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Next week we are starting the new academic year and we will be planning first lessons for all our classes. After analysing GCSE exam results, this is exactly what I am doing this week: planning my first lessons in GoogleClassroom.
In the case of KS3 (Y8 and Y9) I always like starting the first lesson setting the expectations of the class, what is our motto and why "Languages, a life skill to achieve", going through all the apps we will be using and making sure they can log in properly, (Sentence Builders, Languagenut, Quizlet) and a quick revision, about two lessons, on the work carried out last year. What can the students remember?
This year, I have also planned to carry out a reading activity to revise key vocabulary and grammar learned last year. Will my students remember any???
For that, I have used the assistance of AI, and inspired by Joe Dale, I created a PhotoStory for my lesson boosted by Brisk. I am planning, first, to read the story as a whole class, asking students to read aloud, asking them key questions on the text and while students use their MWBs to interact with me while reading the text.
To create my resources, this is the process I followed with links to the final activities, all created within minutes, using Gemini AI and Brisk Teaching.
1. I went to Gemini AI, PhotoStory GEM option. Once I was there, I gave Gemini the following prompt: "Create a Photostory for Y9 students of Spanish, in Spanish, using the vocabulary in the attached document. Make sure the story is engaging for 13 year old students".
2. I opened the storybook so it showed on my screen, and opened Brisk from my Chrome Google Extensions bar. Once Brisk was open, I clicked on "Create" and "Forms" and I used the following prompt: "Create a reading comprehension quiz (20 multiple choice questions and two short answer questions) in English about the photostory that is showing on the screen".
Within seconds, Brisk created this Form. I thought it was pretty good!
3. As I want to support my students when carrying out the activity, I clicked on "Boost Activity" "Tutoring Option" in Brisk. This option makes the whole difference!! Once clicked, Brisk creates a task, which you can just share with your class, where the students carry out the previous Reading Comprehension Quiz, but now, with the help of a virtual Tutor which will guide them through the process.
The final activity to share with students, using "Boost Activity" in Brisk, looks like this.
The whole process took minutes!!!
Overall, I am very happy with the result: The Storybook is engaging and looks like a book!! I can exploit the text, traditionally, while sharing the link with my students in GoogleClassroom and then expect students to work independently with Forms and having the Tutoring option for help.
This blopost Part 3 is all about Retrieval of vocabulary and structures in the Structured Practice of our learning journey. When I think of Structured Practice after the Modelling stage, I think of receptive and productive practice. Receptive Structed Practice consists of students getting exposed to the vocabulary and structures we have modelled in the previous stage in a listening and reading format, but still not expecting students to produce language themselves. Productive Structed Practice will consist of tasks expecting students to produce language in an oral or written format with scaffolds, mainly, through the use of translation from English into target language or by the use of prompts that will encourage students to practice the language we want to focus on.
Passive Structured Practice
At this stage, it can be really difficult not to end up doing the same types of tasks over and over again. Similarly, it can be very timed consuming creating new listening and reading material to base our activities/tasks on.
That's why the use of Artificial Intelligence can be vital at this stage as it will allow us to create multiple texts, on given vocabulary, to be exploited in the classroom. It is also important to make it clear that any listening and reading tasks should not be based, purely, on reading/listening test comprehension questions, but these should be an opportunity to work with the language (meaning and form) to help students to embed new structures into their long term memory, reading/listening for learning not testing.
Using Twee to create multiple texts
Twee is a free website that allows teachers to create a text based on specific vocabulary/structures and subsequent different types of questions, which we can easily modify, such as Fill in the gaps, Multiple Choice answers etc..
However, the best asset of Twee is to be able to create the texts in different formats: for example, in the format of a funny dialogue or funny story. The key is to allow students to have access to the vocabulary we want them to embed in many different ways. Twee will also allow you to create activities based on Youtube videos, for Alevel students, vocabulary, or writing tasks. Once the texts are created, we can choose to use Twee activities or create our own ones, based on "form" as well as meaning. Some activities that we can create with the given texts are:
Asking students to identify specific words/expressions/tenses or grammatical points in the text.
Asking students to translate parts of the texts.
If several texts are created, Twee will allow us to create Narrow Reading activities easily: comparing the differences between 2 or more texts.
Asking students to infer meaning from specific words/structures in the text.
Asking students to turn the text from present to past or future tenses.
Asking students to focus on collocations of words, seeing words in context and create own sentences.
Of course, the texts we create can also be used in the Fluency Stage as model texts on what students could write themselves!
Using Diffit to spice up your texts
Once we created a text with Twee, we can use Diffit to format it and transfer it into Slides/ PowerPoint but also into Forms. I love the latter possibility. Diffit, will create questions based on a given text, that was created with Twee and will turn it directly into a Forms activity. Once in Forms, we can modify the questions by focusing, again, on form, specific meanings etc.. but within a Form activity. I think this is great in order to retrieve the vocabulary we want students learn, aka, transfer to their long term memory, over and over again, in different formats: as a worksheet, in Slides/PPT and Forms.
Using Vocaraoo to personalise listening tasks
Once we have our texts created by Twee (we can also use Claude or ChatGPT) we can turn a text into sentences and exploit them as listening material by recording our voices with Vocaroo. Vocaroo is an old friend but it does the job! It will allow you to record your voice and share your recorded audiofile directly, with a unique URL (which expires within 3 months), or download your audio into a MP3 file to be used over and over again on different activities:
Dictation/fill in the gaps dictation/ fill in the gaps without the gaps dictation.
Transcription type of tasks: write down exactly what you hear in English or Target language.
Correct the mistakes in given translations from an audio.
Matching halves of sentences
Putting sentences in order making up a full paragraph, which students can then translate or work from a reading point of view.
To make the experience more real, I ask my students to bring headphones to our lessons, so they can carry out these activities individually at their own pace. This works wonders at KS3 too!
Using Vidnoz to create video/listening material with avatars
This is my favourite site. In the past I have used Synthesia for this type of activities but in September I came across Vidnoz, which is so much easier to use. Vidnoz allows us to create a video, within 5 minutes, with a chosen avatar from the site. We can choose a video template, an avatar, the language we want to practise, the voice and finally we can just copy and paste the texts we created with Twee to be turned into audio. We can decide the speed we want our avatar to talk and a MP4 video will be created within 5 minutes. You are allowed to use 3 minutes per day for free, which I think it is enough as videos, should not exceed the 2 minute length, to avoid fatigue. Once created, we can download it or we can upload it into our own Youtube channel to share more easily. Once you have the audio/video material, it is great to carry out, again, lots of audio tasks:
Fill in the gaps
Transcriptions of the whole video
Rearranging the transcript in the correct order
Spotting all the verbs in a particular tense
Using Google Earth to spice up reading tasks
Another app that can really help us to do reading/translation tasks with a twist, is Google Earth. Why not ask students to go on a virtual journey around Madrid, Paris, Barcelona or Berlin showing them the main landmarks while we ask them to translate specific texts/sentences? Again, this is a fantastic way to retrieve vocabulary in an interactive way! Once you create your project, by choosing your landmarks, your pictures and editing the content (the text you want students to translate, work on) you can share it as a slide show. Students will be taken to the specific landmarks, they can complete the tasks and have a walk around Barcelona, Paris or Berlin!
Passive structured practice is key to establish a very good foundation for students to be able to use the language. It should not be rushed and AI is great to help us create interactive material swiftly and interactively.
Happy Easter everyone! I thought I would share with you a short post on how to use AI to create Google Forms Quizzes in seconds, using the Chrome Extension Brisk Teaching, which you can download from the Chrome Web Store here. I heard about this extension from Joe Dale, guru of all things technology and languages, and inspired by his brief, I thought of making it work to practise the productive skills of Writing and Speaking with my current Y11 students, once they are back from their Easter Break.
Brisk Teaching is very intuitive and very easy to use. Once it is downloaded as an extension, make sure you pin it in your Google Task Bar.
Brisk can create a wide range of tasks, based on any web text showing in your screen, this could be a website, a google doc, a google slide etc.. I have just explored the "Create" feature properly, but the extension also has a " Give Feedback" feature which will create automatic feedback, after you give a rubric and/or what you want to focus on, on a given text. This could be really useful when marking Y13 long essays or for History/English teachers.
However, I just focussed on "Create". This is what I did after downloading the extension:
1. I opened a google doc where I had lots of sample of questions in Spanish and English to help students prepare for the oral exam.
2. I clicked on the brisk icon on my task bar and the extension opened up at the bottom of my screen, as the picture above.
3. I clicked on "create" and then "Quiz", which opened the following menu:
4. I change the language to "in Spanish". This is great, as my text had questions in Spanish and English but the app, ignored all the English input and just focussed in the Spanish questions.
5. In the box "what should the quiz cover?" I pasted the questions from my document that I wanted the quiz to be based on, I started with those referring to Theme 1 in the AQA GCSE syllabus.
6. I ignored the grade, and chose "long answer" instead of "Multiple choice", as well as "20 questions" (that is the maximum) from the following box.
7. Brisk then, will ask you if you want your quiz in Google Forms or in a Google Doc, this is useful if you just want to create a quiz for a worksheet. I chose Forms and that's it!
Brisk created a 20 question quiz, based on the questions I had pasted, in Spanish for students to write a paragraph. I just have to share the Quiz with my students and look at the responses. I carried the same process for Themes 2 and 3 and ended up with 3 quizzes covering potential questions for the forthcoming GCSE General Conversation oral exam.
How can I see this working?
The whole process to make the three quizzes took me around 4 or 5 minutes so I saved a good hour of work.
I want to use the quizzes for my students to carry out as a self-testing mechanism, where they can open the form and write, without looking at any notes, anything they can on the given question. Great to practise oral and writing skills.
I am planning to go to Exampro, choose writing exam bullet points from the 90 words task and the 150 words task, save it to a Google Docs, and then use Brisk, to create a quiz based on the bullet points from different written tasks.
As a teacher, I can see my students responses and spot common mistakes which I can then address as a class, either from a Grammatical point of view, or form: have they covered our 5 Magic Powers? I can also focus on individual feedback to specific students.
The extension will work brilliantly to make a reading comprehension interactive quiz, in seconds, on a given website for A level. In fact, Brisk can also rewrite the content of a website to make it more accessible, a little bit like Diffit, which is excellent in the case of original native articles to work in the MFL classroom.
The "Give Feedback" feature as mentioned above, would be excellent to give feedback to students on something they have written in a google doc. Brisk even gives you statistics of the displayed text by telling you how long was spent writing it and how many pastes it had! so excellent to see if your students actually wrote an essay themselves or copied and pasted from different sources.
Overall, I think this is a fantastic FREE extension that can really reduce our preparation teaching time massively. Thanks, Joe!
