It was an absolute pleasure to present today twice in the Language Show 2021. Thank you everyone for your lovely comments, they really mean a lot! The actual webinars and presentations can be found below:
Showing posts with label Blended Learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blended Learning. Show all posts
Sunday, 14 November 2021
Language Show 2021 Webinars
Blending Learning: Giving Pupils superpowers!
Saturday, 26 June 2021
Planning a "Blended" curriculum: Give students wings!
You all know how much I love technology in the classroom, not because it is a gimmick but because it genuinely spices up my teaching, saves me lots of time and most importantly, it is a great tool to practise key structures, in many different ways, which equals to lots of retrieval practice and stickability, in all the stages of the learning journey. Finally, it allows me to take languages outside the classroom and make my lessons accessible to my students once they leave the classroom, in other words, it can give students Super Powers or like the old Red Bull advert says, it gives my students wings!
However, for Digital tools to have a positive impact in our students' learning, it is important to plan and make its use clear in the curriculum. In order to do that, as I mentioned in my previous blogpost on achieving Fluency, it is important to decide a platform to share with students and think backwards: What do we want our students to achieve by the end of each unit? How are we going to get there? and finally, which tools can we use at each stage of the process?
This is the journey:
a these are some of the tools I use at each stage:
MODELLING STAGE
Spiral and Mentimeter
I use both tools as an alternative to Mini Whiteboards in the classroom: I do translations both ways, dictations, delayed dictation, finishing the sentence or write a sentence with the given word (great for retrieval practice). A tutorial video on how to use Spiral can be found here
Screencasting
Screencasting, I use Loom, your modelling activities, and upload them into your own very Youtube channel, is a great way to practise Modelling. Of course, I do modelling in face to face lessons with my students, however, I love the possibility of using my own Youtube videos as listenings, dictations and translation as homework tasks. This is a clear example of how technology allows you take your lesson outside the classroom! Modelling and listening/practise pronunciation has never been easier! This is an example video
Bitmojis
Bitmojis are a great way to carry out modelling activities! I can make my Bitmoji talk and create multiple listening comprehension activities based on this: Fill in the gaps, Questions/Answer, full transcriptions etc.. I use PhotoSpeak on my iPhone to create the talking effect. Once the video is created and uploaded unto my Youtube channel, I can create a MS Forms task with it, add it to a LearningApps activity or just embed it into my OneNote with the activities I want my students to carry out. I love creating my own Speaking Bitmoji as a listening activity as I can speak faster, slower etc.. to meet the needs of my students.
For a post on how to use Bitmojis creatively in the classroom, visit this Blogpost. with a tutorial from the amazing Joe Dale. This is an example of my Bitmoji Speaking on Relationships for my Y10 class.
Ths site is amazing for Modelling!!! It was created by the talented Marting Lapworth, creator of TaskMagic and Textivate and it is based on Gianfranco Conti's MARS EARS type of activities with Sentence Builders. You can create your own activities or use the premium ones based on prepopulated Sentence Builders on the site. I use the site for face to face teaching with my students, but especially to help pupils memorise our Sentence Builders in a engaging way. For more information on this site, visit its Blog
AWARENESS-RISING AND CONTROLLED PRACTICE
Flippity
I love Flippity for fun drilling practice of my Sentence Builders with elements of Fluency as I demonstrate on this video tutorial
I also use Flippity with Manipulatives and as a listening activity, you can even insert your Bitmoji video there too! Check out this example. Overall, it is a great way to have a Blended Learning experience!
LearningApps
One of my absolutely favourites! This tool will allow you to create many different type of online activities which will help students memorise those important Sentence Builders and practise the language in a controlled and fun way! Here there's a tutorial video on how to exploit this free tool in the classroom.
All my LearningApps activities can be found here
Wheel of Names
Another of my classic activities for Blended Learning. I explain how I exploit and milk this tool in this Video Tutorial.
Quizlet, Memrise, Blooket and Carousel Learning.
These vocab learning platforms are great tools to practise the language and help students memorise Sentence Builders. I use Memrise with KS3 and Quizlet with KS4. I always link each of my Sentence Builders to at least 3 Quizlet or Memrise courses with around 10 chunks in them. Carousel Learning is also a great way to practise translations and carry out Retrieval Practice. I love Blooket as it allows me to upload my Quizlet courses so, from one activity a get two interactive tasks!
Quizizz
A quiz tool which I maximise by asking students to produce long answers to oral questions before we carry out oral practice in class. A type of warming up task! I also use it as an alternative tool for listening practice. I explain how in this video Tutorial.
SPONTANEITY/ROUTANISATION/AUTONOMY STAGE
Genially
Great for Escape Rooms and especially, BoardGames to practise open ended questions or specific structures.
Tip: Plan in advance with your team how you can exploit Genially and divide the work by deciding, within your team, who could create which activities on different topics. I also love using Genially to practise Exam skills in a relaxed way, even with ALevels! An example can be found here.
Deck Toys
Deck toys is the not so known app and it is fantastic! I use it to create Scape Rooms with all levels, including Y13/Y11 and exam skills. I love it, because I can also include Quizlet courses here. For a blogpost on how to exploit Deck Toys use in the classroom, click here.
All my DeckToys activities can be found here.
Flipgrid
Great for oral presentations! I love this app as students can cover their face or even do screencasting. I also like the fact that I can enter some rubrics to mark their work.
Padlet
Another classic! I use it for collaborative work but also to showcase what students can write about from memory at the end of the learning journey, so the whole class can see each other's entries and learn from each other. I also use Padlet as a revision guide at GCSE. A post on how to do that can be found here.
Of course there are more tools! This is just a summary of my favourite mainly FREE ones! This is language, The Language Gym, Textivate and Languagenut are also some of my favourite ones at the Practice Stage too.
The key point is to plan, when designing the curriculum, how and where these tools could be used in the classroom to give students WINGS!
A presentation on these ideas, which I carried out for Languagenut can be found here
Saturday, 19 June 2021
From Structured Production to Fluency
I have decided to write a short post on the trickiest and most difficult stage of the language learning journey: the transition from structured production, where students practise the structures and chunks in our Sentence Builders, to spontaneous output, where the students can produce such structures freely and, most importantly, creatively by manipulating the chunks and applying grammatical rules.
What is fluency?
Before I show my strategy, I would like to define what fluency means for me in the context of a secondary school setting, with limited curriculum time and pressures from external exams.
Fluency does not mean to be able to speak freely on any topic, as a nearly bilingual person would do. That’s another interpretation of fluency, which, hopefully we can reach at some point, normally towards the end of Year 13 and in some cases by the end of Y11.
In my context, fluency means that my students can reproduce in speaking or writing format, unaided, from memory, the structures we have practised on a given topic and in the case of intermediate learners, to start combining Sentence Builders from past topics and applying grammar freely to express their own opinions and saying what they want! In this sense, my Year 7s can be fluent when talking/writing about Free Time for example, which is hugely motivating.
Students start creating schemata in their long term memory with the studied Sentence Builders on different topics, creating a web of fluencies/schemata which relate to each other, allowing them to manipulate language and combine key structures and vocabulary, such as suelo, me gusta, me gustaría que… fuera/ si tuviera la oportunidad, etc… and apply grammatical rules, in new contexts, becoming creative with the language, to reach, little by little, the more general definition of fluency, which for me would mean the true internalisation of the grammatical system and a big corpora of vocabulary/structures, which can be reproduced by the brain, automatically, to create utterances and which, as I said, in my experience, starts occurring by the end of Y11 or Y13, if not later!
It is liberating then, to say to my Y7 you are fluent in Spanish on this topic and as you become fluent with other topics too and start applying the grammar and combining structures more freely, you will become a truly fluent speaker of Spanish in any given topic. But your first step is there!
How to achieve fluency?
In my experience, it is essential to have a clear SoW and learning path for students. That's why I always advise teachers to plan backwards. Start by deciding as a team, what outcome/ model text you would like your students to be able to produce by the end of a topic or unit, making sure that you incorporate structures and grammar from past topics/sentence builders, retrieving key structures in new contexts.
Once that is decided, design the Sentence Builders based on the vocabulary/grammar needed for your students to reach your final outcome; and reflect on the activities you, as a department, are going to use to help your students at each stage of their learning journey within a topic, from Modelling, going through Structured Production to reach Spontaneity/Creativity. Having a list of these activities in a given SoW can be extremely useful for a team, see the second picture below.
Do not expect Fluency/Spontaneity/Creativity to happen spontaneously without careful planning and a clear structure. Spontaneity or the EARS part of the learning journey, using Gianfranco Conti's nomenclature, needs to be planned and structured and it relies on a robust implementation of the two previous stages of learning (MARS). Move too fast, and the last stage will not happen! hence, why it is so difficult to achieve in a secondary school setting, although not impossible!
Strategies to achieve fluency
Have a “less is more” approach, specially at KS3, so that you avoid cognitive overload. Start increasing the amount of topics/grammar to cover in a given year, as students become more mature. In our case, we teach 3 topics in Y7, 4 in Y8 and 4/5 (as we study a film as a topic) in Y9. You can see this in my KS3 SoW, which you can find here.
Retrieval Practice and Recycling of key structures, called Universals by Gianfranco Conti, or high impact expressions by me, is key. This requires careful planning of the SoW, and the material to include in your Sentence Builders. These should incorporate content vocabulary but also a list of key structures and high frequency words, recycled in different Sentence Builders, so when given a new Sentence Builder, around 20 or 30% of the structures are already known to students. They will feel motivated too. When deciding your activities, for the Modelling and Structured Production stages, make sure you incorporate vocabulary from previous topics. Retrieve past topics and LEARNED STRUCTURES, CONSTANTLY. it is what I call EMBEDDED RETRIEVAL PRACTICE. A blog post on this can be found here.
Case example:
My Y10 students studied problems/accidents during the topic of holidays and they learned the structure "un dia iba a/quería + infinitive" (salir con mis amigos, ir a la playa, which allowed them to recycle vocabulary from Free Time anyway) "cuando de repente, me picó una medusa/ tuve un accidente con el móvil/ me caí al suelo/a la piscina etc...". Students learned these structures extremely well via Structured Production activities and could produce them spontaneously when we did the topic. I thought that was a nice way to incorporate a story, which could be funny so memorable, as Vincent Everett explains in his blog, to their GCSE repertoire. Consequently, in subsequent topics, we always incorporated a problem or an accident that happened to them when in school, when working at the weekend, when they met their best friend. Every time we revisit this subtopic, I incorporate new key structures to the problem, "le dije" "me dijo" " ese dia estaba contento porque había ganado una competición de música". All my students now, can narrate, fluently, a little accident/problem in many different contexts using key vocabulary, thanks to constant revisiting of the stuctures!
Recycle of all the activities you used in the Structured Production stage but with a twist. In the previous learning stage, I tend to use many translation type of activities, either by using Battleships, Information Gap activities, Oral Ping-Pong and especially LOTS of classic BOARD GAMES, which at the moment I do via Genially Templates and those produce by the talented Marie Allirot. A link to Marie's Boardgames as she showed in the ALLLondon Show & Tell in June can be found here.
I use these templates all the time! However, at this final stage, instead of expecting students to translate a sentence, the boardgames tasks will require students to create utterances from a given word, for example, or answer open ended questions on a given topi, always incorporating questions from past topics too, which force students to retrieve language/structures from their long term Memory.
Flippity and Wheel of Names are also brilliant ways to develop fluency in this way! firstly in writing via mini white boards and then in pairs by testing each other. I explain how I do this in these two youtube Videos of mine:
How to maximise Wheel of Names (via Blended Learning) for Spontaneous Production. In this video example, I use translations but for spontaneity, I would use open ended questions or the beginning of a sentence they have to finish, or a topic students need to write or speak about, for a given time. Video link here
How to maxime the the use of Flippity (via Blended Learning) for Spontaneous Production. Video link here
Other activities that work for Spontaneous Practice:
Oral presentations via Flipgrid. This can be very powerful if students feel confident about the language and the structures they need to use.
Use of Padlet, where students write from memory what they remember from a particular topic. See example below from my Y9 students. I also find that trying spontaneous production in writing before doing it orally, helps a lot!
3,2,1. Speak on a topic for 3 minutes, then change partner and do it for 2 minutes then for 1 minute! This activity works extremely well combined with Speed Dating!
Any Dice game linked to a topic: have six topics on the board numbered, if you get a 1 you must talk about that topic for a set period of time. I love Vincent Everett's idea, where students work in pairs and scribble in a piece of paper while their partner speaks and stop when their partner stops talking. The person who managed to speak the longest, more scribbling in the sheet, is the winner! This is his blogpost where he explains this activity. I tried this a couple of weeks ago and it worked brilliantly! All students wanted to speak for long.
Group talk like Greg Horton beautifully explained in the ALL June conference last week. Get students to work in groups of 3/4. Set some questions on the board, mainly opinions on topics, and students must have a conversation, agreeing and disagreeing with each other on the given topics. This works really well if, previously "small talk" phrases have been taught to students such as: estoy de acuerdo, pero estás loco! , se te va la olla, de ninguna de las manera, pues para decir verdad, yo diría que, ¿de verdad?, tienes razon, no tenía ni idea!
Piedra, Papel, Tijera (Stone, paper, scissors) where the winner needs to answer a question or talk on a topic. This can be combined to 1,2,3 or the Scribble Vincent's idea.
Use of Flippity: the Randomizer in pairs. I am going to use this next week with my Y10s in preparation for their oral exam: students click on the randomizer and must answer the given question from column one, using the structure, some how, from column 2. Example here.
Finally! Practising questions!!! if we want students to be fluent, they will need to ask questions. This can be done, easily, with Flippity and the Randomizer using question words that students need to create to find out things about the life of the teacher, for example.
Fluency is not easy, but if it is planned effectively it can take place as early as Y7!!!
Saturday, 8 May 2021
15 Onenote Tips to maximise your students' learning experience and SAVE YOU TIME!
I love Onenote. It is such as great tool that allows me to carry out blended learning seemingly, saves me time, allows me to connect with my students easily and to bring my teaching to the 21st century.
Most importantly, Onenote helps me take my subject, MFL, outside the classroom and maximise the learning experience of my students outside my four teaching walls!
Ultimately, Onenote contributes to develop independent learning skills in my pupils, my ultimate goal!
On this post, I am assuming, you know how to create a Class Notebook within Onenote and you have one already set up. This post will focus on how to use your Onenote once this has been created by sharing with you my 15 top tips.
1. Think carefully on how you are going to structure your Content Library.
Ideally, this should be a departmental approach. How many sections are you going to create? What will be their names? This should match your teaching methodology and Schemes of Learning/Work. In my case, I have a section for each topic I teach called: Lessons + name of topics, another section for Grammar, Blooklets, Sentence Builders, Revision Work and Subscriptions to external sites, such as Languagenut, This is Language, The Language Gym or my Quizlet folder. See my example below.
Remember that the Content Library cannot be edited by students but anything in it can be seen by them, so if you do not want to release the content of a lesson, I would advise you to store it in the Teacher Only section of your Onenote, just below the Content Library.
2. Have a page for each week's lessons. Within my lesson sections, I create a page for a week's worth of lessons rather than a page per lesson. Sometimes there is too much content so I create a second page for an individual lesson and make it a subpage of the main week. This way, it is easy to find your lessons and it minimises your work considerably! I store my lessons in the Teacher Only section and paste it in the Content Library when I want to distribute them to students.
3. Have a template for your lessons which you can store in the Teacher Only section. In my case the template includes a picture of my Interactive Classroom, which I created using Canva, which personalises my Onenote and makes it more colourful and attractive!
4. Populate the sections of your Content Library, little by little, with reference materials that support your subject, treating it as an area for the ultimate independent learning experience for your students! What will your students need to support their learning and provide scaffolding? In my case it is grammar explanations, links to sample oral questions, oral booklets, translation booklets, our Sentence Builders with direct links to Quizlet courses. Any materials/booklets you would give to students, can go here, including self-assessment areas! You will save lots of time and paper in photocopying! Think of this section as the door to Independent Learning and teach your students to use it and become independent. TOP TIP What about using this area for your own video tutorials on modelling or explaining a difficult concept? You can use LOOM.
5. Use your Onenote as your teaching planning tool! I don't use a Teacher Planner anymore, as my lesson plans are in my Onenote: per week, per group, with all links to PPTs, Word Documents, external links to quizzes, Youtube Videos... It saves me time as all is in one place, which anyone in the department can share, so you can reuse each other's resources by tweaking content to match individual classes. Most importantly, you can reuse lessons from previous years too just by copying and pasting your old pages.
6. Use Page Colour when populating your page and different fonts/bolding/highlighting bits to make your lesson content attractive to learners. I also, advise you to use the Tags option on Onenote for students/you to tick tasks which have been accomplished, or classify tasks within a particular skill. MAKE YOUR LESSON ATTRACTIVE!
7.Remember that any Microsoft file will embed into your Onepage, as well as some external files, such as Genially or Youtube videos. That will make your lesson interactive and will allow your students to access such material nicely during your lesson and outside the classroom!
In the case of URL based material, such as MS Forms or Youtube videos, just copy and paste the URLs into your Onenote. In the case of MS files, just Go to Insert, file, choose your file and then, "Upload to Onenote and insert link".
TOP TIP Take advantage of this opportunity and think outside the box! You can also Insert external Links, as well as links within pages in your Onenote (remember the Content Reference Library?), so an opportunity to think outside the box: How can you use other external apps such as LearningApps, Flippity, Wheel of Names, Quizziz or Genially to maximise learning? I add links to all these apps directly to my Onenotes. I explain how I exploit these apps in blended learning in this blogpost.
8. Use the Snipping Tool app to select sections of a textbook, website etc.. that you want students to work on and paste the content onto Onenote. I use this all the time and it is extremely useful for a particular reading or listening activity!
9. TOP TIP!! If you want students to respond to questions, etc.. Create a Table for them to write answers on. Look at my example above, where I pasted a section of a digital textbook into Onenote with Snipping Tool, for a reading task, and then created a Table for students to write their answers in. I always change the colour of my Table to make it stand out!
10. Do not reinvent the wheel! Use all your PDFs, Word Worksheets interactively in Onenote. For that, just insert them but, instead of choosing the option shown in Tip 7, choose "Insert as printout". This will insert a copy of your document as an image (an image per page). Once this is done, right click on your image and set it as background. That way, students can either write on it directly, with a digital pen, or just type their answers! This is very useful in the case of Exampro materials, where students just type in their answers directly into the worksheet.
11. Give feedback by Inserting an Audio, or ask students to give you oral answers to questions! This will save you lots of time when Marking!!
TOP TIP use the Windows+V option to access your clipboard of copied images when marking, which allows you to find your recent copied feedback stickers, for example, and just paste them when marking, without having to go to the Teacher Only section to find the sticker you need! Why don't you try to use your Bitmoji as a sticker for Feedback? See example above too. 
This is my presentation from a TILT Webinar a delivered last March on Feedback using Onenote, with lots of tips!
13. Distribute your pages to your students weekly, that's why I tend to create a page of lessons per week, so I only need to distribute one page per teaching set. This means that students get a version of your distributed page in their own section for them to edit and work on.
TOP TIP if you make a mistake or change your lesson plan, you can delete a distributed page easily and you can also distribute pages to particular students!
14. Use the Review Student Work function when marking. This is under Class Notebook on the top of your onenote and it allows you to go through work really quickly! It only works with pages that you have distributed, not created by students, so if you want to use this function, make sure you distribute the page where you want students to work. In my case, it will be their lesson page.
15. Finally! When setting up your Class Notebook, think about the sections you want to see in your students' areas. Structure this for them and explain to them how they are going to work, which sections to use for what and the rationale behind! In my case, I have a section for each topic (lessons), a section for Sentence Builders and a section for Prep/Homework. Students can always create their own independent sections, which I encourage them to do, but with a rationale. However, you can only distribute pages to previously created sections by you.
For a video demonstrating these tips this is my Onenote Tutorial
ENJOY ONENOTE AND THE BLENDED LEARNING EXPERIENCE IT PROVIDES!
Thursday, 8 April 2021
Blended Learning made easy
Following my presentation yesterday in the UKedChat Conference 2021 on how to have impact lessons via Digital Tools, I have started creating a series of short videos demonstrating how I exploit a Digital Tool in my lessons in a blended learning scenario.
If your students do not bring their own device to school, remember that many of these activities can be carried out with a mobile. I know there are rules about mobile use in the classroom, but after the digital revolution we are living, I firmly believe that mobiles should be allowed in lessons when it is required by the teacher, maybe that's something you can talk to your SLT. We have certainly changed rules regarding using mobiles in lessons in specific scenarios.
MOST OF THESE ACTIVITIES WILL TAKE YOU ONLY 5 OR 10 MINUTES TO PREPARE!!!
Blended Learning Demo 1 How to maximise Flippity
Blended Learning Demo 3: How to use Boardgames with Genially
Blended Learning Demo 4: Quiz time! Quizizz and Carousel Learning
Blended Learning Demo 5: How to maximise Flippity with the randomizer
Saturday, 12 December 2020
Embedded retrieval practice: the next level
You may think I am obsessed with retrieval practice but it is so important in order to keep students motivated and make progress that a big percentage of my lesson time is dedicated to this.
A few weeks ago I read an article by Marc Enser on some research on retrieval practice. In the article Marc explained how two departments in their school (History and Geography) wanted to see the impact of retrieval practice in their students’ results. They used quizzes in their lessons for this. Both departments got an improvement in their test results but Geography’s were much higher. When they analysed the data and tried to explain this discrepancy, they discovered that History used to do a quiz in each lesson from previous knowledge but not related to the content of the actual lesson. Geography, on the other hand, did also a quiz but this was embedded in what students were learning in the lesson, hence, helping students to consolidate and embed learning in this long-term memory more successfully than the History department. This is powerful and it relates to my own practice.
Retrieval practice must be embedded with new content constantly so language becomes automatized and students can transfer structures freely from different contexts!
All activities done in lessons with new material should include structures from old topics applied to these new contexts while also making reference to the content from past topics. Planned activities and homework tasks should give students opportunities to practise past content as a matter of fact: When asking students to practice sentences on school topic, why not including sentences from holidays and, most importantly, adapting those structures from holidays into the new topic of school? When planning activities for Y11 students on the topic of festivals, why not including also content from work, free time and holidays? why not applying structures seen in the topic of free time "juego al fútbol desde hace 3 años" in this new topic "trabajo de canguro desde hace 3 meses"?
Digital tools for embedded retrieval practice
In this post I wrote, extensively, about different apps that I use for retrieval practice but I would like to add a few which I have used since while still mentioning the old ones!
Spiral.ac
This is the new kid on the block in my teaching! Introduced to me by Laura Causer during the Show and Tell Webinar of the Language Show, this tool has revolutionised my retrieval practice strategy and saved me time!!!!
Spiral is basically, like Wooclap or Mentimeter, an interactive response tool. What’s the difference with the two previous apps? You need zero preparation if you use the QuickFire light option!
Basically, you open an account, create a class (you don’t need names), select the QuickFire light option from the home menu, select your class and share a special URL and code with your students (these will also be the same for that class every time you launch the QuickFire, so my students have bookmarked it). Similar to Kahoot, Mentimeter etc....
Pupils log in with that special code (not additional login required) and you will start seeing their names appearing on your screen. When you are ready to ask questions to consolidate and retrieval previous knowledge, you just press the green go button!
Students then start writing their answers to your question, which will appear on the screen, only when you click on “reveal answers”. This option is great as students cannot copy each other and you can wait to reveal answers once everyone has submitted their input. To increase pace, I encourage early birds, either to check their answers or to extend them so they do not sit down doing nothing while partners submit answers, great for differentiation too!
At this point you may select “show names” too or “hide the names”: I find this little action powerful as sometimes you may want to give confidence to students who tend to make mistakes and you may decide not to show their names until a later stage.
However, when you decide to do so, the students’ names will appear with their answers on the screen! Big plus from Mentimeter or Wooclap and students can also modify/ improve their answer if you prompt them to do so. Great tool for feedback too.
Spiral is basically an interactive mini whiteboard and it is ideal for hybrid situations when you have students online and students in the classroom! Also no need to sanitise mini whiteboards after single use! In action it looks like the pictures below:
LearningApps
In my previous post I explained in lots of detail all the activities that can be achieved with this tool. The golden rule is to use these activities blended in the learning experience and incorporating structures and vocabulary from previous studied topics! Below there’s a how to video guiding you how to use the tool.
Flippity
Another great free tool for Retrieval Practice! The randomiser and Random Name picker are great tools for retrieval practice! Instructions are straightforward and you will need a Google account.
Extended uses of how to use Flippity can be found in this Post.
Quizizz
This tool allows you to create personalised interactive quizzes, incorporating sound too so great to revise oral questions while also checking listening comprehension!
Carousel Learning
This is another of the new tools I have started to use in the last month. Designed by Adam Boxer, creator of Retrieval Roulettes, which Julia Morris talked about during the Show and Tell Webinar in the Language Show, Carousel Learning is also a free tool which allows you to upload a spreadsheet with as many items (Qs) as you want to include, and topics. As my input, I use short sentences that students need to translate into Spanish.
In your spreadsheet you must include your question (English sentence for me), the answer (Spanish translation) and the topic it refers to. There is a template in the site to get the setting right! Once this spreadsheet is uploaded, Carousel Learning allows you to create specific quizzes on particular topics, which you can rotate and assign to different classes. There are also many quizzes questions from the learning community for you to use too!
Why do I love Carousel learning? Because students do not get immediate feedback but they are presented with the right answers at the end of their quiz. Students then must decide if they were correct or not. I think this feature is extremely powerful for independent learning and making students take ownership for their own mistakes and improvement!!! What did I get right? What did I get wrong? Why? And look for help! Although it needs training!
Jane Basnett has created this súper video on how to set up a quiz on Carousel learning. It is extremely informative and well explained so a must watch!
Genially
I love this tool!! There are many talented Genially people in the UK such as Marie Allirot or Julia Morris who actually make their own genially activities from scratch!
However, I am lazy, so I use the templates provided in the gamification section! You have many interactive free games such as Snakes and Ladders or Escape Rooms, which you only need to modify to fit your retrieval practice input! I love genially because through games students reinforce those key structures! Genially also embeds smoothly into Onenote, which I use for my lessons, although you can just share your genially game with your classes the way you want to!
You can also embed your LearningApps to the genially game questions! How cool is this?
How to use Genially video (using the app templates)
Wheel of names
One of my favourite apps! For an extensive explanation on how to use Wheel of names in the classroom and in a blended learning situation have a look at this post.
To find out how Wheel of Names works, have a look at the video below:
How to use Wheel of Names video
Textivate
Let’s not forget the basics! This is not free but it is brilliant for retrieval practice! I love every feature of it! It is very affordable. It is an improved online version of Taskmagic: same creator Martin Lapworth.
Example of Textivate activity based on Tourism and Transport (embedding principle).
Other tools you can explore!
BLOOKET
This is a tool which allows you to create your own little games, which you then share with students. Students get tokens and rewards for completing the games. In my opinion, more suitable for KS3. My only reservation is that the games are based on multiple choice, which, I, particularly, am not keen on. However, still a great tool to revise those key structures, especially similar ones in different tenses!
WORDWALL
Similar to LearningApps but you can only create a limit of activities unless you go premium! You do not have the embedded audio facility, which is a shame! However, the activities are very eye-catching and attractive for young learners!
GIMKIT
Many people are using this! It is not free and I have not used it myself yet! The Intruders game seems like a hit on twitter and many people have recommend it to me. I need to explore this one!
DECK TOYS (thanks to Jimena Licitra for this)
This was introduced to me only a few weeks ago by the amazing Jimena Licitra and it has lots of potential! However, it will require some time to create your resources. This app allows you to create interactive learning paths for your students! It looks very, very powerful and engaging but you will need to dedicate some time to it! You can have some free decks, or learning paths for free but after that there is a premium to pay. You can also use decks created by others! If structured well, this should be an extremely engaging tool for topic revision and retrieval practice of key structures. Watch this space!
So, retrieval practice is important, very important. So important that it should be present in every lesson you do by embedding content and structures from all topics all the time. Using these tools allows me to do so in a motivating and engaging way! However, do not get me wrong, retrieval practice can be done without technology.
Embedded Retrieval Practice must take place at all stages of learning, ALL THE TIME and it must be planned thoroughly via meaningful activities, especially in the Practice Stage of learning!
Sunday, 15 November 2020
Language Show 2020 Presentations and Webinars
Thank you so much for the feedback I received today from both of my webinars in the Language Show. It has been amazing to read your comments, contributions and ideas! We learn from each other.
As promised the Webinars presentations and Videos are below.
Motivation and engagement in the MFL classroom: let's play, let's speak!
YOUTUBE LINK ON MOTIVATION
Stickability beyond the classroom: delivering high impact lessons via the use of IT tools.
Saturday, 7 November 2020
How to Blend Learning?
Blended learning, we have definitely heard this term over and over again since the first lockdown when schools were shut, as the future of education.
What is Blended Learning?
The way I see it, Blended Learning means that students learn through the combination of face-to-face and on-line teaching methods, all blended into one, to maximise their learning experience. In other words, learning occurs via traditional methods, such as worksheets, Question and Answer sessions, activities via a textbook or a worksheet, combined with the use of IT tools which, via careful planning, help students in their learning journey.
When I think about Blended Learning, I think about the different spaces where learning takes place and the different ways in which such learning can occur.
Why different places for learning?
Students do not just learn in the classroom, they may learn on the bus, at home in their bedroom or during a school trip. They can access knowledge from any space, as long as they are doing a learning activity, like the school trip example, or, most importantly, have a device from which to carry out learning! That's why when blending learning, I think carefully, where students can access different activities.
Why different ways of learning?
Practice is key in learning and making progress. However it can be tedious to do such practice in just one way, say via worksheets using paper and a pen. This can be the case for young learners, who are bombarded with stimuli and immediate feedback experiences via technology at all times: you like a series, you binge it and watch it all! Accessing information and learning via videos, online images or collaborative tools can be extremely engaging and productive.
Blended Learning, allows me to take the learning experience outside the classroom if and when students or I choose to do so and teach in many different ways, which in the process, allows me to revisit content over and over again from different angles, without a feeling of repetition or dejá vu. This experience, in exchange, engages my students, makes them more independent, more involved in their learning process and, ultimately, makes their learning more in tune with their 21st century experience.
How to Blend Learning?
Planning a sequence of lessons:
- First of all, I would advise to have a vision of what you would like your students to achieve by the end of series of lessons and move backwards from there. For example, to be able to talk about their holidays last year.
- Secondly, think about what elements do your learners need to get there? This means structures, including vocabulary and grammar. A Sentence Builder with the potential sentences that students should be producing/understanding by the end of your sequence of lessons can be extremely powerful or just a model text.
- Finally, think about how are we going to take them there? What steps do we need to plan for the students to practise and embed our planned structures? It is, in this final step where we can blend learning!
Elements for blending learning
- Use an online platform with your students so that you can share your planned activities, aka, learning steps, with them: Google Classroom, Firefly, Onenote/Classnote, Teams are the most common platforms, I believe, schools are using.
- Plan the activities for your lessons and think, at each stage, which and how IT tools can assist you and your students to enhance the learning experience. For this I have a list of potential IT tools that I could use at any stage. You do not need to use them all but it is important that you are aware of them.
In my case my Blended Learning IT tools ready at my disposal are these:
In the centre I have Microsoft 365 as the core of my blended learning classroom:
Onenote
Teams (for remote teaching)
Onedrive
Flipgrid
Forms
Sway
Word/PPT
These main apps are supported by Firefly (our School Virtual Learning Platform) which I use for online libraries for my students, not class specific, and Smartboard Software for the delivery of in-class lessons.
Finally there is a wide range of apps and tools that I can use for my teaching and students' learning:
LearningApps, Quizlet, Wheel of Names, Flippity, Loom, Peardeck, Memrise, Genially, Quizizz, Edpuzzle, Padlet, Canva, Mentimeter, Wooclap, ClassroomScreen,Thinglink or Wordwall.
For ideas on how the different tools can support Sentence Builders and the learning experience, click on the following post.
For How to videos on how to use some of the apps above, click on the following post.
I use, Onenote (Class Notebook) to share the links to these online activities with my students, who need to bring their own device to my lessons. I share my lessons with students weekly. Consequently, students have access, via Onenote, to all worksheets we work with during lessons and to links which will take them to different interactive activities which need to be carried out during lessons or at home, for reinforcement, or as part of homework.
A normal set of lessons (3 in this case) looks like the example below on Onenote. As you can see there are classic activities such as Battleships (which I could photocopy if I want to) but also links to other interactive activities like Flippity or Wheel of names, to be carried out orally in pairs, or in writing. Reference materials, such as the formation of the past tense in Spanish, are easily shared this way too:
Students can also work collaboratively via the Collaboration space on Onenote or a Padlet or Google Document. This is great for brainstorming of ideas on a given topic.
Homework, may include a video, which can be embedded into Onenote, which I have previously recorded with Loom (screencasting) where students need to follow instructions and complete a series of activities directly on Onenote in the box supplied:
Homework can be oral practice, via the Insert Audio function on Onenote, which allows me to carry out a dictation, ask questions which students need to answer, or just repeat after me for pronunciation work. In the example below, students had to click on the Quizizz activity for practice, before listening to my questions which they had to answer using the audio insert on onenote:
By blending learning and having a platform (Onenote) to share my online activities, as well as worksheets, with my students, I can create Learning Libraries, with resources for specific classes to which students have access at all times, in all spaces. The resources will also include a wide range of activities using different tools. They are all under Content Library and are classified in different Tabs. See the example below from my Y11 Onenote:
The way I blend learning is by maximising the use of a wide range of online resources in the classroom, via Onenote.
Students can access their Onenote, and their interactive personalised activities in lessons but also in any other space (bus, home, library). The online, interactive tasks allow learners to practise key vocabulary and structures (sentence builders) in many different ways and shapes, making the learning experience innovative, catchy, memorable and sticky, just like the different social media platforms, so embedded in our students' lives, do! The difference is, that I use technology not just for entertaining the kids but to enhance their learning experience in all different ways and spaces!
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