.

Page 12: Teachers  guide

EnglishCentral empowers teachers with strong assessment tools and ensures accountability between all stakeholders: teachers, administrators, students and parents. Our comprehensive reports give teachers a complete view of what the students have been doing, how well they’ve been doing and how they are making progress. Teachers can print attractive looking reports of each data set and all reports come in a very clear graph form. There is also the option to export an excel file of student data. Further, teachers can look at reports across a complete time section, from start to finish. The main reports are:

1. Watched Videos 2. Learned Words 3. Speak Points Earned 4. Lines Recorded 5. Pronunciation (weak phonemes / avg phonemes) 6. Overall grade (% of Watch | Learn | Speak goals met) 7. Number of Visits

It’s important to note that all reports can be filtered either by what the student has done with Class / Teacher curriculum (Only Class Activity) or everything the student studied on EnglishCentral (All Activity)

Page 13: Teachers  guide

Reports also feature powerful Premium functionality. Listen In allows the teacher to listen to a student’s recording. A great tool and perfect for remedial help or a teacher student one on one conference. . Our pronunciation reports show the student’s weakness in producing sounds/phonemes and is a perfect tool for assessing student difficulties with pronunciation.

Reports have additional features.

1. Edit your student’s names and give them a proper name or alias. Makes it easy when looking at the reports!

2. Clear colors indicating completion or incompletion of goals (grey or color ). 3. Calendar settings. Look at reports over any time period – period! 4. Filter your student list alphabetically or from best – worst / worst to best 5. Drill down and see what your students have been doing. In addition to “Listen In”

you can see what videos your students have watched / spoken and what their grades were.

Page 14: Teachers  guide

Besides making curriculum and tracking students, you can manage students and invite fellow teachers to join you and teach on EnglishCentral. This is all done through the Manage tab on the Teacher Tools. This is where you manage things and add/delete schools, classes, groups, teachers, students. You will be able to:

1. Invite fellow teachers to your class as a co-teacher 2. Join and become a student in your own class. 3. Add / Delete Schools / Classes / Groups 4. Group students in levels (and assign specific videos for them) 5. Add / Remove students from the School or classes / groups. 6. Edit student names and give them an alias. 7. Upgrade students. Assign seats that you have purchased to give your students

Premium Access. The teacher that originally created the school is an administrator. Other teachers may be made administrators of a school and be able to manage the teachers / students in the school roster. Administration status can also be removed. ** Please be careful when deleting your school, classes or groups. You’ll get a confirmation message when deleting a school or class but please be careful!

Page 15: Teachers  guide

Other Things Of Note:

You can upload a logo to your Class Page. (be in your School view)

Make an announcement that will appear on your Class Page. (be in Curriculum view)

Class View: You can go to your class page from the teacher tools and check that your videos are posted (but they will appear at the bottom of your Tools page – please be in Curriculum view)

Page 16: Teachers  guide

Teachers are royalty to us! If teachers , administrators, schools buy seats for students, they get an immediate 20% discount from the standard pricing. Seats can be bought by clicking the “Buy Seats” tab from the teacher tools.

1. Select if you want to add seats to your own Teacher Account (only you can manage these seats and assign to students) or to a School Account (where all administrators can use them and assign to students).

2. Select your payment plan. Semester or Yearly. Or enter a Premium Access Code. 3. Select your number of seats / students and payment method.

Schools that purchase large numbers of seats get a steep discount which increases depending on the number of seats. Contact Us for info. about this or access cards.

Page 17: Teachers  guide

Your Class Page is where all the action takes place! Your students Enroll here, study here, get messages here. They can compete with classmates and share the page on Facebook or Twitter. Your selected videos will appear on this page, as well as any course that you’ve selected for your students to study. At the top, each student will see their progress towards the goals you’ve set for them. A great motivator!

Page 18: Teachers  guide

The My English page is the home base for all student self directed learning / independent study. On this page, they can see a list of their classes, the videos they are studying and any progress to date. Students need to select Topics for their My Class page. We have an extensive number of topics, enough to match the interests of everyone. ** The videos on the student My English page will be filtered by the difficulty level the student has selected (not that which the teacher selects which only applies to class videos).

Page 19: Teachers  guide

Every member has a profile page. You access your profile page from the top of any page, clicking your name and icon.

From your profile page you can:

1. Upload / edit your profile photo. 2. Edit your personal information and settings 3. Edit your language settings 4. Set how you appear on the site or how EnglishCentral contacts you. 5. Upgrade your account to Premium 6. Upgrade to a teacher account if you made a mistake and registered as a student

(click the link in the right sidebar)

Page 20: Teachers  guide

Our patented video player is our pride and joy. It works miracles and students love using it.

Students WATCH and SPEAK in the video player. They receive corrective feedback on their pronunciation and speaking fluency. They can control the learning environment and learn at their own speed with the player’s unique features. These features include:

1. Compare: Instantly compare your speech with the model 2. Repeat: Repeat the line right away. 3. In line dictionary: look up any word and find out how to say it 4. Speak lines and gain points. Compete with others and climb up our Rankings page. 5. Record your voice and get feedback so you can improve. 6. Use the hidden challenge to listen for missing words and improve listening skills

Page 21: Teachers  guide

The vocabulary features of EnglishCentral are deep and extensive. Consider us the worlds largest 2nd language spoken corpus – a video one at that! We track all the vocabulary that a student WATCHes | LEARNs | SPEAKs and we show them their progress. Students can study video in several ways on EnglishCentral:

1. Through the video player, as they watch a video 2. By using our Vocabulary Quiz app after watching a video 3. By selecting vocabulary based on a topic and level and making their own study list. 4. By watching “word clip lists” of videos baased on a specific word (and speaking

these lines too!). We have over 80,000 words in our library and more added daily as we produce new video content. We’ll even get bigger – mark my word! Our Vocabulary Quiz App

Page 22: Teachers  guide

Students must Watch | Learn | Speak a word 5 times each in order to “know” and have mastered that word. Our spaced time repetition system assures students learn vocabulary at timed intervals and in a variety of contexts.

Our vocabulary is leveled by a variety of internationally recognized scales of which the student can select.

** Students may also search for a word and get a cliplist through the search box.

Page 23: Teachers  guide

Pronunciation is our bread and butter, our cup of tea, our icing on the cake – we do this well! On EnglishCentral, we track every phoneme a student speaks! We’ll give detailed progress on how a student is getting better. Students through our Pronunciation page can get help all the sounds of English which they might have a problem with. Get tips, watch expert videos, record cliplists specific to a sound. Feedback is given based on a phonetic model but we also give feedback related to how well a student practices the rhythm and timing of English.

Page 24: Teachers  guide

We are never far away and are here to help.

1. Please check out the HELP section (look at the bottom of every page) It is very detailed and translated into all our main user languages.

2. Teachers may contact [email protected] with any teacher tool related

problems. We’ll get back to you ASAP.

3. Our Blog is full of great hints and helpers about how to use EnglishCentral. Stay in Intouch with all the latest there. Just click the button on our Teacher Tools! http://www.englishcentral.com/blog

4. Use our Contact Us page. We’ll be glad to answer any questions you may have. http://www.englishcentral.com/contact-us

Stay Connected. Try our social media for extra help. Also our UserVoice where you can give us additional feedback.

Make sure to visit our blog’s RESOURCES page where you’ll find further info. about EnglishCentral . Tutorials, brochures, logos, etc………. http://www.englishcentral.com/blog/resources/