Creative ways to practise writing, reading and translation skills: Google Earth

This week has been one of those weeks were more traditional activities and the latest cutting edge technology have merged to inspire me!  This morning I saw on Twitter a great writing game, shared by Erin Gray, called "Capture the flag"  to revise for the fast approaching GCSE writing exam. It goes like this: 

Divide your class in 6/8 teams. For the game you will need a set of coloured flags, say 12, per team.  Print your cards and stick them on the board, as shown by Erin on her twitter post picture: 

Give each team a list of typical GCSE questions/bullet points. Students, in teams, write a paragraph for each given question. Once their paragraph is written, they must come to the teacher who checks the paragraph for any mistakes and if correct, students are allowed to pick any flag belonging to any team from the board. If the paragraph is not correct, they must go back to their seats and correct it. 

At the end of the session, points are given to each coloured flag, (see picture below from Erin Gray posted on twitter) so the team with most points wins the game. As Erin points out, it is a mixture between a running translation activity and a group game with the add-on of practising writing skills!

I love the game as it is! Thank you, Erin. However, after attending the third webinar on Joe Dale's series on AI for MFL teachers, and being a BIG fan of Google Earth and Wheel of Names tasks, I was inspired to combine these two tools with Erin's concept into one activity. This is the result

Writing Quest around Barcelona using Google Earth and Wheel of Names

I created a project in Google Earth based on a Writing Quest around Barcelona. Inspired by Joe Dale, I used Chat GPT to suggest 10 famous landmarks in Barcelona and to provide me with a description of such places in Spanish at GCSE level. I added the places suggested by Chat GTP and their description information to my Google Earth project. 

Then, I went to Wheel of Names and created a wheel with the GCSE questions in relation to Theme 1 for AQA GCSE Spanish (it could have been any theme and I could have used Chat GPT to give me a suggestion of questions, but I had my own). I went back to my Google Earth project and added the link to my wheel of names, at the end of each landmark description. 

This is the result :  Google Earth Writing Quest around Barcelona 

It works like this:

1. Divide the class in 6/8 teams like the original Erin's game

2. Have the sets of coloured flags like Erin suggests, stuck on the board. One set per team.

2. Share the Google Earth link with students via Onenote or Google Classroom

3. Students in teams, you could this in pairs or threes too, open the Google Earth presentation, go to the different places and do two things: 

         a. Translate into English the description of the landmark they are seeing (Reading)

         b. Click on the Wheel of Names link, spin the wheel and write a big paragraph on the  selected question for Theme 1. They must do this without looking at notes. (Writing)

4. One member of the team must go to the teacher to check their writing is correct

5. If correct, like in Erin's game, they pick up a flag from the board from any other team. If mistakes are found, they must go back to their team and revise their paragraph.

6. They continue with the next landmark in the presentation.

I have included 10 landmarks, meaning, 10 translations and writing 10 paragraphs. The translations include nice, new vocabulary, which I will ask students/teams finishing early, to identify and add to their personalised Random Quizlets. 

The whole activity took me 10 minutes to design thanks to Chat GPT. The Wheel of Names can be reused in other retrieval practice tasks for self testing, either for writing or oral purposes. In fact I have a wheel of names for each AQA Theme for this purpose:

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 1

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 2

Wheel of names Sample Questions for Theme 3

The game, adding Google Earth Projects, adds a cultural important element: a virtual visit to Barcelona. If done periodically, you can show different cities where the target language is spoken! Students will need to speak in Spanish when talking among them: real purpose for the activity, which helps motivation!

I hope the idea is clear and thank you again, to Erin and Joe for their inspiration today!

The new, new kid on the Block (and it's here to stay): ChatGPT

I have not been blogging a lot recently, mainly because I have been busy decorating our new house in Oxford but also because I get inspiration from my students and at the moment I am not teaching, although actively looking for the right job for me. 

However, I got very, very excited with the last TILT webinar on Tuesday 21st February on ChatGPT (thank you to Helen Myers and Joe Dale for the series). I have been playing with it in hypothetical situations but it was truly inspirational to listen to all the wonderful contributors that shared ideas on how to use the AI tool in a languages context. 

Julia Morris, who presented for an hour, was great, but also all the presenters in the TeachMeet session afterwards: Sandra Aktas, Sonja Fredizzi, Jerome Nogues, Sarah Shooter, François Stalder, Steve Morgan, Aubrey Swisher, Vincent Everett, Caroline Schlegel and Claudia Elliott. Apologies if I missed someone, you were all great!

To start with, I would recommend anyone interested in ChatGPT to watch the free webinar here

However, I thought I would write a post giving a summary of the activities that I particularly loved from everything shared by these wonderful educators, using it too, as a self-reflection tool! 

 ChatGPT is free, although there's a premium version. To use use it, you just need to open an account. Please, be mindful that you need to be 18+ to open an account. Children under 18 need parental permission, so I would not use ask my KS3/KS4 students to open an account and use it themselves, at the moment, in lessons. 

The way I can see this working for me is to use the chatbot as a resource generator, although ALevel students and GCSE students at home, with parental permission, can also use it to practise their linguistic skills directly with the chatbot.

My favourite activities with ChatGPT 

1. Asking ChatGPT to write any text format: dialogue, a story, a typical exam question and command it to create reading comprehension questions about the texts in TL or English + answers. The key thing is to be very specific with with your command: " write a dialogue of a 14 year old in a train station in German" (example from Julia Morris) or "write a typical GCSE 150 words text on holidays in Spanish using present, past and future and generate 6 context questions about the text with answers". 

2. Asking ChatGPT to write a text but, commanding it following Julia's advice, to write each paragraph in a box with a left side in the TL and the right side in English.  This would be ideal to create a spot the difference activity if you modify the TL or English texts slightly. I particularly liked François Stalder's idea to ask students to read the generated text using the "read aloud" Chrome extension feature or the Reading Coach in Microsoft Teams.

3. Once you have your text, students can translate the text into TL or from TL.

4. You can ask ChatGPT to write a text and use it as a typical model writing answer for a GCSE exam, which you can analyse with your students. It would be great to ask the chatbot, to use specific vocabulary, structures or tenses. I actually asked ChatGPT to write an essay on La Casa de Bernarda Alba, one of the A Level texts we used in our school, on Bernarda Alba: ¿víctima o verdugo?. Although not perfect, the text presented a good starting point to write an essay and have a discussion with students. I would also use it to complement it with further ideas from my students: perfect for a rewrite to improve type of activity. 

5. You can ask ChatGPT to generate a vocabulary list in a table in the TL with an English translation. I thought this would be great for A Level teaching to generate a list of vocabulary on more abstract topics. 

6. Another great idea shared by Julia was to use ChatGPT to summarise a text taken from the internet, for example, from a TL/English newspaper, to make it accessible to students. You can command it "to make it accessible to a 12/13 year old reader".

7. You can ask ChatGPT to create a gap fill activity, commanding it to take a specific number of nouns/verbs/adjectives/conjunctions out. For this activity you can copy and paste a text you already have or ask the chatbot to product the text in the first instance. 

8. You can ask ChatGPT to create Quiz/MCQ based on a text + answers.

9. You can ask ChatGPT to pretend to have a conversation with you on any topic. This is great for A Level students! Below you can find a little extract of a conversation on Tolerance in Spain, where I play the part of an average A Level student. Although not perfect, I can train ChatGPT to practise a more natural conversation: ask me questions, one by one. At the end the chatbot gives me lots of information on Franco etc.. which, is not natural and not analytical enough, but very useful to spark ideas in the students. 

10. Ask ChatGPT to give you typical questions + answers for ALevel on a particular topic, the more specific the better! (it can also be for GCSE) and then you can mix these up and ask students to match up the questions to the answers. This was a great idea from Sandra Aktas.

11.Ask ChatGPT to produce Narrow Readings: create a text about Paco who is 15 and he likes...  then you can ask it create a very similar text about Rosa, who is 13 and ask it to generate a find who type of activity based on the texts. Great ideas from Sonja Fredizzi and Sarah Shooter. 

12. François Stalder suggested to copy and paste a text generated by students and command ChatGPT to correct the mistakes in the text and provide an explanation for them. I thought this was great for marking!

13. I also loved Jerome Nogues' idea of getting the transcript from an audio/video, using Word, and then, generate questions on the transcript using ChatGPT, or generate grammatical questions based on the text too. Appsmashing at its best!!!

14. Following the Appsmashing tendency, the following Steve Morgan's idea was fab. He suggested to get text from a picture (maybe from a textbook?) using Onenote, to ask ChatGPT to tidy up the text (when extracting text from a picture the format is all over the place, and it can take ages to tidy it up!). Then we can command it to write questions based on the text. Finally, we can go to www.fromtexttospeech.com and turn the text into an audio file, with listening comprehension questions! I thought this was genius as finding audio material can be difficult, so this way, we generate the audio + the questions to go with it. 

15. I loved Aubrey Swisher and Caroline Schlegel's suggestion of using ChatGPT to generate cultural comparison questions for students. 

16. Finally, I loved Claudia Elliott’s idea to ask ChatGPT to create comprehensible input simple stories using emojis! What a great way of making the text more accessible and fun!

There were more ideas, indeed, so watch the video,  and a second part to this webinar will take place on Tuesday 28th February when Julia will share more little gems with us but what a wonderful collection of tasks! Finally, use this list of good prompts, curated by Joe Dale, to help you using commands for our new friend on the block, ChatGPT. 

As it was repeated over the webinar, please be mindful that ChatGPT is not fully 100% accurate, so you will need to check your texts for mistakes, its cultural understanding can be limited, as Vincent Everett pointed out, and you will need keep prompting, to eventually get the final product you want, like training a digital pet!