Reading Progress in Teams

Yesterday my Year 9 Spanish class submitted their Reading Progress assignment on Teams, whereby they read their winter oral exam aloud and Teams gave colour-coded feedback on the accuracy of their pronunciation. I was able to go into each response and listen to their recording whilst following on the screen and edit Teams’ feedback very quickly and easily, clicking on words which I disagreed with. It was quick and easy to do, and let me see common recurring issues as well as who needs more or less support. I think that Year 9 will find it useful as they come to do the actual oral exam in a fortnight, as this should reduce the number of marks they lose for pronunciation.

No prep retrieval practice ideas

 In the mild chaos and serious exhaustion of hotdesking, it's been great to have a few tricks up my sleeve this year while the computer logs on or to finish the lesson. Here are three activities which my classes are loving:

• 4 Squared                                                                                                                            An oldy but goodie which I had never used before this term. Draw 4 squares on the board then ask a question. Whoever gets it right gets his/ her name on the board: once you have 4 names, the next pupil to answer correctly chooses someone to eliminate from one of the squares. I give stickers to the 4 in the box when the game ends. 
• Stand up if                                                                                                                              You say or display a phrase in MT or TL and they stand up if they think they know it. You choose one of the pupils standing and if they get it right, everyone standing up gets a point. If they get it wrong, everyone standing loses a point. I gave a sticker for reaching 4 points and a sticker for every point after that (5 stickers = a positive on lesson monitor) It works brilliantly at all levels.Yes, some might not stand up at all but they still seemed to enjoy it
• Vindictive                                                                                                                            You can do this orally or  with a mini whiteboard each. All pupils stand up to play. Call out a word, the first person to call out their name and answer immediately when called upon or to write the correct trans choses someone else to sit down. If they are sitting down, they still play and if they win the round, they stand back up & knock two others out. The winner is the “last man standing” If two pupils are left at the end but someone sitting down gets the correct answer first, they stand back up and knock the two standing out and ultimately are the champion. No prep and excellent retrieval practice as well as for learning new vocab if able to look at list as play
• The wonderful @Chapeluser shared this with me last year and which I'm going to try it out again this week

"Have you ever tried a ‘Cat’ lesson? (Actually it could be dog, elephant or anything you fancy!) It works for any age and can be mangled accordingly. Great fun, and loads of learning.

You simply ask them to divide a page into two columns, English on the left, TL on the right.

Just sit and dictate, starting with simple phrases with them writing the translation each time.

1 - The cat

2 - A cat

3 - The cats

4 - Some cats

Then move through crazy sentences, the sillier the better. For a top set GCSE you would arrive at about no 15 with, ‘If I were to tell you the truth I would say that the best thing about my cat is that he can order food in a restaurant!”

The kids love it cos it’s silly, and you can provide instant feedback after each one. Get a feel for how many have got one wrong and then you can slip in another re-worded one on the same grammar point later. Verbs, adjs, grammar structures, the lot. "

Hopefully some of these are helpful, I've found them excellent for recalling vocabulary and retrieval practice as well as engaging pupils and adapting to not being in my own classroom all the time.

Site smashing with vocab lists

The joy of a busy languages teacher when you realise that one humble vocabulary list can be used multiple times and join up pupil learning 😍

•  Create your word or sentence list, tabbing from the target language to the English. Copy it all and paste it into a new course on Quizlet. Pupils enjoy Quizlet for the flashcards and games as well as playing Quizlet Live in individual or team mode. 
  
  
  
  
  
• Go to Memrise and sign in. Select the Courses tab, create a course, fill in the details and set it up. When the empty vocab list appears, click on advanced and select bulk add words then paste your vocabulary list.  My pupils like the fact that they can gain points for each vocab set they learn. 

• Go to Gimkit and select New kit then select Create with flashcards and paste the vocabulary list. This is always a favourite either in team mode or individual. 

•  Go to Blooket and create a new set, pasting the same vocabulary into the set. The games on Blooket include the classic game which is like Kahoot, the race and the Battle Royal game. The graphics are cool and the pupils love choosing their animal icon.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

• Go to Carousel Learning and download the template to create the question bank. Paste the vocabulary and complete the final column for the topic/s. Upload the question bank spreadsheet and then create a quiz using this question bank and allocate it to a class. This is new to us this week and the pupils have found it really useful to test their learning and retrieval of vocabulary. @Carousel_Learn posted this on Twitter:

      "Also worth noting: REVISE QUESTIONS = students see flashcards of the questions in the quiz only REVISE TOPICS = students see flashcards for every question in every topic included in the quiz"

In these very busy days of school, it is so heartening and pleasing to find websites which are so easy to use and with time-saving uploads of the same vocabulary. Pupils can see links in learning and a sense of satisfaction at their progress. 

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.

A-Z of ICT in Modern Languages

I have the honour of presenting to the Modern Language PGCE students tomorrow at Queen's University in Belfast. I spoke to the same group last term about the use of games in the modern language classroom, so this time I thought I would go a little more high tech, stealing Alex Blagona's theme from the London Languages Show, and do an A-Z presentation of ICT in the ML classroom.

A Z Of Ict In Modern Languages

View more presentations from Amanda Salt.

I have uploaded the presentation to Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/asalt518/a-z-of-ict-in-modern-languages