Innovative Strategy for Education in Digital Era

Abstrak

The writer of this paper believes that innovative strategy for education in digital era is
really needed , especially in teaching English. This paper focuses in how to use the internet
for teaching speaking and listening. The reason is people all around the world now use the
internet everyday for their various needs, Some use the internet for entertainment, business
or education.Talking about teaching speaking, a teacher or a lecturer can use the internet for
downloading splendid short educational videos with various topics as the teaching material.
We can play the videos with various topics of conversation. Students are asked to watch the
videos by paying attention to how the native speakers pronounce the English words
properly. The teacher or the lecturer can deliver spontaneous questions about the videos.
Without them realizing, students will have an exercise how to speak English
naturally.Another way is students can be asked to imitate for example, pronouncing new
vocabularies or difficult words. The native speaksers in the video are playing roles as
models for students to learn. By using short educational videos taken from the internet, a
teaching and learning process will be more fun and interesting. Besides video, we can use
the internet to download films or songs. Because speaking skill relates to listening skill, we
can also train students’ ability in speaking by giving them a lot of practices in listening.
After watching a film for instance, students are taught to retell certain dialogues from the
film. We are also possibly to have a small discussion about the theme of the film. We can
divide students in groups to discuss together. By doing so, students will practice both
speaking and listening skill.About songs, students can be asked to write the lyric of the
songs that had been heard. We play the songs for several times and students will “guess”
the lyric. From the lyric of a song, students can learn many vocabularies. New vocabularies
are essential in speaking. We see here that the internet can maximize a teaching and
learning process. We can use language laboratory to play the short videos and give
questions to all students. They will learn about different accent of spoken English too
because sometimes the “player” in the videos come from various background. Some are
American, European or Afro-American. Internet has become “a friend” for everybody. It
can be accessed from a cellphone instead of a laptop. It is easier for us to get many kinds of
information quickly. But in school or campus, the use of internet in a language laboratory
will be more effective.
Keywords : innovative teaching strategy; the internet; video; song; teaching speaking and listening