Abstract:

Educational tools and technology have become a trending market recently amounting to $1.45 billion in 2018, in the U.S. alone. Companies and startups worldwide are coming up with solutions to global-scale issues related to education like Newsela from New York City, curating non-fiction readings and adapting them to different reading levels or the company Geekie in Brazil, that utilizes adaptive learning technology and gamification to shape the curriculum to fit the student’s specific needs. Technology in education has allowed learning to be more flexible and affordable, interactive and inclusive, as well as supportive of different learning skills. Moreover, technology may increase collaboration between student-teacher, student-student, prepare learners for future careers, and also motivate and engage all learners. Technology in education may also be the solution in cases of a global calamity that imposes a period of quarantine for teachers and students in a middle school setting in São Paulo, Brazil. In this case study research, we aim at exploring different online language learning resources focused on interaction and motivation in a PBL classroom thought a 14-day period of quarantine, where instruction was done solely online. The purpose of this research is to, first, curate tech resources that emphasize interaction and motivation in project-based learning, then choose the two that best suited the purpose of this research, and finally test them with students. Results will be collected by surveying students about their preferences, as well as analyzing the results of the interaction between students, and teachers, and their effectiveness of creating an interactive and motivational learning environment. The context of the study will be the online platform Canvas, as well as the physical classroom at an upper-class school in São Paulo, Brazil. The period for the research will be of 14 days, where the main teachers of additional languages and their students were in quarantine due to exposure to the COVID-19. In a time of uncertainty and change, there is always a possibility of growth and innovation. This study will discuss possibilities in the online teaching of language in a project-based learning environment that can retain key characteristics between learners: motivation and interaction.

Keywords:

Online learning, additional language, PBL.