Nowadays, innovative technologies seeped through all aspects of our lives, especially the sphere of education. Introducing new information technologies to education system is a new approach to teaching, which helps students accomplish tasks interactively. For instance, using Internet resources and multimedia equipment, such as apps, online board tools might create interactive lessons, in particular implementing new approaches in online classes can improve communication skills of students.

Innovative technologies have enormous potential for improving the educational process. They can greatly enhance teaching and learning, making it more interactive, accessible and effective. Not only do innovative technologies require students to have knowledge and skills, but also to think, analyze and solve problems.

Using innovative technologies in teaching can significantly increase the excitement and motivation of students, which in turn contributes to more successful learning of the material and the development of their skills.

Distance education gives a great opportunity for students to attend classes without being personally present at the educational institution. Nowadays, technological devices such as a tablet or laptop is enough to join a lesson from almost anywhere in the world. The only condition is a high-quality Internet connection and a video communication program that will allow the teacher and students to see and hear.

Due to the forced total transition to remote learning during the international coronavirus pandemic, developers of remote learning programs have coped with the task very successfully creating applications and platforms accepting and sending homework, and showing materials to the whole class at once.

Using interactive learning platforms and programs allows students to interact actively with the material and apply their knowledge in practice. They can perform hands-on tasks, solve problems, conduct experiments, and receive immediate feedback on their actions. This promotes deeper understanding and retention of information

Making an observation of offline and online lessons, we can say that using multimedia tools one of the best ways to make learning interactive. For example, in online classes, teachers can use Miro – online whiteboard tool. Miro, a workspace for innovating with visual tools, helps speed up work in online classes and make it more fascinating. It is a workspace that allows teachers and students to work creatively and interactively in a collaborative way no matter where everyone is. During the lessons, teachers can unite all students using interactive displays. Teachers can stimulate the creative energy that comes with Miro's motivating collaboration capabilities. From notes and text to pictures, diagrams, and support for a wide range of file types including images, documents, tables, GIFs, and PDFs, Miro has everything to visualize ideas, map complex processes, and develop students’ projects. It has an extensive collection of templates for exercises and many other brainstorming techniques that are crucial to hold lessons.

Using this board during classes, teachers can explain any grammatical topic, and also reinforce the material by doing exercises by the students themselves. This application allows students to complete assignments on their own during the class. For instance, students can fill in the gaps, insert the necessary words, match correct words and phrases.

The board can directly be managed from the browser. The most convenient way to work is from a computer or tablet. To start working with the service, teachers can select the Education tariff. This free plan offers unlimited boards and up to 100 students from the browser. They can invite them to participate via email. The rights of participants can be limited by choosing to edit, comment, or view only. Content can be tagged by level, allowing different students to access different content on the same board. Changes will be highlighted, and new comments will be marked with a pink dot right on the board. Any change in a Google document will immediately appear on the board if it is attached to Miro.

The board can be filled with lesson materials, students’ attention can be controlled with screen sharing, and a timer can be used to limit the time for completing tasks. Students can work on a project in groups, using templates to prioritize tasks, tag who is responsible, and keep track of who has been most active. If necessary, teachers can correct the work in stickers or comments. Videos cannot be uploaded from a computer, but a link to the video can be provided. A video can be added from YouTube and any other platform to the widget, and it will appear on the board.

In fact, students can work directly on the board. It can help students work together in a collaborative way. Collaborative tasks may be the best way to get students to produce comprehensible output, since when students work together, they need to negotiate meaning. As a result, students produce comprehensible output beyond their own individual level of competence. Social interaction can lead the learners to language development through interactional exchanges. Technology can facilitate this by making it easier for learners with different levels of knowledge to talk to each other, especially through collaboration.

For example, in online English classes in the workspace of Miro, we conduct discussions, carry out assignments, and students have the opportunity to do tasks themselves. Students actively and with great interest complete all reading, speaking, writing and listening tasks in the workspace. In a Miro board, there is access to a few sets of board tools and settings. The toolbars surround the board workspace.

During online classes using stickers in the toolbars, we can hold interesting lessons. We can change their color, size, text font. Stickers can be tagged to know who owns this or that brilliant idea. We can like them and thus identify the most popular ideas. We can also take a photo of real stickers, attach the photo to the board, and the stickers will become electronic. Such online lessons improve students’ communication skills as they have to talk and collaborate with one another.

To hold online classes is not so complicated if we know the ways of conducting lessons and checking students’ comprehension. In fact, at present, a great number of platforms and apps exist to monitor students’ understanding. For example, Kahoot is a game-based learning platform. Using it helps teachers to check students’ knowledge and makes it easy to create, discover, play and share fun learning games in minutes for any subject, in any language, on any device, for all ages. Introducing such game-based learning platforms makes learning awesome. For instance, I often use this platform when I want to know how well the students comprehend the material that we learn in online lessons. I do some quizzes following the instructions on screen adding questions, answers, images, and video. Also, teachers can add multiple-choice quiz questions, true or false, survey questions, and, if they have a paid subscription, they can also add slides and polls. The timer for each question has to be toggled, and teachers should remember to add images. After creating quiz questions, they have to enter a title and description in the Kahoot summary to summarize it and help students find it easily. As for my students, they do the quizzes with a big interest. Since it is like a game, they love doing it. It is a very helpful tool to check students’ mistakes and explain their incorrect answers if it is necessary. Furthermore, it is one of the effective ways to check the students’ progress.

 Using new information technologies helps to improve students’ creative thinking and communication skills, which is essential nowadays, especially in learning a foreign language. Classes dominated by innovative technologies, make it possible to bring education as close as possible to real life and link theoretical material with practical activities [1].

To sum up, it should be noted that using multimedia tools in teaching a foreign language in online classes is very important as it makes the lessons more interactive and fascinating. It can help develop students’ creativity and communication skills. Using such platforms in online classes can be enjoyable not only for students but teachers.

Literature:

1.       Бердичевский А.Л., Тарева Е.Г., Языкова Н.В. Профессиограмма современного учителя иностранного языка. – Москва: Издательство: Флинта, 2021. – 48 с.

2.       Дмитриева Е. И. Основная методическая проблема дистанционного обучения иностранным языкам через компьютерные телекоммуникационные сети интернет. // Иностранные языки в школе. – 1998. – 168 с.

3.       Мухина С.А., Соловьёва А.А. Современные инновационные технологии обучения. – Москва: Издательство: ГЭОТАР-Медиа, 2008. – 360 с.