Maximising AI: Using Gemini Storybook Gem and Brisk together

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".

I uploaded my Sentence Builder Booklet in PDF format, containing all the sentence builders learned by my students in Y7 and Y8.  Gemini created the following storybook, "El verano de nuestros sueños"

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.  

The NEW GCSE: It's all about RETRIEVAL. PART 4 PRODUCTIVE structured Practice and developing FLUENCY

Merry Christmas to all! What a term this has been! I hope you can now relax with your loved ones and enjoy the festive season. As I have now some time, I would like to complete the final part of my thoughts/strategies to tackle the new GCSE for MFL. Part 4 and the last one, is all about developing fluency in students via oral structured practice. I find this stage the most challenging one and, in my experience, only possible to achieve if the other stages have been carried out thoughtfully and in depth, which can be difficult given the curriculum time constraints we all face.  

Stage 4 is all about students being able to produce language via structured practice, mainly via the use of translations from English into Target Language, or prompts, expecting students to work from memory as much as possible. At this stage we create models of language that students, eventually, will be able to produce on their own as they become more and more fluent. 

This stage should be full of communicative activities/games, where there's a need to produce language. These are some of my old favourite tasks:

Oral Battleships

This old activity is always a winner! Students work in pairs and choose 8 boxes from the battleships grid randomly. I give students the prompts and they must create sentences to find out where their partner's chosen boxes or ships are.

Information Gap Activities

In any shape and form! Basically, any activity where students, working in pairs, have to exchange information to complete a task.  This can be done by asking each other questions to get specific answers, that students need, to complete a table, or just by exchanging information by translating sentences to each other. The important element for these activities is that we give students prompts or the sentences we wan them to produce and again, we expect them to translate such sentences from memory as much as possible!!

Board Games

Again, in any shape and form! Any game will be great, virtual or by using a classic board, dice and counters! Snakes and Ladders or No Snakes and Ladders, which is the same! Connect 4, Noughts and Crosses, Jumanlly etc.. work wonders. The idea is that when students are placed in a box, they produce target language orally responding to a particular prompt: an image, a sentence in English that they must translate, a word they must extend and put in a sentence etc.. 

I love digital games, so I use many games from Genially, which require hardly any preparation time.  Click here for an example. 

Flippity is also great for this: have you tried its new Connecto game? Click here for an example

The idea with these games is to create nearly real communicative situations basically the willingness to win the game and for that, a need to speak in the target language. As they become more and more confident with the covered material, we can exchange the prompts for questions and add time to the equation, so that students need to produce the language, quickly.

The same games/activities can be carried out by students several times but decreasing the time they have, to produce their answers: 2 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, so we start developing fluency. 

Wheel of names matched with "Stone, paper, scissors" is also a popular game: students spin the wheel then play "Stone, paper, scissors" and the winner translates the utterance that appear in the wheel. 

Writing Practice using Google Forms

Productive language does not only involve oral work, but it can also be written production. In fact, this can be a powerful task before doing extensive oral work.  To do this, Google Forms with open end questions can be an excellent alternative and to create them, we can use the Chrome Extension Brisk. 

Brisk is wonderful to help you create a Google Form based on a given set of questions. I created the following Blogpost explaining how to use Brisk in this way, step by step. Click here to have full access to instructions about how to use Brisk.  At this stage, I expect my students not to need prompts, so oral, open free questions are key at this stage, but in writing, so students can still think freely, at this stage. 

Writing Practice using Padlet

Padlet is another old friend. It is great, again, to develop fluency in students. I create a Padlet for a given topic, any type of Padlet works. 

Once created, go to "Settings" and then "Posts". Once in Posts, go to "Posts Fields". Create a post field for each question you want your students to write about in the Padlet when they add their entry. You can create as many Post fields as you want to! This means that when you share your Padlet with students and these click on the + button to add their entry, they will see the questions, you want them to answer in writing, one for post field, which you previously created. Students then press "publish" for their entry to be visible to you and all the other students. This is powerful to get inspired by others' answers/entries. 

See an example here

Using a tutor chatbot with Mizou

Finally, the ultimate fluency developer, Mizou. 

Mizou is a FREE AI chatbot generator. I started using Mizou last year with Year 11 students and it proved a great success for those students who were reluctant to practise their oral skills with me as they were too shy. Mizou allows you to create a personalised chatbot in minutes. Just click on "Build a chatbot" , then "Custom". 

Give your Chatbot assessment a title, for example: Practising questions on the topic of Technology. Then fill in the "AI Instructions". Be specific for example, for my Mizou practice on Technology my instructions were:

The students will practice their new GCSE oral exam with you. You will need to ask them the following 4 questions on the topic of Technology:

1 ¿Tienes un móvil? ¿Qué haces con tu móvil? 

2¿Cuál es tu red social favorita? ¿Por qué?  

3 ¿Qué peligros y ventajas tienen las redes sociales? 

4. ¿Cómo solías usar tu móvil en el pasado? 

Ask one question at the time. Ask the questions in Spanish but give feedback in English. Students should answer with accurate Spanish using opinions and reasons.

Give your AI assistant an image, Mizou will create one for you, after your description and give it a name. My AI assistant in Mizou is called Ana. Click on "more options" and type the welcome message that students will see when starting their session with Ana. Then type the "rules". My rules were:

Use the new MFL GCSE mark scheme for the speaking exam to give feedback

Students will answer in Spanish

Ask a question at the time in Spanish on the topic of Technology, starting with the questions given in the instructions.

When giving feedback, do it in English

Add a thumbnail on the topic of your questions and a short description. 

Try your Chatbot and if you are happy just launch it. Click on "Share with students". Mizou will ask you to start a session and will give you link to share with students. 

You can have a look at the final product here. 

The idea with Mizou is for students to develop their fluency with typical GCSE questions that they are familiar with from lessons. 

I hope you found these ideas useful, please, share your views and ideas by leaving your comments below. 

Making instant Google Form Quizzes with AI to practise the productive Skills (GCSE ORAL/WRITING EXAMS)

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!