CALL 11_Nov 25 Reflection

In this session, we have explored a number of tools which are useful for presentations. They are Padlet, Prezi, Powtoon, Adobe Page, Wix, Pinterest and TES Blendspace etc. We also did two tasks on Padlet and Prezi.
I've used Padlet for brainstorming ideas in a writing lesson with my students before. The results were amazing, in a way that can arouse students' motivation and promote collaborative learning. Besides brainstorming, Paul has introduced us to another use of Padlet, which is to present teaching materials of a unit. Since we have a server drive for teachers to store materials in our school, and I always use Google Drive to store my teaching materials, Padlet may not be such appealing to teachers like me. However, it can be very useful for students. Teachers can put the useful materials of the unit on Padlet, then give students the link and they can easily access worksheets, PowerPoint files or videos used easily at home. I think this can foster independent learning, especially for less able students.
I also like Prezi and Powtoon very much because they provide very cute and fancy layout for presentations. Primary students will surely like them. Also, the clear layout requires presenters to type in POINTS only but not clumsy sentences, which is helpful for teachers and students to develop better presentation skills.

CALL 11_Nov 25 Prezi Presentation

Here is my Prezi Presentation for introducing the characters of the story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!

Click me to view the presentation!

CALL 11_Nov 25 Padlet wall for presenting teaching materials

Please take a look at my Padlet wall for presenting teaching materials for the new chapter!
Link is here!

CALL 10_Nov 18 Reflection

In today's CALL session, Paul introduced a number of e-learning tools for writing, including text-based digital story telling, using wikis in collaborative writing, and producing ebooks on websites. We tried storybird.com and mystorybook.com to create our own ebooks. I quite like the two platforms with several reasons.
First of all, the platforms are simple-and-neatly designed as well as very user friendly. Even lower primary school kids can follow and use easily. The two platforms can serve different purposes. Storybird.com is more favourable in promoting creative writing, as students can use the same set of pictures but to create different stories. This can absolutely foster their creativity and imagination.
Mystorybook.com can be used as a simple presentation platform which allows students to use their own pictures or photos and write simple sentences about them. Maybe next year when I have a new lower primary class, the first thing I will ask them to do at the beginning of the term is producing a self-introduction ebook and present in class, so that they can have an opportunity to practise writing and speaking :)

Nov 18 Using Padlet in a writing lesson

In today's writing lesson, I tried to use Padlet for my students to post their instant ideas during the brainstorming stage. The outcome was surprising and there were some observations that I would like to share.

First of all, my students were 100% engaged in the activity. They were totally focused on their work and tried to post their ideas to the platform. Nobody was hanging around or waiting for other people to give them ideas. That was really great! 

Secondly, they were more serious in today's brainstorming process than they had been before. I think one of the reasons was that their ideas were immediately shown on the platform and everyone in the class could see right away. 

With a bit of positive reinforcement (by me ^^), a mini competition was created among themselves and it happened naturally. Each of them was trying their very best to contribute ideas. I was stunned by their hard work! 

Last but not least, Padlet provides a very good opportunity to let teachers give immediate feedback. When I highlighted some good adjectives and sentences by one student, the others just tried to include similar things in their posts. This is just so POWERFUL! 

Padlet Link

CALL 10_Nov 18 mystorybook

Take a look at my story produced on mystorybook.com :))

CLICK ME PLEASE :)))

Nov 17 Trying out Google Forms Quiz & Actively Learn with students

Today, as half of my class went on an exchange trip to China, I cannot teach many new things. To make the best use of the lesson time, I planned to let my students try out some of the e-learning tools in class.
First of all, I asked them to do my Google Forms Quiz on -ed/-ing adjectives. The process went well. The best thing I like most was that I could show their results right away on the screen and explain tricky parts. My students told me they quite like it than the usual pen-and-paper quiz :)

The second tool I tried with my students was Actively Learn. They like the reading comprehension very much and what's so exciting was that they could 'like' other people's open-ended answers!!!!!! I didn't know that there is such a function before my students actually found it out! They're so smart! After their big discovery, the class was heated up and every student was trying to see other people's answers and gave 'likes'! That was totally out of my expectation and that was the real INTERACTION :)

CALL 9_Nov 11_Reflection

In this session, Paul introduced a number of tools for creating interactive reading comprehensions tasks, they are Read Theory, J Cloze, J Cross, Nearpod and Actively Learn.

Read Theory sounds really appealing for teachers because there is only a little work to be done by the teachers but students can read a wide range of materials. But when I tried to take the pre-test, I found it quite challenging for students and there are quite a lot to read and answer. I’m afraid my primary students may not be that motivated in this sense. Also, the analysis of the questions is not that easy for primary students especially for those less-able ones. I think Read Theory suits the needs of secondary school students more.

J Cloze and J Cross are amazing as teachers only need to copy and paste passages to the software and then a very interactive task is done right away. I think apart from training students with cloze passages, J Cloze can also be used as an interactive revision task for dictations. Teachers can blank out key words or difficult vocabulary items in the dictation so that students can practise the spellings. Maybe students will get in love with dictations by then. :P

Nearpod is one of the main tools that our school is promoting. The comprehensive functions of Nearpod make it useful in creating interactive lessons not just in reading. It is also possible to use it in grammar lessons. In the coming two weeks, we are going to use a Nearpod lesson (for the very first time!) for teaching the second conditionals. Stay tune for my updates!

See the lesson here:

https://app.nearpod.com/presentation?pin=NJFMY

CALL 9_Nov 11 Reading comprehension on Actively Learn

Please go to my newly created reading comprehension exercise on Actively Learn!

Click me!
Class Code: 9b33f

CALL 9_Nov 11_JCloze & JCross

Please check my newest JCloze and JCross out :) They are based on a short passage about the interesting animation "The Incredibles"!

"Mr Parr used to be Mr Incredible, one of the greatest superheroes. Now he lives a normal life but he wants to be a superhero again. One day, an evil man makes up a story and invites Mr Parr to a faraway island to get rid of him. Mr Parr turns into Mr Incredible and goes to the island. He soon gets into trouble. Luckily, his family find out and they come to look for him.I was never bored because the plot was so exciting and amusing. I loved the animation too."

JCloze is here!

JCross is here!

CALL 8_Nov4 Reflection

Tonight, we tried two very ‘fashionable’ tools for speaking activities, Adobe Spark Video and Screencast-o-matic, which I enjoyed a lot.

I have watched a lot of Screencast-o-matic videos on the Net but to be honest this is the first one I produced by myself. The production experience was very pleasant. I tried to screen-cap PowerPoint slides and explain a grammar item. It will be very useful for schools which adopt flipped classroom. For those which are not yet ready, the videos can still act as a resource for students to do revisions.

Being more impressed, I used Adobe Spark to produce a video of myself reading aloud a poem. I enjoy using Adobe Spark very much simply because of its super user-friendliness. Basically, I just need to prepare some pictures and then I can start to make my video step-by-step. The steps are really simple that I don’t even need to ‘learn’ how to use it, and the end product is SO professional! One more thing I like it so much is that it has lots of ready-to-use templates for users to choose from. These templates are very useful to both teachers and students, especially in a primary school context.

Teachers can use the ‘Teach a Lesson’ template to make their lessons more fun and appealing to motivate students. Meanwhile, students can make use of the ‘Tell What Happened’ template to record a self-created story; or use the ‘Show and Tell’ template to describe something to their friends; or very potentially, they can use ‘Make Up My Own’ to produce a presentation, which is particularly useful in any subjects not just English. 

Last but not least, the tool works so well on iPad which is advantageous both in the classroom setting and for students to use at home. I am seriously thinking about doing a tryout speaking project with Adobe Spark for the term paper!

CALL 8_Nov4 Screencast-o-matic video

I am very pleased to present my first ever Screencast-o-matic video! I used it to explain a grammar PowerPoint to teach students -ed and -ing adjectives :)

Please click me for the video!

Call 8_Nov4_Read aloud poem (Adobe Spark Video)

Let's check out my latest read aloud poem created with Adobe Spark Video!

Enjoy =)

Click this link!