Learning English in this era and age are very easy. No longer students only
listen to their teacher in front of the classroom for hours and taking courses that are
monotonous and very heavy in contents, now students can use internet to enhance
their experience in learning English. Among plenty of media that students can
find and use in internet, one of the present applications is Amino. But why do
we choose Amino?
Amino
is a downloadable app that use internet to access social media in a form of
communities. As such, users can join communities or create one for their
benefit. This is one among the benefits that Amino provide for teachers where
teachers can create a community for their students to join one as an online
classroom. Second, Amino is easy to use and customized. After students make
their accounts and customized, they can search for their desired communities. If
teacher had made one, students can join the provided community as a media for
them to receive new material or tasks outside the classrooms. Teacher can posts
relatives material and extra ones to their students everywhere and anywhere.
The same can be applied to students.
Third,
Amino might be simple in appearance, but they provide multiple selections that
can make the experience of using this website more interesting. Teachers can
make ‘tabs’ that students can access. Among these tabs including feeds, public
chat room, personal chat, quizzes, polls, etc. Teachers can make more tabs
depending on their need. For example, to make student have easy access to their
material, teacher can make a tab spesifically to post English material from the
teacher whereas teachers also provide other tab for students to post their
tasks or materials that they want to share for the class. Fourth, students can
‘level up’ based on their recent activities. Posting writings, sharing their
ideas and providing articles can have them gain points to level up. This can be
a simple, yet effective method for improving their motivation as they will try to
challenge their friends to see the highest levels and what that students had
done to earn such accomplishment.
As such, despite its benefits, Amino also has its disadvantage. Some of the
disadvantages of this application are among as follows. First, the website
focuses only on posting writings and pictures. Students need to link to other
websites such as YouTube or podcasts for them to be able to see videos or
hearing audios. Second, there are no easy ways to categorize the older posts.
Unless students using symbol hashtag (#) or keywords as a sign for specific
posts for tasks, the result that they found if they used search engine will not
be specific and will only show the closest results. Third, Amino can be very
liberal in their communities and teachers can’t control what kind of
communities that their students joined outside the classroom. Teachers’ and
parents’ guidance are strongly advised for this part.
Nowadays,
there are plenty of ways to learn English language. Among them, Amino apps, a
media social in form of community become one of media for students’
creativities. With some of the advantages including easy access to application,
easy to customize features, friendly programs to be used for classroom learning
process are become reasons why Amino is a good media for English learning. This
application is far from the perfect media for English language teaching and
learning process, but this application is one of the easiest and versatile
media that both teachers and students alike can use for their benefits in the
future.
