[W9] MailVU: The Connected Classroom for the Future

Hello!

Have you ever heard about the 'connected classroom'? How does it work? If you want to know more about it, let's read this article.

So, today I would like to share a new tool that can be very significant in the implementation of connected classroom, that is MailVu. MailVu is a website that allows users to record a video through their webcam at their own home! 

MailVU Website Link

How to Use MailVu in Learning?

MailVu is an extremely powerful option for teachers and learners to use in language teaching and learning. For teachers, recording lectures in a 10 minutes recording and send it to students via email is just brilliant! For the students is even more exciting, as MailVu can be treated as a tool to enhance their communicative language skills such as speaking and listening and other enabling skills such as vocabulary and fluency skill. Apart from that, MailVu can increase the speakers' awareness on pronunciation and paralanguage or non-verbal communicative elements such as facial expression, body language because they can watch their live and recorded speaking activity which enables them to reflect upon their communication and hence improve it. 

Clean interface of MailVu

MailVu can become an intelligent tool for the implementation of the connected classroom as it can take place outside the classroom and collaborates learners in engaging activities that develop their language skills and knowledge. An example of activity that teachers can carry out is giving a debate topic for students to work in pairs. In the classroom, teachers could elicit the important vocabulary sets and suitable grammar structures that are useful to be used in the debate. Students can also be encouraged to brainstorm the ideas and points to be said during the debate. As a homework, teachers can ask learners to record the debate activity in which the video involves both students. They can work together at home or they might want to work after school hours at the school ICT room. Later, they have to email the recorded debate to teachers and teachers might as well give feedback using the same medium. The idea of making learners use language outside the classroom with the instruction and guideline on contents and skills during the lesson is called 'a connected classroom'.

Below, I put a video explaining about the connected classroom:

Advantages:

• Users can see themselves being recorded and they can play the video again and again with just a click.
• MailVu can be a useful means for students who are quite passive in the classroom to involve in speaking activity and express their ideas as they can do it at home, just in of their own comfortable and less-anxious room. 

Disadvantages:

• The free subscription account blocks many useful functions such as uploading the pre-recorded video into a video gallery, embedding and downloading videos created to be places such as in blogs and creating video testimonial widget.
• Sometimes 10 minutes recoding is just too short, and we might wish for a longer recording time limit.  
• The free account is only available for 14 days before termination.