Gamification and games-based learning seem to be key in today’s educational environment and have an important role to play in the classroom. Gamification is where customizable apps or programs are used in the classroom to enhance student learning. These are what I tend to use in my own classroom. The game-based learning games such as vocabulary.com or No Red Ink are content specific – I checked these out but since they are not in the target language I cannot really see any use for them in my classroom at this particular time. I am wondering if it’s possible to get vocabulary.com to work in another language. I tried it out with some French words, but so far it couldn’t recognize them and I couldn’t’ see a way of indicating that the word was not in English. Maybe that will change over time.
In my classroom we play some technology based games to engage students more in their learning. When learning new vocabulary I post vocabulary lists with either words or pictures (or both) to our class page in Quizlet. Then during class or at home students spend between 10-15 mins reviewing the vocabulary and playing the match-up game also. In the past I also used Quizlet Live whereby students work in teams and one student from each team has the correct answer to the question that has been asked of the group. I have not played this game recently with my freshman students as I found that sometimes one or two of them would logon twice, which meant that when the game opened up there was a team who had players missing. This became quite tedious in that you as a teacher you have to review everyone’s name on the list to see who really is in the game before assigning teams, so in the end I tended to avoid that. A tool that I recently started using is Quizizz, which I love, particularly because of the feedback it gives to students. Often I can find a Quiz on Quizizz that is based on a chapter of the book I am currently covering, so I duplicate it and then adapt it according to student need. Once students have played with the vocabulary on Quizlet we switch over to using this tool. I can ask students to log in and so see their progress and as an educator you can know who or who isn’t in the game. Once students have gone through all of the questions we then review those answers that were most incorrect in class. On their own screens students can also see what answers that they got wrong together with the correct answer which is great. We then use Quizizz again and generally the class results will improve by at least 10% on the 2nd play. Another app I enjoy is kahoot. I use this when we review a chapter before a major Quiz. I write questions which include vocabulary and grammar questions. The students enjoy playing this game, although I probably use it quite a bit less than the Quizlet or Quizizz. It doesn’t have the feedback possibilities that Quizizz does and often it is not easy to find kahoots that cover the material that my students have been learning, so I pretty much write each one from scratch. These three games have their positive points and their drawbacks, but on the whole students are certainly more engaged when they are being used in class, and when surveyed as part of my research last semester, students certainly felt that Quizlet did help them learn new vocabulary more readily. On a personal note, I would love it if Fortnite became available in either French or Spanish, so that students could just hear the instructions in the target language and become familiar with them. Most of my students love playing this game, and so it could be a huge draw.
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This week was my favorite week of the course so far I think – getting to experiment with those suggested apps was really interesting! I checked out several apps including Imovie, Screencastify, Vocaroo, Soundation, Audacity, Edpuzzle & Powtoon. I decided to look at Imovie because my students make videos of themselves doing roleplays or skits which they share with the class. I liked this app as it had great editing abilities so that the students could eliminate or change parts before uploading. This gave them more flexibility than other apps such as flipgrid, but you can’t set up a class page/area, students just have to upload the link. I tried out Screencastify, which did the job that it was intended to do, but I didn’t find it as easy to use as Screen-cast-o-matic. I didn’t seem to be able to crop the area on the screen to record and so had to go to full screen, but then I couldn’t pause it as it was running. (Could just be my user- error though). I liked the fact that it saved to Google drive, that makes life so much easier when trying to find a document and having it there at your fingertips as opposed to logging onto a third party’s website. Adobe Spark is better still I think for being able to import a graphic and then talk over the top of it and make it into a presentation. Their graphics are awesome. They do need to tweak the areas where you can add text though as that is quite limiting. I tried to find workarounds on the internet, but it said that this was something their teams were still working on. I would like to be able to put text where I like on an adobe spark page as opposed to just being limited to adding a caption, or title and text.
I tried out three of the voice apps, but none of them totally addressed my needs. Vocaroo was a really simple voice app for recording your voice, which my students could definitely use for recording themselves, but it was very basic and just allowed you to record without editing. You could then just upload the link onto our schoology, by cutting and pasting. The other two apps Soundation and Audacity looked interesting, but they were way more complex and more for musicians who are making music. In my classes I’m looking for a simple app that students can record their voices, edit it and then upload directly to schoology, via a link, or the ability to save in google drive would be great. I did look in the app store too, but didn’t find anything that met this criteria. The other apps I checked out were EdPuzzle and Powtoon. I could definitely use Edpuzzle to upload a You Tube video, or probably more likely a screencast that I had made and then add some simple basic questions for understanding. This seemed like a really useful app to use for the flipped classroom whereby students would be doing this activity at home or at a station in a classroom. The final app that I looked at was Powtoon. This app looked great for someone who is trying to advertise something, or use lots of graphics, but personally I felt that in my language classes it would be difficult to use this a lot of these as many of the graphics had English phrases attached to them. The pages just looked very busy to me, and it did put me off from trying to use it. I really much prefer the simplicity of Adobe Spark with simple graphics , but I can see where Powtoon could be great for other classes such as English or Journalism. The use of apps can greatly enhance my classroom teacher. Imovie will be great for my students to use to upload their skits and roleplays, with the ability to edit and then upload to Schoology. Students could use Screencast-o-Matic or Adobe Spark to prerecord presentations about cultural topics of their choice which they can upload to Schoology via a link, and then I can show these to the rest of the class, so they get to experience each other’s findings. I would certainly try using Vocaroo in my classes, but I am still on the lookout for something which has editing possibilities, but is simple to use and is just for the voice, which students could upload as a link to schoology or save on their google drive. EdPuzzle will something I will definitely use for informational purposes for my students so that they can answer questions about what they have watched. This would be good to use for student understanding, but could also be used as an assessment tool as well to see how much students have understood. I like the fact that this app is so compact and that the questions and video can be incorporated together as opposed to watching the video and then opening up a separate document to type up the answers. The articles we read this week were really interesting. The key points focused on having the students watch screencasts/videos independently so that they can see them at their own pace and answer questions. I have already done this a small amount with my students, but I just asked them to take notes, and only a small number of them turned in the assignment. The article by Jon Bergman mentioned using EduCanon, which apparently can tell you who has watched the video, which I thought would be interesting to look at, but I haven’t managed to do that yet. Other articles were suggesting doing the flip in class so that students can watch a video at a station and then answer questions; this last week I asked how many of my students have their own headphones and most had – so I think this would be a definite possibility for my class, although they don’t always bring their headphones with them. My classroom is quite small, but I would like students to try and work in small groups in different areas, so that I could get to them more and become much more of a facilitator rather than standing and teaching from the front. When I was on my teaching practice over 20 years ago, the Chair of my Department actually used this strategy of introducing the topic and then having the students work on a list of listening, reading, writing and speaking assignments, at their own pace, choosing which they did first over a period of several weeks. It was very successful but very different to what anyone else was doing at that time. It’s so interesting to me to learn now what a difference this can make to student learning and kudos for her for implementing this method! How can google forms help us in our practice as teachers? Google forms are not something that I have ever really used in my own classroom, but my school administrators use them frequently to get responses from both faculty, staff and students, so it is probably high time that I investigated them! Having read several articles now, they have given me many ideas that I would never have thought of, for using google forms in my classroom. There seem to be many useful add ons out there such as Flubaroo that can be used to create a detailed grading summary of student test results, or Goobric to create rubrics for grading student work, or the quick QR code generator to name but a few.
Since I have never used google forms before, I would like to start by making something simple and then use more add-ons as I become more confident with how they work. Initially I would like to use google forms to make a simple multiple choice test for my students about French adjectives. Initially we used Quizizz which gave questions with multiple choice answers, and I would like to transfer these multiple choice questions from this app to a google form for students to be tested upon. I will endeavor to use the app Flubaroo to grade this test – it will just be about 15-20 multiple choice questions. Google forms seem to open doors to many different possibilities – I currently have many rubrics for projects which have been typed up into a google doc, but I usually print them out and spend time writing comments as the projects are being presented. It would be great to do this electronically and then for students to get instant feedback. Currently I wait until all of the projects have been completed for before giving students the worksheet that I have filled out, and if students have been sick, this can take a while – google forms could certainly revolutionize this practice for me. In class we often organize impromptu events such as cheese-tastings or crêpes parties, all of which google forms could certainly streamline by getting students to sign up to bring in certain items and then the add-on formlimiter could be used to limit sign-ups to get the required number of items we need. For my capstone project I am considering studying how music can help with language acquisition. Recently my students have been learning songs and it has really helped with their pronunciation and they seem to remember some of the words when prompted by the music, so I would like to see if music does make a difference when learning language. Essentially, students will choose a song from a list that I give them and will make a poster representing their song using Adobe Spark. This poster will contain a vocabulary list of all of the key words that are important to the song, a gap-fill activity for the rest of the class or others around the campus to fill in while listening to the music, and a link to a karaoke video, also made by students. The QR code add-on could be used here so that once students have made a poster using Adobe Spark, listeners could use that code to take them either to a gap-fill activity to complete whilst listening to the original song, or to a karaoke version of the song that they could sing along too. My students will make a karaoke video with the words so that the listener will know when to sing along. Once this project is complete I intend to give my students a survey using google forms or survey monkey so that they can express their opinions as to whether they feel that music has helped them learn more words, improved their pronunciation or made them more engaged in their learning. I’m excited for this project - it will be fun to use new technology to try and enhance it – I’m hoping my students feel the same way too! Social media is becoming more and more prevalent in our everyday lives, so as educators we need to embrace it and become adept at using it. For myself, I see Twitter and possibly Instagram as being the main tools that would be used to communicate with colleagues, students and parents. I believe social media has many uses; just yesterday I joined a Twitter chat and was amazed at the amount of great tips and tools that I gained within the space of an hour. It was a total unknown to me, and I was quite nervous when the time came to join the chat, but it was so easy to use. I just typed in the hashtag #langchat and all the comments that fellow educators were making just popped up! It was so great to swap ideas with language teachers having similar classroom experiences. I definitely intend to try out some of their suggestions to see if it has any impact on my students’ learning. I am a little cautious, though, as I am not very familiar with all of my own school’s policies surrounding social media. One article I read suggested taking pictures of “students being awesome” in the classroom, but I am unsure if I am allowed to post pictures of my students on an Instagram account or on Twitter. This is something I would need to research. It is important too, to consider very carefully what you post online, since people can make judgements about you on just single comments that you make, especially if they don’t know you personally. Several articles suggested posting assignments and information about topics that have been covered in class on social media, which sounds a great idea. I already post assignments to Schoology, but it would be interesting to poll students and find out how many would benefit from them being posted on social media. Would they be more likely to do the assignments?
Social media can certainly be used in a variety of positive ways, and I think the key word surrounding all of this is “positive.” Celebrating student successes and sharing and swapping thoughts and ideas with students via planned online chats are all great ways to get students to feel more involved, included and motivated towards their studies. For example, once a week my Spanish 4 students go to Napa Valley Language Academy, where they help out in the classroom. Each week they write a diary describing the events of their hour spent there. I am wondering whether it might not be more to do an online chat once a week where students could contribute to the conversation. The only issues might be the time parameters, as many students have extra-curricular activities that they are involved in the evenings and after school. In today’s world, students I believe, need to be more educated on their usage of social media. It is far too easy to voice an opinion via a post in seconds, and then realize shortly afterwards that maybe that wasn’t the best thing to do. In times gone by, young people were under far less pressure as they didn’t have to worry about this aspect of their lives, as social media was not really available or accessible. Thoughts and opinions were kept to the locker room or behind closed doors, whereas today, making your thoughts public gives others the possibility of making false judgements about you, because they just happened to read one inappropriate posting you may have made on social media. Students I think want to be popular with their friends through postings they make, but are blissfully unaware of the consequences this may have. Schools, colleges and employers often check social media accounts to see what kind of information potential candidates are posting. If they don’t like the look of what they see, then it is very easy for them to pass over that person and move onto the next. If a student makes an inappropriate comment on social media, then their school needs to use that as a “teachable moment,” rather than a “punishable moment.” We need to educate our students. Teachers, counselors and administrators are all in a position to do that and should be empowered to do so. If I saw an inappropriate post by a student at my school, I would talk to the student’s counselor, teachers and administration so that they could help the student to see the error of their ways, and why it is so important to behave in a professional manner on social media. Behaving on social media as you would face to face with a person is key. Age is also another factor, in that no-one under 13 should be a social media account. So many things to think about, and so many possibilities out there. Exciting and scary at the same time! I am going to delve in slowly, but would certainly love to increase my use of social media with my students. |
AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. ArchivesCategories |