Friday 1 April 2016

A few wee gems for engaging learners

Ok so it took a little longer to blog than I promised but here I am and raring to get back to work. For those not on Twitter or Facebook with me, I broke my ankle on 2nd January (don't ask, a random act of kindness gone wrong) and was off until the last week before Easter. It really took all my energies to get into work that week and catch up with where all the classes were so I'm looking forward to teaching properly this week. One advantage of being off is that I've had time to check out some cool websites and make some nice resources.

Dobble 
Some people may have heard of the brilliant kids' game Dobble (Dobble Game on Amazon) There are a number of different ways to play including dealing the cards out and the players turn the card one at a time, trying to find the image their card has in common with this card. At the time, I wondered about using the game in class but the icons are tricky enough in the target language. Then a month or so ago,  I happened to spot a link to a Dobble card generator on Twitter  http://www.gorfo.com/dobble/#/home/ Here are the cards I have made for Form 2 Spanish after I have introduced prepositions http://www.gorfo.com/dobble/#/share/56fe880ed6f6b/en



Meme Generator 
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/meme-generator-free/id645831841?mt=8
Coffee with teacher friends yesterday and one of them happened to mention her new favourite app. Which is now mine of course. Within a few minutes, I had created these four memes to illustrate Si clauses for my A level Spanish classes. (For those non Spanish speakers, they translate as "If I study, I get good marks", "If I study, I will get good marks", "If I studied, I would get good marks" and "If I had studied, I would have gotten good marks") I foresee hours of fun ahead..


   
      


Quizizz 
This is an online quiz website http://quizizz.com/ which allows you to play in real time or to set it as homework. You can browse and duplicate existing quizzes which obviously can save you a lot of time and select two, three or four options. You choose how many questions you want in the quiz.



Once you have finished, you then can play live or set it for homework. Useful features include jumbling the questions for the students (which avoids too much collaboration between computers 😀) and a Quiz Review whereby the students see all the answers at the end of the game. 




As a teacher, I can see how students answered the questions which enables me to better inform my teaching for the next lesson.




Quizalize
https://www.quizalize.com/quiz/welcome
This is another quiz website, similar to Quizizz and Kahoot. Again, you can browse for existing quizzes to use or adapt and you choose how many questions you set.


The quiz adds a competitive element as with Kahoot, as the students gain more points, the faster they answer. Whilst some would argue that this is detrimental, it does add to the ambience in the classroom and can engage boys particularly.


Interestingly, when you set up the classes and assign quizzes to them, it does this via https://live.zzish.com/learninghub  which also allows you to assign Kahoot quizzes to the class as well. I really like the look of the post-quiz features such as 'who needs help' and 'what we need help with'  NB A word of warning that the free account only stores the last five quiz results.


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