Loiana Leal Pavlichenko – Lecturer in Portuguese
School of Modern Languages
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
What did you do?
Loiana has been using H5P to create formative exercises for students studying Portuguese at a range of levels in the School of Modern Languages. Using H5P Loiana has authored resources to support reading, writing, grammar, listening and pronunciation.
Loiana uses H5P to present new material and to give students short activities to self-evaluate, practice and prepare. One of the content types she uses regularly is “column” which enables her to bring together an interactive video, audios, a piece of text, a short quiz and summary in a way that can be presented easily on Canvas. These on-line exercises prepare students for PiP Seminars as well as collaborative group activities on Canvas. The H5P activities are purely formative, so students can be relaxed about using them without worrying about points and scores.
Using “interactive video” Loiana has added comprehension questions to Portuguese video content published on Vimeo and YouTube. Adding questions is straightforward, and Loiana particularly values the fact that she does not have to download, edit and upload video content. The interactive video content type opens up huge possibilities to add questions to topical and mainstream video content – anything from a music video to a documentary about a capital city:
See the complete content on H5P: POR2010 S1 Semana 3 Vídeo Luanda: 444 Anos Tema Lusofonia – H5P.com
Loiana uses a wide range of H5P building blocks. For example, for vocabulary development she has used flashcards:
See the complete content on H5P: Exercício de vocabulário: A primeira noite (de José Eduardo Agualusa) – H5P.com
To support the students in their understanding of grammar she uses drag and drop exercises :
See the complete content on H5P: Exercícios de gramática – Conectores: tradições de ano novo – H5P.com.
She has also found the “essay” content type helpful for some exercises, for example to model answers for Reading and Comprehensions, Summaries and Reviews. For the H5P “essay” content authors define a set of keywords that will trigger individual responses if they are found or are missing in the text. Authors can also provide a model answer to be shown to students, so they can self-asses their performance. Loiana has used this to type of question to check that students are using correct verb tenses, key vocabulary and identifying detailed information in a given text (reading for detail tasks)
You can see more of Loiana’s H5P examples in our NU Content examples folder in H5P.
What do students think?
“My students love it”
Loiana Leal (Portuguese Level B Module Leader)
Informal feedback along with responses in the mid module survey demonstrate that students have really valued the H5P activities that Loiana has created.
Student voice
“I think it is more interactive, it is more engaging. We learn by doing”
Charlotte Pickles (POR2010 Student, MLS Social Secretary)
“The best thing in my opinion about the interactive activities is we’re less likely to burn out from doing too much of the same work, because it is different from the usual reading, watching, writing”
Steven Dodd (POR2010 Student Modern languages SSC Secretary)
“I think these resources are really good, they make learning fun. Because they are interactive I learn better, I really take all the information in”
Tori Higglesden (POR2010 Student, Student representative for POR Level B)
Useful Resources
H5P page – Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle University