How can we make our online sessions more engaging more interactive and get more involvement from
our students in this video I'm going to show you two techniques I'm going to focus on two
great technologies that we can use for free that will add variety to the sessions and get the
students involved and what's really powerful is that immediately you'll be able to look and see
what they're doing see the results and see their responses great way of checking understanding
great way of getting more engagement from your students let's get started okay so we're on zoom
at the moment and what i'm going to do is let's say you're doing a session and you want to get
your students to do an activity so you're trying to move them away from the session you want them
to quickly do an activity just to check their understanding you've explained something you've
watched the video and now you want to see well are they following me one of the best websites
that you can use is a website called word wall the reason is it allows you to make more than 30 games
so let me quickly jump over and show you word wool so we're on word wall and I'm going to just choose
a game and play it for you just to show you what it's like and then I'm going to show you
how you share it with students which is really easy in this game I've done a little lecture with
my students about GDP growth domestic product and then the students have to do an exercise to show
me that they've understood and they have to put in order all of the countries in terms of their
gross domestic product based on the information that i was giving them in the presentation so
it's a great way of checking understanding and the other nice thing about this activity is that
the students can get immediate feedback because once they do the activity they can click on here
it immediately gives them feedback but even more interestingly I also get the feedback because I
can set an activity share the link in zoom the students click on the link they do the activity
and then I can click on the results and I get the results and you can see that I use this technology
a lot when I'm trying to check understanding if I just click on any of my results let's say
for example this one here then I get immediate feedback on what the students have done whether
they got the answers wrong or right was there anything I need to cover again so it's absolutely
perfect for quickly checking understanding but then you finding out whether or not the students
did or didn't understand you so let me take you through an exercise of what I mean let's
say I've done a little lecture with my students about buildings famous buildings around the world
and I now want them to do this activity so I just quickly open up the activity and all I need to do
when I open up the activity is click on share and then I just sits click on set assignment I'm going
to ask for their names click on start and I share that link with my students so I jump back to zoom
I simply share the link with the students and now the students can click on the link and
actually do the activity let's actually look at that activity so you can see how this one works
so in this activity I click on it what happens is the students have to drag the word into the
correct place so we've got the first one here leaning tower of Pisa and we can see that we have
to drag this word into here to get the first one right and then we come to the second one which is
Sagrada Familia and again we've got to drag this one over here and so on so the students complete
the activity when they think they've completed it they click they get immediate feedback so I
didn't do very well and of course that information comes back to me almost immediately as the teacher
and this is one of the reasons why when I'm doing an online session using zoom and we need to check
understanding a lot because we can't see our students we're not in the room with them I do
lots of little activities just to check that they've been following me and why I like word
will particularly is quite simply this if we click on the activities create an activity
you have a huge number of activities at your disposal that you can use and I'm gonna quickly
take you through just making one to show you how easy these tools are to use so let's do a really
simple example just to show you how simple it is to use this technology I'm going to click on
match up and what I'm going to do is I'm going to match countries with their capital cities and I'm
just going to do the first one for you then I'll do the rest without recording it but I'm going to
put the country on one side and then the capital city on the other now I could be writing sentences
I could be using pictures I can do a lot more but I'm just going to do this really really quickly
when I want to add a new item I just click here and then I can add another item okay so I've added
my countries I've added my capital cities it took me just a few seconds to do that I can now click
on done and if I want to use that activity in the class with my students all I need to do is
click on share and when I click on share it then opens up the activity click on set assignment I'm
going to choose enter name click on start and then share that link with the student so you're doing
a lecture you want to check their understanding and so you share the link give them a couple of
moments to do it and ask them when they finish to write in the chat window done so you know they're
done and then once you finish the activity you can quickly click on the results and say okay
guys let's have a quick look at how you're doing now I just want to point out to you sometimes
I'm doing this with huge numbers of students or teachers if I'm doing teacher training 315
60 193 so you can do this in really big classes in fact I've done a few big sessions training
teachers in using zoom where I've had four or 500 people in the room doing the exercise in word wall
and it's worked perfectly now just to explain to you word will you can use it for free you
are allowed to use up to five games for free and then you can use those games again and edit them
so you can use them in a low level and then change the game and use it in a higher level if you want
to do more than five games unfortunately you will have to pay but you can use this as a free
tour and for a long time I did use it as a free tool and just simply kept editing my five games
so we've focused on word wall and if you want to learn more about word wall I've put up
here a more detailed video about it but now I want to shift over to a second type of activity
and this time it's not individual it's going to get students to collaborate in an area where they
can share their ideas and then we can look at what they've been writing now the great thing about
this technology is we can get our students to write collaboratively but we can also get them to
record and I'm going to show you examples of that so let's move over to this second technology now
and really think that you're going to like the option that this opens up in terms of
the way that we can get our students engaged in our sessions now this is another technology
I use a lot when I'm working with zoom or with Microsoft teams and I want to get the students
to collaborate and work on something and build more dynamics more interaction into my sessions
and this is slightly different type of tool because it gets the students to do things
collaboratively and let me just quickly show you an example so let's have a look at a couple
of examples first I'm going to show you this one here what happened here is I just all you do with
Padlet is you create a link to an electronic board and then students can add all their ideas up and
what I did in this one is that I got my students to add recordings so they could record themselves
it's very easy to do that okay so it literally is one click of a button you simply make the what
we call the electronic cork board you share the link to the court book and then the students can
interact on the court book with you and very quickly you can do these collaborative activities
where you get lots of ideas together for example in this one I wanted to the students to think of
questions to ask if they were going to meet the photographer Steve Curry and you can see here that
I get loads and loads of different questions all added onto the screen so you can do this in really
big classes it's absolutely brilliant to get that kind of collaboration together in the lesson let
me show you how it works so I'm going to just focus on how we make a Padlet and you'll see
how easy it is to actually introduce this into your teaching and learning
so to make a Padlet all I need to do is click on this button here make a Padlet
it's that easy and the one I'm going to choose is called we'll do grid okay so
grid is great if you want to get lots of people collaborating together and I'm just going to
write the question here on the on the right hand side and I'm going to say what do you like
most about teacher or learning in classroom let's imagine that I'm asking the students okay so I'm
asking them this question I click on next it's that simple I click on start posting and I just
share this link with my students so I just copy the link and then share it with the students
so back in my zoom room all I would do is just paste in the link now let's just show you what
happens the students can just click on that link and immediately it's going to open up the screen
they can double click on the screen then they can write their name so they can
write russell and then they can begin to add their post so really easy here I add sorry my
post here and then they click on published and immediately it's added now one of the other really
nice things about working with Padlet is that you're not limited to them just writing you can
get your students which is something I often do to get them to record themselves speaking
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get back to the video so you can see the padlet's a great way of getting our students to collaborate
together and then we can get all their ideas in one place but we can also use Padlet for audio
now if you want to learn more about Padlet I'm going to add a link to a more advanced video
about Padlet but I am going to quickly show you how now we can add audio rather than text so we're
going to look at a different one here I'm going to click on make Padlet and this time again I'm going
to select grid but the question that I'm going to ask the students to do this time I'm going to say
record yourself so I actually want them to do a speaking activity record yourself telling me about
how you try to learn English okay so let just doing this again as a really simple example
click on next now the difference in this activity is that again you're going to share the link but
when the students click on the screen what they want to do this time instead of writing they can
put their name again at the top of the screen they can write their name but what you want them to do
in this case is to choose one of the other options there's lots of options here they can click here
and you notice that for example one of them says audio recording so we're going to click on that
and then i'm going to click on this button here let me just okay just click on that button here
and just do a quick test testing testing one two three test it testing just explaining what i do to
learn english what I mainly do to learn English is to read recording done click on playback and save
that's where you can just again if you want to give it a title
my English and should really write that with a capital and then simply click on the save button
and that recording has now been added onto the Padlet so you can do an activity with
your students in the classroom where different students are adding up their Padlets onto the
screen really hope you like the video please like the video please share the video and of
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