How to Use Amino for English Language Teaching and Learning Process

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.

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