Remote teaching during a pandemic: Part 5: Websites to use in your live lessons

Although I love my career and can’t see myself jumping ship anytime soon, teaching is tough. It’s been especially tough over the last year throughout the pandemic as we’ve had to get to grips with teaching remotely and trying to engage students in learning via a computer screen, when often we can’t even see or hear them. Luckily we have a ton of online tools at our disposal to enable us to do this, so I’ve compiled a list of my favourites.

Learning Apps

First up is Learning Apps. I found out about this great website last year when watching Esmeralda Salgado present at one of the Linguascope Show and Tell webinars during the first lockdown and it has been one of my most used websites since then. I’ll probably blog about it in more detail at some point, but in a nutshell it’s a website that generates a variety of activities including matching up games, cloze texts and crosswords from the vocabulary you input. One thing that I think sets it apart from gamification platforms I’ve used previously is the text to speech tool, allowing for listening exercises at home without you having to record your own voice. This makes it possible to do a range of listening activities including dictation exercises using the freetext input game.

Flippity

Thanks to Mike Elliott for sharing this one. Flippity can be a bit tricky to get your head around at first, but if you click on ‘instructions’ underneath the game you want to create and follow them exactly, you shouldn’t have any issues. You can copy and paste vocabulary onto the spreadsheet template, or type it in if you don’t already have a list typed up. Again, this is another site I’ll probably do a more in-depth blogpost on, but the opportunities are endless. It can create flashcards with L2 pronunciation so that the students can say the phrases out loud at home, before moving on to the ‘Practice’ tab where they can practise writing the spellings. Students can then do the matching game and type their fastest score into the Teams chat (or share a screenshot if you don’t trust them not to cheat). Use the Randomizer game to choose a sentence for students to translate. They could all type this into the chat and you could then select one student to press enter. You can also create a Scavenger Hunt with questions to answer or sentences to be translated either into L1 or L2.

Quizizz

This is a website which allows you to create engaging, interactive quizzes. ​You can either create your own quiz or use one of the ready made quizzes which are shared freely. You can also use the ‘teleport’ tool to steal questions from other quizzes. When creating your own quiz from scratch choose between ‘multiple choice’ or ‘fill in the blank’ questions. Students then visit joinmyquiz.com and type in the code shared by you on the screen (or type it into the Teams chat). The questions will then appear on their devices for students to answer, while you keep an eye on the leaderboard. I also tried out the Quizizz lesson with my year 10s last week and they absolutely loved it. Huge thanks to my colleague, Marc Hoy for making me aware of this and I’ll definitely be using it again soon. This allows you to make your live lessons interactive by uploading your PowerPoint slides and adding questions for students to answer in between the slides.   

Mentimeter

​Mentimeter offers a variety of online tools to allow teachers to quickly assess students’ knowledge and understanding: multiple choice, word cloud, open-ended, scales, ranking and Q&A. You simply add the question you want students to answer, then display the code on the screen. Students go to www.menti.com, type in the code and answer the question. All the responses will then appear on your screen.

Deck.toys

​Deck.toys is probably the one I’ve found the most difficult to set up so far, although I did manage it eventually without anyone’s help and simply through trial and error. Students work their way through a series of tasks, racing their classmates to be the first one to reach the finish line. To set it up you add the vocabulary you want the students to learn/practise. They can start off with a simple flashcard activity to familiarise themselves with the phrases. They then work through other games such as pairs, matching games, memory games and crosswords. One thing I really like about deck.toys is that part way through the game you can add an easy and a more difficult path for students to choose between, allowing for differentiation. I also like that you can very clearly see all of the students initials on the map throughout the game, so you know which activity they’re up to.

Whiteboard.fi

​Whiteboard.fi is really easy to use if you want to see students’ responses to your questions, without them seeing each other’s like they would if they typed them into the chat. You can see each student’s whiteboard on your screen, but they can only view their own.

As always, let me know how you're getting on in the comments below or on social media. If you find my posts and resources useful please consider clicking the coffee button.
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Dannielle x