Online Tools that make a task fun!

There are many online web tools that can make learning fun for the student and are valuable resources for teachers.  With the tools listed below, teachers can actually be giving students a variety of activities such as pre-task (getting to know), formative and summative tasks.  Well planned tasks can assist teachers easily gather student information and see how they are progressing once set up.  

Prior or pre-testing, also known as entry tickets, is to gain the background knowledge of what your students know if they are a new class or before introducing a new topic.  They can take the form of just simple questionaires or surveys and usually short.  For example, if I was to teach a new class of Year 7 (1st year high school) Chinese, I would pre-test them to see what knowledge and language ability they had.  You can find the example I created in Socrative, if you have a Teachers or Students account, you can search for it on Socrative and search for SOC-12288269.  

Socrative is an easy to use web based application for teachers and students.  You can download the apps for iOS and Android and there are lots of support and forums out there.  Socrative's power is not only the smooth and easy way you can design your activities, but also in the way that you can include games and most important of all for teachers, the feedback function.  As soon as the activity is finished teachers can at the press of a button receive an emailed spreadsheet of the results.  You can download from other teachers from the generous list of shared, prepared activities at Socrative Garden.  Student can access the activity via the web or download the app. 

Kahoots  is a fun tool that is similar to Socrative.  The interface is different though and once in the activity it is very engaging.  Students find it very entertaining and it has a count down function that really engages students.  It also has a feedback facility for teachers with a new download to Google drive function.  You can log onto the Kahoots website and create an account for free and then start designing your activities. 


Google Forms are incredibly powerful as an online tool that you can create a multitude of activities with. When you download the Flubaroo or Doctopus add-ons, it is an even more powerful application.  Teacher feedback, like in Socrative and Kahoots, is sent via the email in a Google sheet and then you can check out the data.  To log onto the activity, the student can be sent the link or it can be hyperlinked on your webpage. 

Quizlet is a useful addition to this list of free web tools for teaching and learning.  Similar to the ones mentioned above, Quizlet can be used to support student learning by creating lists for vocabulary and sentence pattern activities in a variety of languages.  It's test feature is a good summative and formative tool that gives a variety of options to how to set up the test.  The only negative aspect of Quizlet is that it does not have the teacher feedback like Kahoots and Socrative in the form of an excel spreadsheet.  I have mentioned this to the Quizlet people but their response was to get the students to screen shot and send it which I don't think is a good option.  For such a good product and if you pay for the teacher's version like I do, I think an excel feedback facility for teachers would make Quizlet one of the best out there.  Besides this gripe, it does have several great feature for example, it has is that is provides native speaker audio for the texts and a few basic but fun games, even on the free version!  The iOS and Android apps work well as well, but do not have all the functions the web based platform has.  

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Apps For Chinese

There are a million apps for Chinese out there for learning Chinese, but for the Chinese language teacher, the list below are amongst the most useful I have found and would recommend.

This one came via the Twitter feed and if you have been searching for a scanner or tablet that can convert Chinese characters to editable text, optical character recognition (OCR), then your search is over.

   1.      Pleco an excellent Chinese dictionary that has hand writing recognition and it is   
                                           FREE :)

2.  2.         Qingwen: an even better Chinese dictionary that has what Pleco has and more including; voice, create wordlists, but NOT FREE $6.49  :(

3. iBooks: to download Chinese books, although many are too difficult for the Continuers course.

4. Pages: to annotate downloaded texts.  Great app, but expensive @ $12.99

5. Goodreader: one of the best readers. You can annotate by using the speech bubble function, but for text annotation within the original, Pages has it over Goodreader. Good value @ $1.29

6. Keynote: good for presenting in slide format, also has the advantage of sending your work to open in Powerpoint.  Great app, but only if you really want it @ $12.99

7. Comic Apps - check out the list by Education Technology and Mobile Learning here 

8. Writer: a Chinese writing game, good for revision exercises and having fun at the same time. FREE :)

9. Chinese Writer for iPad: Chinese writing revision FREE :)

10. Pinyin: perfect your tones with this revision game app FREE :)

11.   Translate Photo Free   is a free app that you can use on your iPad.

1. Take a photo of the image or page of a book with Translate Photo Free.

2. Press "Next" in the top right hand corner.

3. Preview the text.

4. Choose your language at the bottom of the screen. 

5. Tick the box if ok.

6. Wait for the conversion and there is your text.  

7. There are various ways to send the text so you can edit it further, press the sharing icon at the top right of the screen.  I found that when I sent it via email it was very slow, so don't be in a hurry to work on it.  

Overall, I found this app very useful and easy to use, if they speed up the share function, it would be perfect.

There is also a speak and translation function available.  Just be aware, digital translations have some way to go yet, but at least it gives you the gist.

Also, check out the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK),  China Panorama series and Boston University Chinese courses  iTunesU Chinese resources.  
Google also has some great apps, more to come about Google apps later.  
See my recommendations for other great language tools in the other sections or my Pinterest boards. 
There are lots more out there, so let me know of anymore more that you think useful.

China Diaries

China is such an amazing place.  I have been traveling there since the early 80s and have taken over 12 schools tours there, 10 of which I organised. Taking tours overseas is probably one of the best activities you can do with your students.

The benefits for students are huge with language immersion happening as soon you land in the country.  No matter what the language level is, students benefit from listening and reading authentic language.  Although students may not understand everything of what they hear or read, they still get the important and passive exposure to the language.  Picking up bits and pieces will encourage them to engage and hopefully improve on their language.

It is probably at this elementary stage that technology can benefit students.  Smartphones that can scan the language or even apps with OCR functions will help.  Google's new translator app will help in speaking situations.  Teachers need to set boundaries for these types of apps as students could easily become too reliant on them.  More on translators in another post.

Back to travel and its benefits for your students.  Link or sister schools also add in another layer to language learning and travel. Pre and post travel activities that focus on language exchange between the students help engage students in their language learning and also to get real language exchange. This can be done by organising penfriend exchanges and Skype or Google Hangout.  I combined penpal and Skype to develop an engaging and productive language unit.

China is a land of contrasts, that cliche has been mentioned many times and not only by myself.  Modern next to tradition in every facet of Chinese society can be seen everywhere.  Its an amazing place.

Differentiation in the Language Classroom

Everyone learns differently and teaches differently.  Differentiation strategies in the classroom  aim to cater for students different learning abilities and interest.

Differentiated instruction is a topic huge around the education world and there are many forums devoted to improving teaching and learning with best practice regarding this topic.  Here is my Pinterest board regarding differentiation in the classroom, it's a good resource if you want to look at it in more depth.
Follow Ken's board Differentiated Learning on Pinterest.



When differentiating in the classroom, technology can be a useful and practical tool.  Here is a Prezi I created with some ideas on how to use web tools to help differentiated in the languages classroom.





Click here to view a  Sample Differentiated Lesson plan and activities.

Presentation Tools For Language Teaching

Presentation Tools

Prezi     My Prezis

For a variety of how to present a slide show, Prezi is a good option.  You can import Powerpoints into Prezi but will need to reformat once in Prezi.  Here are my likes and dislikes about Prezi.

Likes

• web based, so you can easily access your Prezis online
• you can also view off-line, just need to make sure to save it for offline function
• sharing via different ways, such as email and online
• able to embed Prezis into your web page, grab the html and insert once you have turned on the html version of your web page or blog.  Embedding is not that hard, but you may need to practice a few times to get it right.
• you can make it private or public or share with those with a link
• presentation transitions are unique, watch your vertigo!
• new slides and changing of sequencing of slides is relatively easy.
• inserting images is easy.
• sub-slides are a very handy tool, sort of a footnote or smaller slide that goes to full screen size once engaged.
• automatically saves every few minutes
• it's free!
• Prezi can be used on most devices, but some are more limited in functions than others
• Embed Youtube videos

Dislikes (not many)

• not many, but the fact that Prezi does not hyperlink to text or images is annoying, you need to paste the whole link in TIP: shorten the link in Google or bitly or tinyurl

Google Slides

Like all Google products, Slides is very good.  Dovetails wonderfully with Blogger and if you are a Google fan with Blogger and sites, this is probably your go to presentation app.

Keynote

A great app that almost holds its own with Microsoft's Powerpoint.  Keynote is user friendly and the presentation can be controlled with your iPhone which is useful.

Powerpoint

Probably the benchmark for all presentation slide software.  Powerpoint is a favourite of mine and I imagine like many others, slide presentation skills were honed with PPT.  It is a powerful tool that can do it all, except its not a cloud based product, but that is not really a huge disadvantage except if you want to edit online.

Slideshare

Slideshare arguably houses the most amount of free, publically available slide presentations online.  Whatever topic you are after, it has probably been saved and shared in Slideshare.  
You can create slide presentations in Slideshare, but not on mobile devices.  

Emaze
Emaze is a new discovery for me.  I came across it from one of the people I follow on Twitter.  It's a clean, simple web based presentation tool and the free version can produce quite good slideshows.  There are enough functions to jazz it up a bit and you can share it and import from Powerpoint, which is what I did for this one.  If Prezi gives you vertigo, this is a good option.  I think the paid version is quite expensive, but if you like it and think its worthwhile, then go for it.  

Skype and Google Hangout

Skype is a great tool for communicating with other schools and students.  We have used it to set up language interaction with schools in China and Australia.  The pictures here are of a few of my students when we were Skyping with students in Guangzhou, China.

Here are a few ways we used Skype in the language classroom and it may give you some ideas to how you could integrate it into your teaching.

Situation 1: Overseas Skype contact
1. We had several connections with schools in China.  One school in Guangzhou was very enthusiastic to Skype with our students.
2. The sessions were planned for 30 - 40 minutes, but we rarely reached half that time in pure conversation time.
3. Sessions were planned to be split between English and Chinese, 10 minutes of each, then if there was time left over, there was free time to talk about content outside of the session objectives.  For session outline, see the Narrlakes link below to my Skype resources.
Reflection
Overall, even though the network dropped out regularly, I believed the amount of engagement, enthusiasm and time spent communicating in Chinese was beneficial for my students.  As China is only 2 hours behind Australian time, times to Skype were not that difficult, although sometimes we had to change to lunch times if timetables clashed, we still had a pretty good strike rate nonetheless.

Situation 2: Local Skype contact
1. We started the local Skype program differently.  First step was finding a school to Skype in Sydney.  As there are many schools who teach Chinese, this was not difficult.
2. After initial contact was made with the teacher of the other school, we started off with finding Skype/Pen pals for our students, setting up Skype accounts, applying for the regular Skype incursion with the school administration and then the letter writing.  The reason we wrote first is so the students felt they already knew their Skype/pen pal and also practice the content of the first Skype session.
3. The sessions were planned similar to Situation 1 points 2 and 3 above.
Reflection
The setting up with the local school was much easier, although the timetable clashed once we changed to a new school year.  The letter writing definitely was an improvement in getting the students prepared and feeling more comfortable with talking with their peers as they had practiced their language beforehand.

Here is a slideshow of a presentation I made at a staff meeting of how Skype was integrated into the classroom.


Laptops, iPads and other mobile devices have brought real life language learning into the classroom.  Here is my link to a short Skype movie I made, no Academy Award nominee, but it will give you a short snapshot of how engaged the students are. Some advantages and disadvantages are;

Advantages
- real time and real life communication
- students are motivated
- Language exchange and practice is valuable
- comes at the best price...free

Disadvantages
- can be time consuming setting up Skype sessions, liaising with the IT staff, the other school's teacher and students, setting up content etc.
- Wireless is unreliable with Skype, especially with up to 15 people Skyping at the same time with people thousands of kilometres away.   With the connection dropping out often, lots of time is lost, so out of a 40 minute session, perhaps only 10 - 15 minutes of talk time can be completed.

                                       

For my lesson ideas and activities on Skype, please go to my Narralakes webpage.



Although I have not used Google Hangouts in the classroom, I have used it on a professional and social level and love using it.  It is a great tool and has more functions than Skype in the way you can refer to different screens to show images or diagrams.  I believe there is much of my Skype activities that you could transfer over to Google Hangouts.

Games in the classroom, I thought I knew (1)

        

Being a teacher for over 25 years, I thought I knew about games in the classroom.  But when I came to design and create my own digital games, I realised there was much more to games based learning than I thought I knew.

Games have been around for thousands of years.  Games in teaching and learning, just as long, they go together don't they?  When I look back at my university days and studying to be a teacher, I really cannot recall any topics in our courses about teaching with games, maybe it was too long ago and the old memory just isn't working like it use to.  Everyone knew about games though as we all grew up playing games and much of our interactions with others somehow integrate games.

The basics of games, sometimes known as game mechanics, are competition, rewards or points, engagement and enthusiasm towards an action.  It is amazing how much of these gaming components or mechanics are in everything we do.  Here is a quick question, think about how playing one of your favourites sports like football or basketball or a board game like monopoly and chess, how competitive are you when you play?  These are obvious game examples, but think about when you were younger, and how even at home and being motivated to do something for your parents and receiving a reward for something even as simple as taking out the garbage or cleaning your room.  Your parents knowingly or unknowingly took these game strategies to get you to do something.  Would you have done these jobs without game mechanics involved?  The use of game mechanics is also known as gamification, taking these components and placing them in a non-game environment, like home or in the classroom.

Gamification is not only used in the home and at school though.  Gamification is everywhere, look at advertisements, reward cards and programs, end of season sales in shops and even big business and corporate structures and employee incentives, they all involve gamification.

In the educational setting, classrooms are set up to reward good behaviour and results.  Every school does it slightly differently, but the basics of game mechanics stay the same.  Expectations (rules of the game), rewards and points, competition.  Not all students are motivated by the gamification of the classroom though, this may be due to the type of gamification used or other factors.

Before things get too complicated and discussing the other "factors", I recommend reading some of the articles in Edutopia and by Joseph Shapiro whose research and articles on games give an excellent overall view of the pros and cons of games based learning and gamification in the classroom.

My main focus is on games based learning in the classroom, particularly digital games based learning.  There has been a significant amount of research conducted in this area regarding student engagement and progress made where their teachers integrated digital games based learning.  The research article in the Canadian Journal of Action Research, Vol 13, No.1, 2012,  shows that there is improvement in learning outcomes for students using digital games based learning.