Making Kahoots really ups the DOK(Depth of Knowledge)level for students level of critical thinking.
Today I attempted (successfully I might add) to teach my students to make Kahoots. For this activity you will need access to a computer lab. I got students in the lab and played them my You Tube video on signing up for Kahoot. I stopped at critical points to allow them time to type what they needed on the screen. Here is the video:
With this video, I took students step by steps through the video stopping at each step to get students to complete the task. Everyone was able to get an account. I even had 5 new students and they were even able to get accounts. I want to describe my class once more. They come to me knowing NO English. So this activity was done with them using native language support from students who had been in my class. They understood with this support and were able to be successful in the classroom.
Now it is time to proceed to making games. My students were very familiar with Kahoot as we have been playing my games daily. I noticed that as much fun as they were having, the faster levels needed more challenge. That is why I chose at this point to teach them how to make Kahoots. Once everyone had an account, I proceeded to walk them through the steps to create their first kahoots. I modeled each step. How to find a picture. Kahoot now has Getty images built in so we used those. I took them through making 3 questions. My faster/techie students picked up the process rather quickly and so I told them to make 8 questions total.My slow students crept along with me making the three questions together. I showed them how to save their Kahoots and then the fun began and we played many of them. 24 of my 25 students successfully created an account and one game. After our lab class was over, we went back to the classroom and started learning Food vocabulary. Unbeknown to me, my students were making pictures we were studying into Kahoot games on their phones while I was teaching. How wonderful! You can see a few of their creations below https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/a7bd236f-fabf-4813-80f5-3e60b89ce2cb https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/1cb11fa6-4900-4604-b587-2cd6e6fa0eb9 https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/97e2b4f5-a1c7-4700-9f12-97f6f73f690f
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My class loves playing Kahoot and Quizlet Live. I told the students that next semester they might get a teacher who doesn't use Kahoot and they were very surprised. For this reason, I have decided to teach my class how to make their own kahoots. More on that a bit later. On Friday, I subbed for another class. During the break I was able to spend some time talking about how I use technology with two other Pre Level teachers. It started off by saying ways they try to engage the students so that students would not use the phones. I mentioned that they might want to try using the phones to engage the students. One teacher dug deeper into my psyche by asking me how and what I did. I told her that I started off using Remind, then once the students were familiar with that we moved on to Quizlet and so on and so on. She mentioned that I seemed to be layer technology onto instruction. I loved her use of the word "layering". I think that is how I approach everything I do in teaching students language and technology is no exception. The other instructor discussed how she felt that the digital divide was too big for those older students without phones. (In my classroom every student has a phone of some sort). I mentioned that she could group the students together. She still felt it was inequitable. I hope to deal with that concern later in another post after I give it some more thought. So today I made a short 2 minute video teaching students how to sign up with Kahoot. I plan on posting the video on our Facebook group and through remind. I want to see if any of my tech savvy students will sign up for an account before class. I will use the video on Monday in the lab and have students get an account. I will then teach them how to make a game using the included Getty Images that are now embedded into the program. I have embedded the video I created below: It has been a busy couple of weeks. I presented at Orange County CATESOL, Napa Adult School and now off to CCAE in Long Beach. However, I did develop a great lesson to use with Low beginning ESL students using QR codes to meet the EL CIVICS Lesson on the DMV. I will be posting a link to this lesson as soon as I develop it futher, but I feel like it was very successful. First I flashed a QR code on the screen and asked students if they had ever seen it. They said no. Then I asked them what it looked like. They said it looked like a UPC code. I said great and introduced them to QR codes. Since we have been using our phones for research, Quizlet Live and Kahoot, when I told them to download the app for a QR code reader, they had no problem doing it. There were many to choose from and some were better than others. But after about 10 mins, they had all downloaded one that worked well enough for the activity. Once the QR codes were downloaded, I had a practice sheet where students practiced scanning codes. I had one with my contact information, one with my picture and one of a wordless youtube movie. The movie was a Subaru commercial with the Barkely dogs. Since our focus was on DMV, I had students watch the movie and find out what parts of the car they could see. Next I divided the students into groups. I carefully placed a higher level student in each group so that they could help lower level students. I gave each student a job. There was a scanner, photographer, secretary and organizer in every group.
The next activity was like a stations activity. I had four different tasks: 1) Go to a group members car. Take pictures of the outside of the car illustrating any ten different parts. 2) Got to a group members car. Take pictures of the inside of the car illustrating any ten different parts. 3) Go out to the parking lot and find as many vehicle types as possible and take pictures of them. 4) Scan a QR code that consists of ten different pictures of traffic signs and write down what the signs mean 5) Scan 10 QR codes of the process in the DMV. Order the process in a sequence as studied. The students got right to work and basically needed almost no help. They were having so much fun doing the activities, that we forgot to take a break. QR codes for beginning ESL students? Heck yes!!!!! I will upload the links to the activities along with teacher notes as soon as all the conferencing is over. I have been preparing for a lot of conferences this spring. This time, my focus is on integration. It is no longer about what apps you can use and about how cool tech is, but about how to integrate into your instruction. I am in a classroom with no computer access and a book that is mediocre at best. But none of that matters for the learning process. What matters is how engaged the students get and how much they practice the language. In order for technology to be meaningful, it needs to be INTEGRATED into the instruction using new ways of learning that fit that INTEGRATION. To this end, I have started archiving good tutorials and lesson integration plans. You can see the tutorials here and the lesson plans here.
The more you can encourage students to practice outside of class, the more time they spend on task. The more time they spend on task, the more they learn. My students are really busy. They work all day and come to school all night. They come to class almost every night and sometimes they don't eat dinner. Some of my students drive about 1 hour just to get to class after work. They don't have any extra time to spend learning. So teachers have to make it as easy and convenient as possible by producing practice activities on the topic at hand that are easily accessible whenever the students have a free moment. All the tools I use are very mobile accessible. I encourage the students to practice at break time, on the bus, while eating lunch, etc. Of course not all of them do, but I continually remind them that this is what they need to do. This week my focus was on vocabulary. I started out by having students learn to use the OPD (Oxford Picture Dictionary). Even though I am a seasoned teacher, I forgot that I can't expect students to know how to use it unless they have instructions. I was also introducing them to Padlet an electronic bulletin board. My instructions were to look at pages 22-25 and find one new word. They were then (using their phones) to search the internet for a picture that described the word and post it along with a sentence. I showed them how to access Padlet and had a model set up. Then I took them through the process of posting a new word, picture and sentence. At first it was very difficult because the students did not understand that they had to find the word first. In retrospect, I would have them search the word, write it on paper and then post it on the Padlet. However, with a lot of support from me, they were eventually able to see what to do. A few of my more advanced students told me that there was no no words on pages 22-25 so I instructed them to find another page in the book where there was a new word. Once they got the word, I helped them to post it on Padlet. What happened after that was incredible. They started posting more and then they started commenting (without prompting) on each others posts. They even tried to correct errors they saw in other posts. I had not enabled this so it was not possible for them to do. Two days later, I continued my quest to help them learn how to increase their vocabulary. This time I gave them the OPD and said pick a page any page. They were not used to this type of freedom, so it took a while before they understood what I meant by any page. After the wrote down all the words from the page (I had them do this in their vocabulary notebooks) then I had them create Quizlets with them. This is to help them learn how Quizlet is their best picture dictionary. Two students were able to post directly to the class and two students shared it with me in email and I edited their sets (they were in Spanish/English) to English + picture and then reposted them in our group with their names. I hope that next time we do this activity, I will get more sets made. Finally I sent them a text message to look at the Quizlet and play their classmates sets. Let's see if this happens. A great week of learning for both me and my students. You can see the Padlet here: https://padlet.com/susangaer/adjectives The Quizlet class is here:https://quizlet.com/class/3741546/ The teacher next door, Katarina Gyurindak, and I decided to do a inter-class Kahoot. We have computers in our classroom but no web cams. Doing an inter-class Kahoot requires webcams. So we brought in our laptops. Katarina has a dell PC and I had a Chromebook. Google Hangouts worked perfectly. She called me on Hangouts and we played Kahoot with our two classes. It was so much fun. Students were really competitive.
The IT department has been working on this mobile lab to use in our classrooms. Last night they asked me to try using the lab on WIFI....This was not a good idea. Students were creating rooms in Roommaker (elouai.com/room-makers.php)and just as they were creating, the WIFI would go out. A few minutes later it would come back. It was not acceptable, so we put the laptops away. When IT came to roll the cart back, students were able to say (The WIFI was not very good. We were not happy about that.) So they got a lot of good language practice even though the WIFI did not suffice. My take away is that WIFI is not good for 30+ students to use at the same time. It needs to be hard wired for that.
I am back from TESOL. I had a great time presenting there. When I returned to my class on Tuesday, I had five new students. During break time, I gave them an orientation and had them sign up for Remind, and showed them the website. Only one student had no service to sign up for remind, but she said she would do it it at home. Which she did !!!! Another student was absent but her boyfriend (also a new student) had her sign up at home after class. I will see if they can follow the syllabus to sign up for the facebook and quizlet group. I will say that technology doesn't seem to be an issue for most of the students. They enjoy learning English on their phones. Note: none of the new students can access the wifi from the portal until I can get them signed up.
I just got back from looking at my remind account and all six students signed up. This includes the one who had no access on her phone at school and the student who was absent. She had her boyfriend's help. So what did I do to enable these non English speaking students to understand me. 1) I pulled them into a small group while the rest of the class was doing oral practice in pairs. 2) I took them through each step and showed them what to do. 3) I gave them all positive feedback throughout the process. Last week I made Nearpod presentation and sent it out through Remind to the class. One or two people opened it, but I guess they could not figure out how to use it. Last night we had Data Entry in the computer lab, so I used the extra time at the end to do a "Live Presentation" of Nearpod in the lab. I am hoping that this engaged the students enough to go back to it on their own time. That is what I am trying to get them to do is use the activities I give them to practice OUTSIDE the class. I don't know how successful I have been. I do know that they are using Remind, Quizlet and Facebook on a regular basis.
I also know that they only know what I teach them. Last night I showed them how to voice respond to me on Remind. Now we are using remind for me to ask them audio questions. So far only the Spanish speakers have tried to respond. I hope the Chinese do it as well. I plan on sending them out one audio question a day for one week and see if I get responses. Last night we got on the MT SAC portal and now everyone in the room has WIFI!!!!!. A dream come true for me and my class. As soon as we got back to class, we played our first game of Quizlet Live. Here is the link so you can see my class sorting into their teams-https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipPkLW2oGHJbK1Ol-NgaBMV_cv2YSBrvSjAL7mNy My students who are low beginning, had no problem learning how to play this rather complicated group game. We used Quizlet sets that they had been studying at home. The program automatically divides them into teams. Playing the game took one round for them to understand that the answer could be on any device in their group. But after one round they were in it to win it. They did not want to go home last night. They just wanted to play and play. I want to talk about my thoughts on formative assessment. Total engagement in vocabulary, reading and listening is critical at the low beginning levels. Without these basic words and understanding, these students can't compete in the real world. Most teachers are now using Kahoot which is great, but I believe that different formative assessments affects the brain differently. Kahoot is great for in class multiple choice and interclass competitions. Quizizz is wonderful for homework. It creates a student leaderboard where students can compete against each other OUTSIDE the class. Quizlet focuses on vocabulary development. Quizlet live finds out if student understand these vocabulary words in a fast paced environment. Using all three formative assessment tools interchangeably creates for a more dynamic classroom with more engagement. The learning gains are evident as students develop interpersonal relationships with each other. The rigor can also be increased at this point as student are in the zone of proximal development. Thus the CCRS are can be met without hesitation. In addition, we worked on describing people. I had students find a picture of a famous person they were familiar with and describe them. Allowing students to apply vocabulary and sentence structure to someone that interests them, creates more autonomy in learning. They were also eager to add to their vocabulary and asked me to teach them more words such as 6 pack abs, muscular, goatee and bushy mustache. |
Susan Gaer
A veteran teacher tackling the lowest levels of ESL instruction. Archives
August 2017
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