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!

5 Magic Powers for GCSE productivity and high grades

As a new GCSE is coming home soon, I am still thinking about the current one and what to do to make sure that students can and will manipulate the language, while scoring the highest grades in the productive skills of Writing and Speaking in the GCSE exam. 

In other words, how can we make sure that students use the vocabulary and structures they know to express opinions on any topic, spontaneously and fluently?  Uhmmm that's what the new GCSE is trying to sort out! I believe the current GCSE, already does that, but anyway... 

These are the techniques we use as from Y7, the beginning of the learning journey, to make sure students become spontaneous with the language and get the highest grades at GCSE in the process, a default nice outcome!

To do so, we introduce  5 magic powers as early as possible, from Y7, little by little!

The 5 magic powers, based on the GCSE AQA Mark Scheme, are:

1. Using more than one tense
2. Giving opinions
3. Giving reasons 
4. Reported Speech
5. High impact expressions and Idioms

These powers are practised inside out, via retrieval practice, throughout KS3 so, when students start the official GCSE course in Y10, they are a second nature to them! 

Then as from Y10, the GCSE specific topic vocabulary is taught, but always subordinated to these 5 magic powers, whose use is needed to score the highest grade in Writing/Speaking at GCSE. Topical vocabulary is constantly revisited via Retrieval Practice and our Sentence Builders. We also work hard to make sure that as much vocabulary as possible from the different topics is recycled in new ones. This is a necessity to tackle the Writing Task 2 in the Higher Paper or the Translation exercise.

As a department, we decide the language we are going to include for each magic power, which will be used, over and over again, throughout the learning journey, by the teachers and students alike: via modelling listening and reading activities and structured practice, creative and, finally, fluency tasks, following a lexicogrammar approach to teaching and learning languages.

We also use the following strategies:

Planning Writing Frames

We use these when students attempt any writing task as from Y10. 

Remember that most of the expressions in the Magic Powers, have already been introduced and fully practised as from Y7! so now we have two more years to make sure these powers are even more embedded with the new GCSE topical vocabulary, which we simplify for the Writing and Speaking exams in our GCSE AQA Sentence Builder Booklet. 

Self-Evaluation and Marking Frames

To develop independence and metacognition in our students, we also try to develop evaluating skills in our learners. For that, once they have produced a written task, they will also use the following Green Sheet/Card to proof-read their work. 

It is very similar to the Planning Writing Frame, but the green card is meant to be a checking point  for the students to notice and avoid careless mistakes, all taken from the AQA mark scheme. Students are welcome to tick the boxes they think they have covered well. Students will get this card and their planning time frame, with every piece of writing they have to produce.

Teachers also use the green card to mark students' work. This saves lot of time for us and it makes it clear to the students what the expectations from the exam and the teachers are. We highlight in green what was great in a given piece of writing, and in pink what could be improved, according to the check list in the card, with a general comment, if applicable, written in the card. The good news is that most of the time this is not needed! 

We also tick the boxes, with a green pen, to make it visually clear, what students did include and could have included!  When a piece of writing is given back to students, they have some reflection time to look at their green card and make improvements, where applicable, while they have the opportunity to ask a friend or teacher if unsure about something. 

These 5 magical powers are reinstated in oral activities too! 

To develop automaticity, spontaneity and fluency, we use Flippity, with potential questions and expressions from this 5 magic powers. We don't want students to learn by heart answers, but, instead, to try to answer these questions with bits they can retrieve spontaneously, using the magic powers column. The answers will be different every time they practise the questions, although, some nice phrases will be learned for specific questions and this is fine! 

Of course, these 5 magic powers are practised via many other activities all the time! and of course, there has been a lot of thinking, as a department, about what expressions/ structures to teach as from Y7 to maximise the students' grades, for example, teaching SUELO + infinitive or Me gustaría que mi madre tuviera. Then in Y8 students will say Me gustaría que mi casa tuviera.

The approach, supported by our Sentence Builders and our repertoire of activities works!