Padlet: The virtual revision assistant!

 As we approach the half-term and the Christmas break will be soon under the corner, I have decided to write about a great use of Padlet to help students, especially Y11s, to revise content.  Padlet is a great tool! It is free up to three Padlets but I think it is worth getting an account for a whole department to use. Padlet will become our students' personal digital assistant for their GCSE course revision!

I use Padlet quite a lot at three levels:

1. For collaborative work with our international links. If you want students to introduce themselves, produce any presentation for their partners, or just show the results of a common project you have been working on, Padlet is brilliant! You set up the Padlet and students from different countries can contribute and comment on each other's work easily and via any format: video, text, audio, presentation or link to anything really!  See example below from our Erasmus project and how we used Padlet for students to identify something about their heritage that made them who they were.

2.For collaborative work among students in my class.  Students can use Padlet to display their work, again in any format. This is particularly useful in the last stage of learning, when students have really embedded their linguistic knowledge and can use it creatively to produce something of their own.

3.As a virtual assistant Schedule. This is the use, I believe, that can be extremely powerful to develop independent learning skills in the students. 

PADLET AS A VIRTUAL REVISON ASSISTANT: My Journey!

Retrieval practice is essential for language acquisition but many of my students, especially those in lower sets, find it extremely difficult to create their own revision schedule when exams approach. Most of them will create a revision timetable for all subjects. They would allocate an hour or two to MFL but they often get overwhelmed with what and how to revise, after all for the GCSE exam there are four skills to practise!

To help them with this task, three years ago, after being inspired by Ceri Anwen in the TILT London Conference,  I created two Revision Schedules for my Y11s using Padlet: One in preparation for the mocks after Christmas and a second one for the Easter vacation in preparation for their oral examination.  Students did not have to stick to the schedule 100% but it gave them something concrete and realistic on what to start their revision work. 

I am not going to lie some students did not use it at all! But many did and with some tweaks, as they thought my programme had been quite unrealistic, they stuck to this revision programme. They and their parents found it extremely useful, especially the weakest ones.  

These are the schedules:

I repeated the process the following two years, with similar results. Nevertheless, the schedule was ambitious and I could understand that could put some of my learners off, who may find the whole experience unachievable and impossible!  

However, the GCSE content is the content! At this stage I had already started using Sentence Builders with low ability students at KS4 and had created my own Quizlets, to which they had direct access to.  So, I thought that rather than waiting to Christmas and Easter, when students had to revise for 10 more subjects and thinking of the Retrieval Practice concept, I would start the official revision at the October Half-Term with my Y11s.  

The programme would consist of 4 weeks: 

• 2 weeks of scheduled 30 minutes vocabulary learning during our 2 weeks' break, we are lucky to have a two weeks' half term in October.
• 2 weeks of own time, when students would dedicate 20 minutes to revise the topics covered since Y10, making the whole retrieval practice process 4 weeks long.

This is the schedule which will be released to them next week:

This schedule focuses mainly on productive skills: knowing the different Sentence Builders studied since Y10 extremely well, so that students can carry out the writing tasks at the GCSE exam.

MOVING FORWARD

I will prepare another Christmas revision schedule but because we have started the revision earlier, I hope the Sentence Builders knowledge will be much better embedded in the students' brains by then!

I hope this will be the case, as this schedule will be supported by a timed writing task, where students will need to put the Sentence Builders into practice, every two weeks.

I will tweak the Christmas Padlet schedule above, which I have used for the last three years, so it is not so overwhelming and will include more receptive vocabulary practice, linked to the GCSE AQA syllabus in Quizlet, supported by periodical practice question papers created by Theme, using Exampro.  Exampro is great for this, because it allows you to create tests to be carried out online, with immediate feedback for students,  so perfect combination with Padlet and marking free!

I also think this model can be transferred to Y10 as from Christmas.  In fact, I will create another schedule for them, very light as the topics covered by Christmas in Y10 will be only 2! but which will reinforce the idea of retrieval practice and, hopefully, will create a strong foundation step for students' language learning as they progress in their GCSE course. 

This is my plan for GCSE, starting this Y10

1. Padlet revision schedule for Christmas, based on Tourism and School/Studies (including productive Sentence Builders Quizlet courses)
2. Padlet revision schedule for Easter, based on Tourism, School/Studies, Relationships and Technology (including productive Sentence Builders, AQA receptive vocabulary Quizlet courses and practice Exampro tasks)
3. Padlet revision schedule for Summer, based on Tourism, School/Studies, Relationships, Technology and Free Time (including productive  and receptive skills)
4. Padlet revision schedule for October Half-term in Y11, based on Tourism, School/studies, Relationships, Technology, Free time and Work. (Like the one above)
5. Padlet revision schedule for Christmas in Y11, based on Tourism, School/studies, Relationships, Technology, Free Time, Work, Area where I live and Festivals (including some productive but mainly receptive vocabulary and practice Exampro tasks)
6. Padlet revision schedule for Easter in Y11, based on all GCSE topics (including, mainly productive skills as orals would normally take place after Easter, but some receptive vocabulary and practice Exampro tasks too)

These 6 revision schedules together with work in lessons and time writing opportunities as from October in Y11, I hope will form a robust foundation for students to succeed at GCSE!!!

Other 5 uses for speaking activities