How do we teach when teaching online (guest post)

Laura Edwards talk on teaching online at the IATEFL Global Get-Together a couple of weeks ago was one of my highlights. If you’d like to watch the talk, it’s available to IATEFL members in the member’s area. Find out how to join IATEFL. She’s kindly agreed to share her ideas here.

This month I was part of the Global Get-Together, an online conference run by IATEFL. I was asked to present by telc language tests and I thought I’d talk about something connected to my work there in test development. But everything I came up with seemed irrelevant when most conversations with my teacher friends and colleagues revolved around coronavirus and their anxiety and frustration at having to suddenly teach online. I knew those feelings were completely valid. I have a Master’s in Education and Technology and ample experience with online teaching and I still felt overwhelmed. I also noticed that many articles and blog posts about teaching online explained the merits of various video conferencing tools, but few mentioned actual teaching. The implication seemed to be that once you get the hang of the tool, everything will fall into place, but that’s not the reality, which is why I decided to talk about how we teach when teaching online.

With schools suddenly shut, we find ourselves having to design materials suitable for online learning, change our assessment techniques and find new ways to manage student interactions, with very little preparation time. We’re also dealing with the stress of the situation, concern for our students’ well-being, and for self-employed or freelance teachers, there’s the potential loss of income to consider. 

Overwhelming really is the word for it! 

Adapting to the situation

I started my talk with a few inspirational quotes. This one from H. Jackson Brown, Jr. seemed particularly fitting.

As well as effort and perseverance, we need patience, hope, humour and plenty of self-compassion to help us face this challenge. 

It’s unfortunate that many teachers see teaching online as something to suffer through. Of course, it’s difficult to be positive about something that’s forced upon you. I can rave about how it creates great opportunities, frees us from geographical limitations, allowing us to learn whatever we want, wherever we are. But we’re human – we require time to grow accustomed to new ideas, technologies and teaching methods. The habits and biases we develop during our lives can cause us to reject alternative ways of thinking or acting. We face what’s known as the Adaptability Struggle. Change is difficult and some may question the appropriateness of a tool or initially dismiss something that doesn’t fit their perception of learning. Talking to students about their feelings and discussing the benefits of online learning definitely helps. If there’s a moment when your students aren’t reacting as you’d hoped or you’re feeling frustrated, remember it could be the Adaptability Struggle.

How learning happens

When it comes to actual teaching, the first step is to consider how learning happens in your classroom.

I teach large groups of mixed-ability adults, who are returning to education having worked for several years. To tap into their knowledge, deal with the differences in abilities, and make sure that in a group of 30 students everyone has a chance to speak, I incorporate a lot of pair and group work, projects, and peer feedback into my lessons. 

Make a list of the activities or approaches you use in your physical classroom and refer to it for guidance when planning your online lessons.

Exploiting the technology

Then think about the tech tools you have at your disposal. The SAMR Model helps us evaluate our use of a technology. SAMR stands for

• Substitution: Tech acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change
• Augmentation: Tech acts as a direct tool substitute with functional improvement.
• Modification: Tech allows for significant task redesign.
• Redefinition: Tech allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable.  

The first two refer to the enhancement of learning, the second to transformation. 

One example of the SAMR model is …

• Substitution: Instead of writing texts by hand, students type them out. 
• Augmentation: Students type their texts using word processing software, with spell check and formatting tools.
• Modification: Students use Google docs to share their texts with classmates and get feedback, perhaps even working simultaneously on the document.
• Redefinition: Students use their texts to make video presentations which they share online.

The goal is to move beyond merely replacing traditional tools, tasks or resources with digital ones, to a situation where technology is facilitating new ways of learning. Of course, under present circumstances, we may not be ready to think about transforming our teaching just yet. We might be thinking at the enhancement level, which is fine.  

The SAMR model helps us reflect on how we can use the tools we have to help our learners best reach their goals. 

Exploiting video conferencing

Many of us are using a video communication tool now. How can we change our lesson design to take full advantage of the tool? Can the tool offer an improvement?

One idea is inviting a guest speaker to join the lesson (if allowed by your school). This is something you couldn’t do as easily without the video conferencing tool. As you and your students are online anyway, it’d be easy to add a friend, colleague or family member to your meeting to be interviewed by the students. Even 10 minutes would be sufficient for them to talk about their job or industry, answer questions about their daily life, or give people a quick tour of their house (ideal if you’re teaching things in the house). It can be informal, even fun, while involving multiple tasks for students:

• Researching the speaker, for example using LinkedIn
• Writing an email inviting them to join, explaining why you are interested in speaking to them 
• Preparing questions 
• Planning who asks what
• Conducting the interview
• Writing a thank you email, outlining what you enjoyed or found useful
• Preparing a post-interview report

If the conversation was recorded (with the guest’s permission, of course), the video can be replayed for comprehension and vocab activities. So much learning from just a short video call! 

Recording your lessons or parts of your lesson is another example of using the tool to transform learning. Students can watch the videos as often as needed, the repetition helping them notice things they didn’t catch initially. This also helps them reflect on their own contributions. We’re often so focused on expressing meaning, we’re not as aware of our language. Students could transcribe short sections of their speech and reflect on their language. 

The SAMR model reminds us to be open to the opportunities that teaching online offers us, rather than seeing it merely as something to tolerate until we return to the classroom. 

The downsides

Moving to online teaching isn’t without its issues. In some cases, students’ verbal participation decreases, causing you to wonder if they’re paying attention at all. There are many reasons why this might happen. Students may be shy, uncomfortable with the technology, distracted or having tech issues. But they might also be unsure about when they should speak or trying to avoid the situation where everyone is speaking at the same time.

What can we do about this?

Start with Small Talk

Begin each lesson by greeting students individually and asking them how they are, giving each a chance to say something. Then ask students to write something in the chat box: what they had for lunch, what they did yesterday. This easy warm-up allows you to check that everyone’s equipment is functioning. It also allows students to try things out, get accustomed to the situation and connect with their classmates.

Create and discuss guidelines for communication

This is a must. Should students mute their mikes? Should they raise a hand (visually or using the function in the tool, if it exists) or type something in the chat box to indicate they want to speak, or can they speak at will? Do they have to turn their video on, or can they participate by voice only? Are they allowed to record the video call? (Consider privacy regulations.) These things should be communicated clearly in the first meeting or beforehand. It’s also helpful to explain why you set each rule.

If your expectations are unclear, you risk intensifying the adaptability struggle, resulting in some students initially rejecting the technology. We cannot expect students to participate the way we want them to if they don’t know what that is. This may sound logical, but we’re all guilty at times of assuming students understand our intentions and motives when, in fact, they don’t.

Try chatting

A lot of interaction in the classroom is spontaneous. The frowns indicating which students haven’t understood the task, the rolled eyes at your jokes, the groans when you announce an upcoming test, the witty comments. So much impromptu communication gets lost online if everyone’s on mute or has to wait their turn before speaking.

One way to facilitate this valuable communication is by encouraging written communication. The chat function in video conferencing tools is often used by teachers as a place to type corrections, but that shouldn’t be its only use.

Instead of asking questions to students individually, ask the group to respond in writing in the chat box. Give them enough time, then tell them to hit send. You can go through the answers to compare responses, ask follow-up questions and point out improvements.

You may consider moving some of your discussions to the chat box altogether. This takes a little getting used to but works essentially like a group chat on whatever messaging app you’d use on your phone. A written discussion gives everyone time to think up a response and prevents discussions being dominated by more confident or out-going students. This would also benefit the less confident speakers among our students who just prefer writing anyway.

It can be a bit chaotic but it’s worth it, as the use of this function not only helps increase participation but, going back to the SAMR model, we see it is transformative in that it allows for greater inclusion.

Using forms

Further ways of increasing interaction would be to use tools like Google or Microsoft Forms to share listening or reading comprehension questions with students. As the students complete the activity, you can assess in real-time how well each understands the material and quickly discover where misunderstandings lie. Questions can be multiple choice or open-ended, students can see which ones they get wrong or right, and you can display the results to the group for discussion. Gaps in knowledge are quickly identified, and you can deal with these questions without wasting time on the ones everyone got right.

Use the same tools to create feedback forms for your students to be used at the end of the session or week. Find out what students like most and least, and if there’s anything else they’d like to cover in the lessons. This gives students a voice, increases their engagement and aids your own development.

Many teachers find that once they move their class online, they suddenly become the centre point, through which all communication flows. They feel pressure to keep things moving and teacher talk time increases. The use of chat and survey forms can help prevent that.

Promoting engagement

What else can we do to ensure student engagement and interaction? Let’s return to the question of how learning happens in your classroom. If you were in the classroom, what would you be doing that you’re not doing online?

My big challenge teaching online is pair work and peer feedback. For me learning is a social activity and communication and collaboration with others are essential. Although some tools allow for break-out rooms, it’s not always practical. If your students can’t conduct pair work during your live session, how about moving that to outside the allotted class time? Give students a task to complete for the next session and assign them a partner. During the following lesson, the pair can report back to the group.

Peer feedback is another collaborative activity that increases students’ engagement and self-awareness as learners. The key to making it effective online is sharing the task rubrics with the students. Explaining to students what they have to do to complete the task successfully brings transparency to the evaluation process, and helps them effectively evaluate and help others. To really enhance the reflective process, students can create the rubrics or evaluation checklists with you. This further helps them develop a common language to use when giving each other feedback.

Students can also give feedback more informally. During speaking tasks, those listening could use pre-assigned emojis or a comments sheet with short sentences like ‘I agree’ or ‘Good vocabulary’. These could be quickly copied and pasted into the chat box, helping students give feedback faster while eliminating typing errors. The added advantage of this is that it builds community among learners, which is even more important when we are not all sitting in the same room together.

All of these things take practice, which I guess was the main message of my talk. We’re in a difficult situation, and it takes time to adapt to any change so we need to be kind to ourselves. I hope this post gives you a few ideas to help you along the way.

After university, Laura left Ireland to work as an English teacher. Now in Germany, she teaches adults and creates content for digital and print language tests. She has Master’s degrees in Education Leadership and Education Technology. She tweets as @edlaur. In her free time, she turns all devices off to read a good book.

Calmer seas

The title of this week’s post is inspired by Zhenya Polosatova. I’ve just read her post comparing the current situation to being in a boat – you can’t decide how the sea behaves, or what the weather conditions are, but you can decide what’s happening in the boat. I feel like this is the first week that’s been anything approaching a standard 5-day work week since the middle of March when all this started. The seas are definitely calmer now. About 90% of what I did was what I’d normally be doing at this time in the year: teaching, helping teachers, admin work for this point in the year, and some forward planning for next year. I feel like most of us have now reached the acceptance stage of the change curve, and some are moving to the problem solving stage.

Away from work, I’ve been going back to some of my favourite books in the past few weeks. I read Winnie the Pooh again after a gap of at least 20 years. I’d forgotten how full of wisdom it is. Here’s my favourite, a reminder not to worry about things you can’t do anything about:

My Zoom lessons

Testing times

Our first elementary teen lesson this week was a test lesson as we’ve reached the end of the unit. Revision was creating sentences from pictures using all the different forms we’ve studied, and a few minutes playing collaborative Quizlet Live with a bumper set of vocabulary (I described how to play this on Zoom here). The test was done through Google Docs, as described in the ‘Testing’ section of last week’s post. These were some of the problems I had and how we resolved them:

• Before they started, I shared my screen and demonstrated how to fill in the test.
• One student couldn’t copy and paste the link, then was pasting it in the search bar, not the address bar (she’s 11). The other students explained to her in Polish, and I managed to get her to share her screen to check she was pasting it in the right place.
• Another student couldn’t open the link at all. I sent her a version of the link I’d shortened using bit.ly so she could type it out more easily. (Top tip: you can edit the link so it’s words instead of a random string of letters and numbers. Don’t use capital letters as the links are case sensitive.)
• The same student then couldn’t edit the document. She hand-wrote the answers in her notebook. I saw her notebook and know she did this, but am waiting for her to email them to me!
• Speaking to students to solve problems disturbs the others. For the second class, I created three breakout rooms. You can rename rooms, so I called them ‘Doing test’, ‘Problems’ and ‘Finished test’. Once all students had their tests open, I moved everybody from the main room into ‘Doing test’. You can move students from one room to another as needed during the test by clicking ‘reassign’ next to their names. This is also a good way to keep fast finishers engaged.

• I had all of the tests open in separate tabs so could see that everyone was working, and roughly how far through they were. This is a low stakes unit test, so I’d asked them to put their books and phones on the other side of the room, but wasn’t too worried if they cheated – at least they’d learn something that way (I know none of mine did though – the test was well within everyone’s capabilities!)

With the first group, dealing with the test problems meant it took almost the whole lesson. With the second group, they had a few minutes at the end. When asked what they wanted to do, they said play Quizlet. Half of them played Match, posting their fastest time in the chat box, and the other half played individual Quizlet Live. This worked really well for 10 minutes, and I know they were all actively engaged, though I wouldn’t do it for much longer than that in a lesson as both of those are receptive, and there’s no productive practice there. It was a nice reward for getting through a whole unit of the book while being taught online 🙂

Pacing makes all the difference

We started a new unit in the second lesson, Entertainment. The first set of vocabulary is TV programmes. I thought that since the students enjoy Netflix, this would be very motivating for them. This was true, but it was too much so in the first group! It felt like chaos at certain points, when they all shouted over each other debating which shows are good and bad entirely in Polish. This was entirely my fault: I’d let test feedback drag on for too long in the first part of the lesson (20 minutes instead of the 10 I managed in the second lesson), and they’d lost interest, which meant that it was hard to get their focus back, and chaos ruled for most of the rest of the lesson. One student out and out told me he was bored!

As part of the test feedback, I experimented with annotation tools for the first time, having seen a teacher use them successfully during a drop in observation on Tuesday (thanks Ash!). I only realised I could do this once I’d already lost the first group, so it wasn’t very efficient as I tried to work things out on the spot. With the second group it worked like a dream, and I could hear them asking in Polish ‘What’s teacher doing to the screen? How’s she doing that?’ 🙂 I’ll definitely use annotation tools again, but plan more carefully how and when.

To introduce 12 items of vocab, we broke it down into 4 groups of 3, with the following sequence:

• Look at four pictures on the slide. What kind of shows can you see? Call out.
• Reinforce any they already know. e.g. Yes, well done! 4 is a reality show.
• Fill the gaps by introducing the other words, combined with the drilling below. If they were confused, elicit Polish examples of each type of programme.
• Drill the words a few times. Go backwards and forwards to keep reminding them, in as fun/pacy a way as possible. e.g. word 1, 1, 1, word 2, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, word 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1 2, 3 2, 1 3, word 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2 3, 4 3, 4 2, etc.
• They copy the four words into their notebooks, along with an example of that kind of show (in Polish if necessary).
• Repeat the cycle for 5-8. When drilling flick back to the 1-4 slide sometimes and re-elicit some of the words. Then repeat for 9-12, going back to 1-4 and 5-8 sometimes.

This kind of sequence works well in a face-to-face classroom, and I think it was passable in Zoom, but I feel like there are probably other more efficient ways to introduce these words. Let me know if you have one!

I held up a mini whiteboard and demonstrated step-by-step the creation of a TV guide, inspired by another drop-in observation (thanks Jodie!). The students made their own in their notebooks as we went along, ending up with something like this:

They then copied two questions into their notebooks: ‘What’s your TV channel?’ ‘What’s on at 6?’ This enabled them to go into breakout rooms and get a fuller TV guide. I realised afterwards that I should have added ‘What’s that?’ to give them a clear question for the genre. Both groups were engaged with this task, and there were some very creative TV programmes.

With the second group, there was time to drill this conversation and for them to practise it in breakout rooms:

This is their first encounter with the grammar we’re going to (!) study next week. Thanks to Jude G for suggesting the use of pictures and colour-coding to make the turn-taking clearer and to brighten up the slide.

Polish

In our Polish lesson we had a similar short dialogue between a victim, a police officer, and a thief. As well as using pictures and colour-coding, I also held different toys up to the camera who was speaking as I introduced then drilled the conversation. We all agreed that this made it much clearer which student (there were only 3!) should be speaking at each point.

Bydgoszcz bear (the victim), an IH money box (the police) and the penguin from the Wrong Trousers (the thief)

Mini reflection

If nothing else, teaching on Zoom has finally got me into the habit of providing very clear functional language and making sure students write it down, something I’ve only ever done sporadically before.

However, yet again there was no movement in any of my lessons (apart from at break time!). I’m finding it challenging to incorporate movement seamlessly with these groups, and the activities I’ve used previously involving movement meant me speaking a lot, and the students not really producing much (an 80-20 ratio according to the observer who saw me run it). Something to think about more for next week…

Management

The only major thing that came up this week was figuring out a way to test the youngest students’ progress (beginner/elementary 7/8 year olds). We realised that if you display the questions one at a time on slides, the students can write the answers in the chat box and you can then download the chat to mark later. For students with minimal literacy, they can be given two options and just type 1 or 2. To push them a little, you might have a choice of words for an item, or you show them the vocab and they type the word. (Thanks Char!)

Of course, this is also an excellent time to re-consider the place of testing in our classrooms, and decide how necessary it actually is. This ‘long read’ from the Guardian is worth it to see what one family have learnt from two months of home schooling in Italy, and how it’s changed some of their attitudes to education.

Useful links

Lots of teachers are sharing their reflections on the current teaching situation. Here are a few I know about:

• Rose Bard in Brazil, teaching small groups in Brazil
• Hana Ticha, teaching secondary in the Czech Republic
• Emma Johnston, teaching private language school students in Chile
• Rachel Tsateri, teaching private language school students in Spain
• Naomi Epstein, teaching deaf and hard of hearing students in Israel

I’ve linked to one post per blog, but it’s worth exploring: there are lots of useful things on all of their blogs. It’s interesting to hear how different people are adapting to the situation, and what they’re learning in the process.

If you prefer to listen rather than read (well done for getting this far down my post!), TEFLology created a podcast episode with the reflections of Anna Loseva (in Vietnam), Rob Playfair (in the UK) and Mustafa Nazari (in Iran). TEFL Commute have started a new series of short podcasts called Who’s Zooming who?

THE REST OF THE SERIES

Each week I’ve summarised what our teachers and I have learnt during the transition to online teaching. Every post includes some tips about using Zoom, activities we’ve tried out (many adapted from the face-to-face classroom), and reflections on how my teaching and management have been affected by working from home. Here are all of the posts so far:

• Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom
• Moving a school online: reflections from week one of using Zoom
• The transition to working from home
• The world is changing
• The new normal?
• Half a week
• Calmer seas (this post)
• What we do
• There’s always a story
• Smouldering
• What a difference a week makes
• The end of normal teaching

You may also find some other posts on my blog/which I’ve written useful:

• Separating work and life when you’re quarantined in one room
• Adding movement to online lessons (a guest post by Olga Stolbova)
• Adding movement to your online lessons (crowdsourced from IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• 4 tips for teaching teens online
• Online activities that really work when teaching teenagers online (a compilation of activities used by IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• Using NearPod for asynchronous online teaching (a guest post by Katie Lindley)
• Moving teaching online (IATEFL panel discussion recording – I was on the panel)
• How do we teach when we’re teaching online (a guest post by Laura Edwards)
• Mentimeter and word clouds
• TEFL (online) Tantrums (a guest poem by Jenna Edmondson)
• Fortune teller decision maker
• A post-corona SWOT analysis

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

Moving teaching online: IATEFL Global Get- Together panel discussion

Last weekend IATEFL offered a weekend of free professional development for the ELT community in place of thre IATEFL Manchester face-to-face conference. I was privileged to be part of the final panel discussion which was called Moving Teaching Online. IATEFL have kindly decided to share the recording of the discussion for free on their YouTube channel.

Recordings of all of the other sessions are available for IATEFL members in the members’ area of the site. Highlights were Laura Edwards’ tips for online teaching, Alex Warren talking about using TED talks, and Tammy Gregersen discussing teacher wellbeing. Here’s how to become a member if you’re not already: https://www.iatefl.org/get-involved/membership

Thank you to Shaun Wilden and Ros Wright for organising it, and to everyone whis given us such great feedback on the discussion.

Using Nearpod for asynchronous online teaching (guest post)

Katie used to work with me at IH Bydgoszcz. She previously appeared here writing a guest post about DIY festive homework, and is back now to explain how she’s teaching in a student-paced way using an asynchronous model, a great contrast to the fully synchronous model I’ve been working in, with only live lessons. Here’s what she’s been doing:

A bit of background

Much like everyone else on my Twitter, Instagram and Facebook feeds I have had to move my classes online. Unlike most of those people, I don’t have a class full of students who have reliable internet access and regular schedules at home. Although a few of them are sitting at home with wifi and no work to do, a lot of ESOL students are what our government has started calling “key workers”. In my classes I have shop staff, factory workers, warehouse workers, care assistants, cleaners, and of course, full-time mums.

I have a university lecturer who almost always uses a website called Nearpod in her lectures with us, and we follow along on our phones, seeing class results immediately on her screen at the front. She mentioned off-hand once that it was a useful website for setting work to be done at home, as it also has a function for “student-paced” lessons. Unfortunately, as I discovered when I tried to use it, you need an upgrade to use the student-paced lesson function. Fortunately, Nearpod is currently offering a free upgrade! It was a bit fiddly to get one, but it was eventually sorted out. I had to fill in a few forms, and even had a Zoom call with someone about what I needed. There was an option to become a “school” account, and link other teachers to mine, but I went for a simpler option to have the upgrade just to myself.

How do you use it as a student?

The easiest way to introduce you to the site is probably by using a demo lesson, so I’ve made you one (be warned, it’s not remotely professional in tone) Access is very similar to the Kahoot process.

1. Go to join.nearpod.com
2. Type in this code: JTOGF (this code expires on 16th May 2020, so get in touch if you miss it and you want to give it a go)
3. Put in a name or nickname

How do you use it as a teacher?

I’d say that once you get over the initial hurdles of getting an upgrade, you only need a little while to find your way around the website. If you have done the lesson above you will know a few of the possible features, but of course there are always more. If you want different classes to do the same lesson but keep their results separate, you can launch it more than once with different codes. This is helpful if you have many classes of the same level with different teachers.

Giving feedback

Once you’re ready, scroll down on the left side until you see “reports”. Each lesson is listed, and on the right there is a house-shaped icon with a pen on it. When you click on that you’ll be taken to a summary of your students’ results. At the top of that summary you can select “downloads” to view the results either by the whole group or by students individually. I download the student reports and email them individually to each student with feedback or suggestions of particular things to practise. This is very time consuming!

Pros and Cons

Although feedback takes longer, you are obviously not spending any time actually in class, so that does sort of balance out. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of options for students using phones to respond with audio, so they tend to spend a lot of time writing. After the Easter break we’re going to have a go at doing a mixture of Zoom and Nearpod.

Has anyone else tried asynchronous online teaching yet? What tools have you been using?

Katie is an EFL teacher back in her hometown in the UK, teaching ESOL part time at the local council and studying for her MA TESOL part time at the University of Warwick.

Half a week

We were lucky to still be able to take our Easter break – I know that some teachers had to work, and I hope that you’ll be able to recover that time at some point. We were off from Thursday to Tuesday, so working for only three days this week, with one English lesson and one Polish lesson. I used the time off to blog, catch up with friends, play Jackbox games with family and friends, and watch some of the fantastic online cultural offerings that we are currently privileged to be able to access, like Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and shows from the Royal Opera House.

My Zoom lessons

As we’re at the end of a unit, we wanted to do something a bit more project-based to pull everything together. I got inordinately excited (genuinely, I was jumping up and down and clapping my hands after I finished the plan!) at the Top Trumps lesson I planned, involving the students creating their own cards. Needless to say, the students were nowhere near as excited as me. It also only worked up to a point, but we live and learn…

The warmer worked excellently, with students writing a range of sentences about superheroes using all of the structures we’ve looked at in the unit, and asking for any adjectives they didn’t know, all based on this slide:

After a quick homework check, these two slides introduced Top Trumps. I asked a couple of students who were familiar with the game to explain how it works in Polish, then demonstrated using the number of pets the two presidents have.

To create our own Top Trumps cards, I first wanted students to come up with their own categories. I gave one example, highlighting the adjective ‘strong’ and not worrying about the noun for the moment.

They had 2 minutes to write 2 ideas each in their notebooks, then copied this functional language into their notebooks.

I demonstrated using the language to negotiate choices, then students went into breakout rooms in groups of 3-4. As they’re elementary students, I expected them to need to translate a few ideas, and told them this was OK, but found my group actually stuck to quite basic ideas. In their group they had to narrow down their 6-8 ideas to 2 ideas. When they returned to the main room, they wrote their ideas in the chat box. I then created a poll out of their suggestions:

• Go to https://fast-poll.com/ (there are lots of different free instant poll creators, but I liked the ease of this one)
• Copy and paste the question: Which Top Trumps categories do you want?
• Copy and paste possible answers from the chat box.
• Tick ‘Allow multiple votes’
• Click ‘Create your poll’
• Copy the link into the chat box for students to vote. Share the results on screen.

It was break time, but only took 2-3 minutes so if you have it prepared you should be able to make something similar quite quickly in your lessons.

As the students were voting I screen shared the results, and they were spontaneously calling out to the others which categories they wanted their classmates to vote for.

I copied the winning five categories into the categories slide, either as nouns or adjectives, depending on what the students had used. I added nouns/adjectives to the other side, and students copied all of the nouns into their notebooks.

Next I wrote each adjective into the chatbox, with the students suggesting the comparative and superlative structures they’d need to say to play Top Trumps. In hindsight, they should have made their cards first, then done this afterwards, but I planned it this way to help their understanding. I actually think it confused them more. The final slides from our four groups (mine and Jude) looked like this:

You can spot Jude’s groups by the much more creative categories they chose 😉

Then students had 5 minutes to create their own cards. They already had the categories written down.

They produced beautifully drawn cards, with the template carefully copied into their notebooks in most cases. The points scores were quite confusing in the first group (it originally said ‘You have 100 points’), and I should have given an example of how to divide 100 points between the six categories. Most, but not all, of the students interpreted my instructions as 100 points per category, so I updated this for the second group. This confusion meant we didn’t have time to play in the first group.

The second group went into breakout rooms in small groups to play the game. I wanted them to say how many points they had in the category they chose, then make a comparative/superlative sentence, but when I dropped into the rooms this wasn’t happening at all, despite having done what I thought was quite a clear example with a couple of students in the main room first. Instead they were just saying ‘Coco, speed, 20’, ‘Wonder Woman 2, speed 40’, then moving onto the next set of scores. I think I need to have clearer functional language for them which they could copy into their notebooks again. I’d be interested in any other suggestions here, as I’m planning for this to be the fast finisher activity in our test lesson next week.

Overall the students were engaged in the lesson, and we revised the structures to some extent. They had the chance to be a bit creative (something that’s been lacking somewhat in recent lessons), but I don’t think I was able to push their language as much as I wanted to.

Management

One of the privileges of being a manager is that I can observe other teachers. Watching the lessons has highlighted how good teachers are at giving clear instructions, supporting them by showing things on the camera and making notes in the chat box. They are using the technology confidently and in a range of interesting ways. There is a variety of activities and interaction patterns. The biggest problem, and one I’ve had too, is the feeling that we need to fill the silence, especially when students are writing in the chat box or working in their books. I’ve started to mute my microphone, or put my finger on my lips to stop myself from speaking at these points. I also try to make sure that comments add value, for example by giving named students specific feedback on what they’ve written in the chatbox.

Testing

Testing has been the other major topic of the week, conducting my first online placement test, discussing testing and assessment with IH DoSes from around the world, and building on the work of Jude F at our school who came up with a strategy for us to run tests for adults and teens. This is what we’re doing at the moment:

• Create a test in a Google Doc.
• Make one copy of the test per student with their names.
• Put the tests into a single folder.
• During the lesson, when it’s time for the test remind them to go to the toilet and get a drink before they start (thanks Lucie!) They put their books/phones somewhere out of reach of the computer (if they’re using one) to make it a little harder to cheat.
• Then share the folder link with edit permissions. You can share the whole folder, or if the group is small enough send a private message to each student with their link (prepare these before the lesson).
• Students can switch off their microphones while doing the test. If they have a question, they can come on the microphone or type in the chat box.
• When they finish the test, they tell the teacher. The teacher makes the test view only, then puts the student into a breakout room with a fast finisher task.

We can never be completely sure if students are cheating or not, but as long as the test is low stakes, we need to trust them. If we’ve been assessing them throughout the year, formally and informally (as our school does), we’ll be able to see if there are any huge differences between their offline and online scores. This has worked well for teen and adult students, and we’re currently working on assessing young learners. If you have any ideas, please do share them.

Here are a couple of tips:

• If you upload a test containing pictures into Google Docs and the pictures don’t show, right click and choose to display the picture ‘in line’ – this made them reappear when I did it.
• Don’t use activities which involve spotting a mistake. The red/blue underlining of the checkers will give away the answers!
• Make sure that students will be able to manipulate the test easily, even on phones. For example, ask them to underline words in a multiple-choice activity, rather than circling them.

Teacher training

Our weekly workshop was very different this week, based completely on sharing. Teachers suggested ideas they’d tried for conducting error correction, post-activity feedback, and revision activities. As they did this, I added everything to a Google Doc. There were lots of useful

Beyond our school, another shift I’m watching with interest is in how CELTA courses are being run, with many fully online courses now taking place, including online teaching practice. CELTA trainers are actively discussing the impact of this shift, a discussion I’m trying to keep up with. Because I only work on one course per year, I can’t see how this is affecting CELTees directly. As a recruiter of many CELTA graduates, I’m currently considering what extra training we might have to provide to CELTees who have never stood in a classroom before. So far I think we’ll need to work on:

• classroom presence
• ability to use classroom space
• monitoring a group speaking simultaneously (not in breakout rooms)
• including consistent pair/peer checks

What else would you add to that list?

Zoom learning, tips and activities

To share sound only (for example for a listening activity), click on screen share > advanced options.

If you’re sharing a video, make sure you optimise for video. Otherwise it skips frames and is very jumpy from the students perspective.

The classroom timers from Online Stopwatch are a great way to help learners keep track of their break times, though you may want to stick to a more basic one for in-class activities! (Thanks Char)

Useful links

If you’re concerned about security on Zoom, this guide has comprehension information about how to prevent ‘Zoom-bombing’ and keep your meetings as secure as possible.

General Plan IH Shanghai are just starting to emerge from the other side of the COVID-19 lockdown. Their Academic Director Simon Cox explains how it has affected them and what might happen next.

The IATEFL Teacher Development Special Interest Group (TDSIG) produces a regular podcast called Developod. The latest episode includes tips for teaching online.

The IATEFL Global Get-Together took place on Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th April, two days of sessions on a wide variety of topics. The recordings are available for IATEFL members after the sessions. Sessions I found particularly useful were Tammy Gregersen talking about teacher wellbeing, Hala Ahmed talking about working with second language learners who have experienced trauma, and Laura Edwards on how we teach online, all of which included practical tips and activities. Here’s how to become a member if you’re not already.

THE REST OF THE SERIES

Each week I’ve summarised what our teachers and I have learnt during the transition to online teaching. Every post includes some tips about using Zoom, activities we’ve tried out (many adapted from the face-to-face classroom), and reflections on how my teaching and management have been affected by working from home. Here are all of the posts so far:

• Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom
• Moving a school online: reflections from week one of using Zoom
• The transition to working from home
• The world is changing
• The new normal?
• Half a week (this post)
• Calmer seas
• What we do
• There’s always a story
• Smouldering
• What a difference a week makes
• The end of normal teaching

You may also find some other posts on my blog/which I’ve written useful:

• Separating work and life when you’re quarantined in one room
• Adding movement to online lessons (a guest post by Olga Stolbova)
• Adding movement to your online lessons (crowdsourced from IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• 4 tips for teaching teens online
• Online activities that really work when teaching teenagers online (a compilation of activities used by IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• Using NearPod for asynchronous online teaching (a guest post by Katie Lindley)
• Moving teaching online (IATEFL panel discussion recording – I was on the panel)
• How do we teach when we’re teaching online (a guest post by Laura Edwards)
• Mentimeter and word clouds
• TEFL (online) Tantrums (a guest poem by Jenna Edmondson)
• Fortune teller decision maker
• A post-corona SWOT analysis

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

My IATEFL history

Today was supposed to be the first day of IATEFL Manchester 2020, but what with one thing and another during The Great Pause, plans have changed, and instead it’s the first day of the IATEFL Global Get-Together. Inspired by Katherine Martinkevich and a huge bout of nostalgia, here is a self-indulgent post of some of my favourite photos from the IATEFL conferences I’ve been lucky enough to attend, along with links to my talks from each year. Putting it together led me down a lot of rabbit holes of talks and links I’d forgotten about!

Glasgow 2012

My first conference, which I attended when I was lucky enough to win one of the two IH John Haycraft classroom exploration scholarships, alongside Ana Ines Salvi, who has now become a friend.

Go online: getting your students to use internet resources was my first IATEFL presentation, and I’m very pleased to see that the tools I spoke about then are almost all still available. Quizlet and Edmodo are particularly useful right now. These two photos were taken at the end of my talk, and summarise the key part of the IATEFL conference and organisation for me: the people.

The PLN after my talk

The Twitterati after my session 🙂 (photo by Cecilia Lemos)

Liverpool 2013

One of the most enjoyable meals I’ve ever had, with these wonderful people:

I presented about the Personal Study Programme at IH Newcastle, where I was working at the time.

Harrogate 2014

This photo is in my office:

It was my first IATEFL birthday, with Ela Wassell getting lots of people to sign a card for me.

The day ended with a birthday meal at Wagamamas, with a waiter holding a lighter over a plate of plain rice and chicken for me to blow out while my friends sang happy birthday. This was the second week of my crazy diet – without my IATEFL friends, I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to go to restaurants and push them to cater for me.

My presentation was Stepping into the real world: transitioning listening.

I was also very excited to take part in the Pecha Kucha night with these fantastic people, talking about 19 things I’ve learnt about as an EFL teacher. < You can still watch the PKs in that post.

Manchester 2015

A great quiz night team:

Ela’s surprise baby shower:

This was the first year I attended a Materials Writing Special Interest Group pre-conference event, probably the single most useful day I’ve ever spent at IATEFL. It was called The Material Writer’s Toolkit.

My talk was called Write more! Making the most of student journals.

I shared lots of other conference photos in this summary.

Birmingham 2016

This was the first year that I attended as part of the IATEFL Membership Committee (now the Membership and Marketing Committee), and the first year I mentored another presenter. This was the year the IATEFL blog was born, which I curated until September 2018, and through which I met a lot of wonderful people and enjoyed hearing their stories. (The blog now lives here and is called Views.) It was great to feel like I could give something back to this community that has given me so much.

I was excited to see my name in print for the first time:

My talk was Taking back time: how to do everything you want to do.

Here’s my summary, with lots of my people photos.

Glasgow 2017

I took part in the Pecha Kucha debate on whether teachers should be paid more than bankers. There’s a recording in my summary blogpost. I didn’t present as my talk wasn’t accepted (completely justified – my idea was very wishy-washy!)

Apparently this was the year of no photos – I was clearly too busy having fun, including another IATEFL birthday, this time on the day of the MAWSIG PCE 🙂

Brighton 2018

By this stage, IATEFL is about meeting up with old friends.

James (who appears in both of those photos) showed a group of us around the stunning Brighton Pavilion, seen in the background below beyond other friends.

I presented my first How To session, jointly with Mike Harrison. We told people How to use social media at IATEFL and beyond. Mike also produced a fantastic Sketchnote version of my talk, in which I introduced ELT Playbook 1 for the first time:

Introducing the #eltplaybook number one by @sandymillin #iatefl2018 pic.twitter.com/vuxuzTWdUJ

— Mike (@harrisonmike) April 10, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

My conference summary is here.

Liverpool 2019

The inaugural TEFL Commute Games Night took place in Liverpool, immortalised in this podcast episode:

It was the third time I had an IATEFL birthday, my favourite kind of birthday 🙂

I How To-ed again in Liverpool, this time on How to present at an international conference. This morning was supposed to be a reprise of this talk for Manchester. My main talk was called Examining the impact of a low-level of teacher proficiency on student learning, in which I described my experienced of teaching Polish with a B1 level in the language.

I haven’t got round to writing up my tweets into posts from Liverpool yet – it’s a good job I’ve got another year to do it 😉 though hopefully it won’t take that long!

2020 online get-together

This year life is all a bit different. Instead of another MAWSIG PCE yesterday, and day one of the conference today, it’s day one of a two-day online get together. It’s open to anyone, and videos will be available to members afterwards. So far I’ve attended two fascinating sessions by David Crystal on language change and Tammy Gregersen on teacher wellbeing. The full programme is here. I’ll be speaking as part of a panel on online learning at the end of day 2. See you there!

4 tips for teaching teens online

This is a short post I’ve written from Cambridge University Press summarising four things I think it’s key for online teachers to do (not just of teens!) The short version is:

• Be their teacher first
• Keep it simple
• Include variety
• Experiment and reflect

You can read the full version on the CUP blog.

The new normal?

Yesterday marks one month since the day I first used Zoom, when Shaun Wilden trained IH DoSes in the basics, and tomorrow it’s a month since we trained our teachers to use it. It’s amazing just how quickly life has changed. During my crazy year of CELTA, I realised it took me three weeks to settle into a new place, and from this situation I now know it takes me three weeks to settle into new habits of any kind. I wonder if it will be that quick to settle back into ‘normality’ again afterwards? Or how long we’ll feel we need to keep 2m away from other people for?

Thanks to Lesley Cioccarelli again for this entertaining video from Wellington Paranormal, and shared by the New Zealand police, on how to get people to stay 2m away from you:

My Zoom lessons

I teach two groups of elementary teens, in tandem with Jude, who has two other groups at the same level at the same time. We plan our lessons together, and share the materials making. In the last few lessons, all on Zoom, we’ve looked at comparatives and superlatives, and words for features in a town (see links at the bottom of this post).

Quiz time

In our first lesson this week, we worked up to the students making geography quizzes.

As the students entered the lesson, I displayed this word cloud of all of the adjectives we’ve studied recently, made with wordclouds.com.

They had about 7 minutes to write as many of the adjectives in the chat box as they could, along with their comparative and superlative forms, while we dealt with tech problems and late arrivals.

After checking their homework, which included some quiz-style questions from the workbook, students played Quizlet Live in teams with the ‘My country‘ vocab. This is one of their favourite activities from class, and worked really well online too. I have 8-11 students in regular attendance, so we played in the main room on Zoom. Everyone put their microphones on. They got K points (our classroom management system) for speaking lots of English while playing, with phrases like ‘I’ve got it.’ ‘I haven’t got it.’ ‘It’s [cliff].’ While they played I had a screen share with the Quizlet scoreboard and a Word document which had the useful phrases and a copied list of who was in each team (I have two screens, but you could arrange everything on one equally well). They enjoyed it so much that it was the first thing they asked for in the next lesson! [Tip: mute the annoying music or they can’t hear each other! If you’ve forgotten to do it before the game starts, on Chrome you can right-click on the title of a tab and choose ‘Mute this tab’.]

Next up: error correction. I copied each of the following sentences, one at a time, into the chatbox, with students writing the corrected version. I told them the information is good, but the English is bad. Again, the group were really engaged with this.

• Asia is biggest continent.
• London is more expensive Warsaw.
• Cat is smaller than horse.
• Polish is the most easy language to learn.

The next part of the lesson didn’t go very well for the first group, as I didn’t make it clear enough that we were going to make a quiz. It reminded me that my expectations need to be clearer than ever. With the second group I told them straight away and it went smoothly. On a slide, I showed them an example of a quiz question about the UK for students to answer:

The highest mountain in Great Britain is in…

1. a) England
2. b) Wales
3. c) Scotland

Then I displayed the question structure and students copied it into their notebooks:

The [superlative] XYZ in Poland is…

a)

b)

c)

The [superlative] XYZ in Poland is in…

a)

b)

c)

We then looked at how the structure mapped onto the example question. Then we repeated this for a comparative question:

London has got a bigger population than Scotland.

True / False

…with the structures…

ABC is ___________ than DEF.

True/False

ABC has got a ____________________ than DEF.

True/False

To set up the task, we had the instructions on a slide:

Make your geography quiz! 

Work with your team. What’s your team name?

Write in your notebooks.

Minimum:

• 3 questions
• 1 superlative
• 1 comparative

Good luck!

Once they were in breakout rooms, I copied and pasted the instructions into the chatbox in each room. They had 10-15 minutes to make their questions.

Being online has forced me to think much more carefully about the support that I give students before they complete a task, particularly in breakout rooms, because I know it will be harder for them and me to spot and remedy any problems. This is good for me and them!

With the first group, technical problems meant everything had taken quite a long time, leaving only 10 minutes at the end. One student from each group chose a question to ask the whole group, who wrote the answers in the chat box. In the second group we had about 35 minutes, which meant they could quiz every other pair. I put them into breakout rooms with the following pairings:

1. AB / CD
2. AC / BD
3. AD / BC

After each round they came back to the main room and I added up points to give us an overall winner.

As a filler for the last couple of minutes, we had a slide of pictures of various things in groups of 3 (e.g. Mars/Venus/Mercury, or elephant/hippopotamus/rhinoceros – thanks Piotr!) Students wrote sentences with comparatives or superlatives in the chat box using these items, and some of them spontaneously made them into quiz questions.

I think this was the most engaging, varied and interesting lesson we’ve had so far on Zoom, mostly because it’s the first time there’s been plenty of time for them to play with the new language with a real purpose. Everything takes so much longer to set up and run on Zoom, and I haven’t been great at prioritising having a purpose for practising the new language so far: definitely something I should continue to work on.

Also, that was 6 activities for the whole lesson, 5 if you count the quiz setup and making it as a single activity. That’s a lot fewer than I would probably include in a plan for a face-to-face lesson – I’m learning to take my time a little more and not try to squeeze too much in.

As blue as the sky

The second lesson this week introduced as…as… comparisons through a range of similes like ‘as white as snow’ or ‘as big as an elephant’. Our warmer was Piotr’s pictures from last lesson, with students making quiz questions again. The context was the camping story from last week. Here’s how we clarified the structure:

I also clarified with a few more examples from the things around me at my desk.

They had time to complete the matching exercise in their coursebooks, then to play Quizlet match and send me their fastest time (another favourite game in class, including trying to beat my time), then to test each other in breakout rooms, one student with their book open, one with their book closed. To round off, they wrote the phrases they could remember in the chatbox.

So far, so normal.

Then, we tried a movement activity which was more thought-through than last week, although with the same general idea. One student selected an as…as… phrase from the book. Everybody had 1 minute to find an object which matched that description and bring it to the screen. As they brought it, I told them what they had (if I could work it out!) and wrote it in the chatbox. They then wrote a sentence using their item and the phrase. Two of my favourites were ‘My watermelon is as big as an elephant.’ and ‘My foot spa is as white as snow.’ 🙂 They produced lots of language, and because they had to hold the phrases in their heads while they found the items, they will hopefully remember them for longer.

Management

We did our first Zoom drop ins this week. It was fascinating to see how other teachers (who now all have far more experience than me!) have adjusted to the new medium. As in a physical classroom, it’s immediately obvious to students that somebody new has arrived, so it’s important for the teacher to introduce the observer, and for the observer to briefly come on the camera and say hello so that the students know who’s watching. Apart from that, being able to sit in the background with camera and video off is fascinating. Thank you, teachers and students!

I also attended two lots of international training via Zoom. The first was a session for IH DoSes run by Barrie Roberts, the DoS at IH CLIC Seville, about online placement testing. This is something I’ve wanted to instigate for years, and now we have no choice. About time too!

The second was run by Giovanni Licata and Michael Haddock for AISLI, the Italian language school association, about including every student in our lessons. We looked at examples of how materials can be inclusive to different identities, and accessible to students with different SEN. Key tips were to remove time limits that might create extra stress for students, to provide choices whenever possible, and to include a wide range of different activities (my favourite was how many times could our group jump on one leg/hop in one minute) and interaction patterns, both of which I’ve been trying to do anyway. If anybody else has tips on working with students with SEN via Zoom, I’d really appreciate them.

I really hope this kind of training format becomes more common after the current crisis is over. I really like the fact that we can share our ideas internationally on an equal footing.

Zoom learning, tips and activities

• When you’re a student/participant and someone is sharing a screen, you can switch the video and the screen share. You could tell students to do this briefly if you need to draw attention to something on the video but don’t want to wait for the screenshare to stop and start.

• If you’re sharing your screen but need to see the participants’ videos, share the window, not the whole screen. Resize the window to make it fill half of the screen, then use gallery view on the videos to see everyone’s faces. I’ve also just discovered the side-by-side mode, which I think will do the same job.
• To stop yourself from talking when the students are working, put your fingers on your lips. This helps to combat the feeling of awkwardness when everything has gone quiet and you can’t see what they’re doing.
• Get students to put them thumbs up, either literally or digitally, when they’ve finished what they’re doing, or when they understand the instructions. I use this a lot, especially when they’re copying things into their notebooks.

Lesson planning tips

It’s more important than ever to avoid unnecessary presentations of language that students already know, as things generally take much longer on Zoom. Assume that they know at least some of the target language until you find out that they don’t. Use tasks that prioritise eliciting/using language before you move into presentation mode. Simple examples for low levels would be ‘What can you see?’ with a slide of all of the items that you’re going to work with that lesson. For higher levels, try out task-based learning. At the very least, use a controlled or freer practice activity at the beginning of the language part of your lesson, then present afterwards, filling in the gaps you’ve noticed from students.

Break down long language presentations into smaller chunks, particularly with younger students. Again, this is good practice anyway, but more important than ever. Deep dive 2-3 items, then repeat for the next 2-3, then repeat the next 2-3, rather than working on 9 shallowly, then going back over all of them. For example, if you have 8 phrases for buying clothes accompanied by images, here’s possible sequence (which I estimate would take 60-75 minutes, depending on the students’ confidence):

• Show them all of the images on one slide. Ask them where it is (a clothes shop). This sets the context.
• Ask them to write what they can see in the chatbox. This shows what they already know. Maybe that includes a couple of the phrases.
• Take the first 3 phrases. Try to elicit phrase 1 in the chatbox or on the microphone. Perhaps give them the first letter of each word as a clue. This mental processing and challenge will help the students remember the phrase. Once they have it, students repeat it 2-3 times, perhaps with an action if they can think of one. Repeat for phrase 2. Then get them to repeat phrase 1,2,1,2,2,1,2,1 switching between them quickly – make it fun! Add phrase 3. Repeat all three: 1,2,3,3,3,2,2,1,2,3,1. Play with the phrases, and keep the pace up.
• Ask students to write the three phrases in the chatbox. Help them as needed. Once they have the correct version, they copy it into their notebooks and draw a picture to help them remember. They number each item to make them easier to refer to later.
• Repeat for phrases 4-6.
• Then phrases 7-8.
• Send students into breakout rooms. They can use their pictures to test each other on the sentences. You can pop in and out and help with form or pronunciation problems.
• Bring students back to the main room. Challenge them to remember as many phrases as possible in the chatbox. If they need extra support, show them the images again. This will show which parts of the form they’re still having trouble with.
• Then students can create their own dialogues in a clothes shop, which they can practise in breakout rooms. Perhaps, they can use clothes they have at home to ‘buy’ and ‘sell’. This gives them a chance to move around. Again, you can do error correction and feed in extra language in breakout rooms.
• Any students who want to can perform their dialogue in the main room. Praise all of the students for their effort.
• Put one or two problem sentences into the chatbox for students to correct.
• If time at the end, challenge them to remember all of the phrases again.

Include more ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ in your lessons to help students stay engaged and remember the new content. Again, this is good practice generally, but at home students have so many more distractions. By creating more natural breaks in the lessons, students can process the content more. Breaking down the language above into three smaller groups creates 3 beginnings and endings instead of just 1 for example. (This is definitely something I read about when preparing a session on engagement last year, but I can’t find the link now! Any ideas where it might be?)

Random thoughts

These have come up during discussions with colleagues through the week – thanks for asking the questions or making the statements that prompted them!

• In the gallery view on Zoom, we’re all equal. Teachers and students are the same size, or trainers and trainees. What influence does that have on our and their perceptions of the lesson/training session? (Thanks Julie Wallis for pointing this out)
• Parents are watching our lessons. While this might seem quite worrying at times, it’s actually a fantastic opportunity to show the range of activities we do with their children in class. For some children, it may mean they are reluctant to speak at first, but give them time and hopefully they’ll get used to it. It may be the first time some parents have ever heard their children speak English!

Questions I have

What are the safeguarding implications of being in a breakout room with one or two under 18s, when you are the only adult there? How can we work around this? Does anyone have any guidelines for this? (Apart from just not being in the room – but sometimes tech failures mean you end up in that situation.)

Is there anything extra or different we should be doing/thinking about when working with students with SEN that we wouldn’t need to consider in a physical classroom? We’ve tried to address the needs of our students as well as possible, but I’m wondering what we might have missed.

Useful links

Sarah Mercer, Tammy Gregersen and Peter MacIntyre would like teachers to complete their questionnaire “to inform understandings about the effects of the move to online and remote teaching on teachers’ health and wellbeing” as part of their ongoing research into teacher wellbeing.

5 of our teachers from IH Bydgoszcz share activities they’ve tried out with teen or young adult students in this post on the IATEFL Young Learners and Teenagers SIG blog (all I did was compile them in one place!)

The IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG (LTSIG) are presenting a webinar every Friday on How to teach English online. I attended Graham Stanley’s session on engaging students, including how to exploit the Zoom virtual backgrounds. I hadn’t tried them before, but am now trying to work out how to exploit them in my lessons. You can find the full list here, including highlights from webinars which have already happened.

THE REST OF THE SERIES

Each week I’ve summarised what our teachers and I have learnt during the transition to online teaching. Every post includes some tips about using Zoom, activities we’ve tried out (many adapted from the face-to-face classroom), and reflections on how my teaching and management have been affected by working from home. Here are all of the posts so far:

• Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom
• Moving a school online: reflections from week one of using Zoom
• The transition to working from home
• The world is changing
• The new normal? (this post)
• Half a week
• Calmer seas
• What we do
• There’s always a story
• Smouldering
• What a difference a week makes
• The end of normal teaching

You may also find some other posts on my blog/which I’ve written useful:

• Separating work and life when you’re quarantined in one room
• Adding movement to online lessons (a guest post by Olga Stolbova)
• Adding movement to your online lessons (crowdsourced from IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• 4 tips for teaching teens online
• Online activities that really work when teaching teenagers online (a compilation of activities used by IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• Using NearPod for asynchronous online teaching (a guest post by Katie Lindley)
• Moving teaching online (IATEFL panel discussion recording – I was on the panel)
• How do we teach when we’re teaching online (a guest post by Laura Edwards)
• Mentimeter and word clouds
• TEFL (online) Tantrums (a guest poem by Jenna Edmondson)
• Fortune teller decision maker
• A post-corona SWOT analysis

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

Adding movement to online lessons (guest post)

My friend Olga Stolbova posted these suggestions on facebook a couple of days ago, and agreed to share them on my blog. Thanks Olga!

Some simple tips on how to add more movement to your online classes. These are some of the things I do and they work for kids and adults.

1. What do you have in your fridge?

For lower levels

Ask your student/s to stand up, go to his/her fridge and remember 5-7 things that they have have in their fridge, allow 1-2 minutes. Then they return to their online classroom and tell you what they have.

For upper levels

Ask the students to check their fridge and tell you what they may be running out of and what they need to buy, ask them to check their fridge and make a list using the words for packaging ( cans/ pack, carton, bottle etc.)

To make it more interactive

Write a list of words that you think a student may have in his/her fridge, and the student/students make predictions about their teachers’ fridge. Set a time limit of 30 seconds – 1 min depending on their level, then you read the items from your list and the students go to the fridge and check. Take turns. It can be done in different formats. If you have a 121 class, then it is teacher-student; if you are teaching a small group, students can work in pairs or you can do it as group. You can use different questions depending on their level. For lower level students you can just read the list, for slightly higher levels you can use: Do you have any bread? Is there any… in your fridge? Is there a bottle of milk in your fridge? To focus on containers you can ask clarifying questions for the second round. e.g. Do you have a carton of milk or a bottle of milk in your fridge?

2. Can you name all the green/pink/blue/white objects in your bedroom/kitchen/living-room?

Students need to walk to their room and check the objects. You may ask them to take pictures of all green/pink/blue etc. objects and send them to you, though make sure you have parents’ permission for them to do this.
You may either set a time limit or ask them to take pictures of limited number of things, e.g. Take pictures of 4 green things in your flat)

3. How many rectangular/oval/triangular objects do you have in your flat/room/kitchen?

(This idea is from Lisa Margolina. Thanks a lot!)

Students are given some time to walk around and take pictures of all/some shapes at home, similar to the one with colours. They may not know the name of the objects, so you can help them with that when they show the object to you or send you a picture of it (with permission), or you can ask them to use an online dictionary to find the name. Set a clear time limit for that one.

4. What can you see from your window?

A student is given 1 min to go to the window and describe what he/she can see outside. If the window is far from the computer, allow 1 min for the task and make them remember/note down 4-5 things. Then they can tell the rest of the class what they can see. Then you may ask several students to compare it with their view. Encourage them to find more than 5 differences. Again, this can be done teacher-student, student-student, teacher-students.

5. Where’s the mirror?

Make 2 lists of 5 objects each: 5 pieces of furniture and 5 objects, e.g. list 1: a pillow, a vase, a mirror, a cat, keys. List 2: a desk, a bookcase, a bedside table, a bed, a windowsill. One student shows his list to the rest of the class. The students and the teacher make predictions about where the objects are. Those who guess correctly, get one point for each correct answer, and the objects are crossed out from the list. Take turns.

Olga Stolbova is a freelance teacher and a teacher trainer, based in Sevastopol, Crimea.

She has taught English in the USA, China, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, Russia and Ukraine and has run more than 30 CELTA courses around the world.

She loves teaching, travelling and coffee.

If you’d like more ideas for teaching on Zoom, including how to incorporate movement into lessons, read Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom.

The world is changing

The title of this week’s post is inspired by this cartoon from Michael Leunig which appeared on my facebook stream this week:

Thanks to Lesley Cioccarelli for bringing it to my attention.

The personal stuff

This week has been my first full week of being at home – I left the flat on Saturday morning to do lots of food shopping, then the next time was Friday morning to treat myself to a 30-minute walk for my birthday (which was far more stressful than I expected as I was constantly looking to see what everyone else was doing).

I live by myself, so the thing I was most worried about when I knew that we might end up being at home was feeling isolated, but actually I think I feel more connected than ever. Yes, I don’t have actual humans in front of me, but I’ve had more social conversations with friends in the last few days than I have for a very long time, and my birthday was far more fun than I expected. It included a virtual birthday party (thanks Laura!) and a group of teachers playing online games from Jackbox (thanks Connor!).

It’s been a week of learning to adjust to the new normal, and of maintaining a sense of perspective: my birthday was the day the world hit the milestone of 1 million confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide. Just over 20% of those people have recovered, but over 50,000 have died.

If you’re not already, please, please, please STAY AT HOME. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, the weather is getting nicer in the northern hemisphere as spring arrives. Walks are good for your mental health, but how far do you need to go? Can you stay close to home? Have you got a garden you can go out in instead or a balcony you can use? By staying at home, you are protecting other people, and giving health services and scientists valuable time to respond. You’re also reducing the likelihood that COVID-19 will enter your home in the first place. Please also think before you buy anything that needs to be delivered – do you really need it? Is it worth putting that delivery person at risk?

THANK YOU to those who are continuing to do essential jobs, like working in health services, making deliveries of food and medicine, and caring for vulnerable members of the community, and to every single one of you who is staying at home.

Management

On Tuesday and Wednesday I worked my way through all of the teachers, having a 10-15-minute chat with each to find out how everything’s going. Somebody from the IH DoS group suggested this – I can’t remember who, but thank you very much! This covered each teachers’ groups, their 121s, whether the tech was working, their general mental health, and any other problems or questions. I’m really glad I did this, and hope to repeat this periodically while we’re still on this pattern. I learnt that attendance is generally very high, barring a handful of students with tech problems (many of which were resolved between the first lesson and second), some exam students are handing in more work than ever, some teen groups are speaking more English than ever (they can feel the need for it now!), teachers are experimenting with functions on Zoom, and we’re still a strong community.

My Zoom lessons

This week we revised comparatives and added in superlatives in my elementary teen lessons.

At the start of Zoom lessons, I prefer to have something that students can get on with using the chat box for the first few minutes while we wait for everyone to join the lesson and deal with any technical problems. We repeated the comparatives challenge from last lesson the first time round, then in the second lesson one student called out an adjective, and everyone had to race to write the comparative and superlative forms. This helped me to see what aspects of the form students remembered and what they needed to revise.

Exploiting the chat box part 1: functional language

In the first lesson, the context for introducing superlatives was a multiple-choice quiz about geography. For example: Which is the longest river in the world? In order for students to do this in breakout rooms, they need some functional language. Here’s how I staged this:

• Get them to open their books to the quiz page and show me.
• Lay the book face down (I showed them this on my camera).
• Tell them: “You’ll work together to do the quiz. You need some English to help you. Look at the chat box.”
• Paste the first phrase with one word blanked out (I had them all prepared in another document). Elicit the missing word – a student comes on the microphone to say it.
• If nobody can guess, give them the first letter.
• Gradually add letters until somebody knows it.
• Ask all students to copy the phrase into their notebooks.
• Repeat for the other three phrases.
• Paste all four phrases into the chat and ask students to check they have them all.

We had four phrases in total, and the chat looked like this by the time we’d finished:

Exploiting the chat box part 2: post-activity feedback

As students returned to the main room after they’d completed the quiz in breakout rooms, they wrote all of their answers in the chat, but nobody pressed enter until I counted down 3-2-1. That way I could see everybody’s answers at the same time, and there was no risk of copying from other people. It’s also a good way of double-checking that everyone participated (though I knew they had from popping into the breakout rooms). We then checked the answers as a group, with me telling them the answer and them debating if they disagreed. Feedback took 5 minutes, but they were definitely engaged throughout. Here’s what our chat looked like at the end of this stage:

Both of these strategies worked really well and I’ll definitely use them again.

I didn’t think this one through properly…

In contrast, the final activity of the lesson absolutely didn’t work the way I wanted it to. The vision:

• A student calls out an adjective.
• Everybody runs to find something ‘superlative’ matching that adjective, e.g. the oldest, biggest…
• We choose which is the ‘superlative-est’ in the class.
• Students write a sentence in the chat box using the superlative.

The reality:

• A student chose ‘long’.
• Everybody went to find the longest thing they could. This took about 3-4 minutes.
• I tried desperately to get students to produce a superlative sentence in the chatbox.
• Instead, they told me the measurements of the thing they’d got, and in some cases wrote it in the chatbox (the funniest was the pug who accompanies most lessons, who I now know is 26cm long thanks to T and his ruler!)
• I realised that any sentence they produced needed the word ‘thing’ as we hadn’t specified a noun and few people knew the names of the things they’d grabbed.
• I tried not to laugh at the inappropriateness of the sentence I was trying to elicit: ‘XYZ has the longest thing’. Oops!

The whole process took the final 7 minutes of the lesson – thankfully I’d already set their homework, so I could just let them go once we were done.

If anyone has an idea for how to exploit students’ environments to produce superlative sentences at elementary level, please comment!

Raising interest

The second lesson was based around a cartoon story in the coursebook about the characters going camping. I had the first panel on a PowerPoint slide, and used a simplified see – think – wonder thinking routine to raise interest. Students wrote sentences starting ‘I see…’ in the chat box for 90 seconds, then ‘I think it’s / he’s / she’s…’ for the next 90 seconds. I tried to elicit potential problems when you go camping, including some of the language they’d shared in the chat box – the first group didn’t get it, but the second group did (they’re a little older). We then watched the story video to check their predictions. I’m still feeling out how much I can push this level – my teen experience is limited, and I’ve only had these groups since late February.

Performing a story

After checking comprehension of the cartoon story, I wanted to experiment with students performing it. I’ve had mixed success with this kind of activity in the physical classroom and haven’t tried it with these groups before, but it seemed to work quite nicely in the end, with students generally engaged, and a few of them getting really into it.

• (Group 1 only) Microphones off: I read the story line by line, students shadowed my reading.
• (Group 2 only) Microphones off: I drilled some of the words group 1 had struggled to pronounce.
• Breakout rooms: in pairs, students decided who’d play each character. They read out the story a few times. When I dropped in, I corrected pron and encouraged them to add emotion.
• Main room: pairs performed one panel each, with everybody performing the punchline of the story together.

Zoom learning, tips and activities

• Various posts/articles have been shared about privacy/security problems with Zoom this week. Zoom are working hard to combat these issues as quickly as they can. We’re already using waiting rooms on all of our classrooms, so teachers have to approve anyone who joins. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to read any of the links, but thanks to Phil Longwell for linking to this video produced on April 3rd:

 

• When students are having connectivity problems, try communicating with them using the ‘rename’ function, as they may not be able to hear you or use the chatbox. I haven’t tried this year, but it might work.
• There’s a lag of 5-10 seconds between when you share a screen and when the students can see it.
• Some students appear twice in the room, with a separate video/audio feed. We suspect this happens if they’re on mobile devices and use the ‘dial in’ function for audio, though we’re not sure. This is a function you can disable in the settings. (Thanks Ruth!)
• If students are working in groups on different Google Docs simultaneously, you can have them all arranged on your screen at the same time. You can then highlight anything that’s a problem for them to sort out. (Thanks Ruth!)
• If you want to screen share and also see all of your students at the same time, arrange your screen(s) so that the software/document to share only takes up half of the screen. Share only that document, not the whole screen. Then use the other half of the screen for their videos: click on the gallery view icon, and resize the box until all of their videos are there. This is particularly useful if teaching young learners. (Will hopefully have a screenshot of this next week)
• After setting up breakout rooms, go to each briefly to check everyone is on task. Then stay in the last one for a little longer to do some correction/upgrading. Vary which room is last each time. If time, sit in one or two other rooms for a longer period too. This ensures students still get hot correction/upgrading of their spoken language, without it being in front of the whole class.
• Breakout rooms have various options, including:
  • Move all participants automatically – this means students don’t have to click on anything.
  • Close automatically after X minutes – good for timed activities.
  • Countdown timer after closing – I’ve found 30 seconds allows students to finish what they’re saying and come back. 60 seconds is too long if everyone comes back except one student!

• Post-activity feedback ideas:
  • Teacher reads out answers (good if only one or two are there)
  • Student reads out answers
  • Nomination chain
  • Chat box simultaneous typing (see above)
  • Chat box – fast finisher types
  • Teacher types in chat
  • Display on slide/doc and screen share
  • Display with one or two mistakes for students to find
  • Display on course book software (if you have it) and screen share
  • Any other ideas? Please comment in the chat
• ‘What’s missing?’ works really well and can be run in a range of ways (thanks Jodie!) For example, a series of pictures on a PowerPoint slide with a white box on one of them. Screen share the slide on edit mode, students say/write what’s missing. Stop screen sharing, move the box, share, repeat. Alternatively, students go to breakout rooms. They show the pictures in their books/on homemade flashcards, but cover one up. Their partner says what’s missing.

Questions I/we have

All ideas gratefully accepted – please add comments!

• How can you quickly ensure students have successfully completed activities in their course books/notebooks during the lesson, especially if their video isn’t working or the image is poor? (I’m mostly taking it on trust at the moment, but maybe you have other ideas)
• Providing feedback on spoken language is challenging to do evenly across the group (and I only have 8-11 students!) I feel like the balance has shifted from the physical classroom. There I can give hot feedback on speaking to everyone throughout the lesson, and spend a little more time with individuals on writing while ‘ignoring’ others at that moment (obviously not ignoring them, but that’s the best description I can come up with!) Online, they get lots of hot feedback on writing in the chat box, but when speaking in pairs/groups I have to ‘ignore’ the others as I can only be in one breakout room at a time. It’s great that everyone is getting so much writing practice and feedback, but we don’t want to neglect their speaking. Apart from ‘sitting’ in a breakout room as mentioned in the tips above, any other ideas for what we could do to increase feedback on speaking?

Useful links

Laura Patsko did a webinar called Moving your instruction online – fast!

Russell Stannard continues to add to his Zoom playlist, including ideas for keeping lessons student-centred.

A timely reminder from Kirsty D. Major, just as I was about to post this: Walk a mile in their shoes – or stay a day in their self-isolation house.

And, as every week, this one: Phil Longwell’s Covid-19 Mental Health and Wellbeing post.

The rest of the series

Each week I’ve summarised what our teachers and I have learnt during the transition to online teaching. Every post includes some tips about using Zoom, activities we’ve tried out (many adapted from the face-to-face classroom), and reflections on how my teaching and management have been affected by working from home. Here are all of the posts so far:

• Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom
• Moving a school online: reflections from week one of using Zoom
• The transition to working from home
• The world is changing (this post)
• The new normal?
• Half a week
• Calmer seas
• What we do
• There’s always a story
• Smouldering
• What a difference a week makes
• The end of normal teaching

You may also find some other posts on my blog/which I’ve written useful:

• Separating work and life when you’re quarantined in one room
• Adding movement to online lessons (a guest post by Olga Stolbova)
• Adding movement to your online lessons (crowdsourced from IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• 4 tips for teaching teens online
• Online activities that really work when teaching teenagers online (a compilation of activities used by IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• Using NearPod for asynchronous online teaching (a guest post by Katie Lindley)
• Moving teaching online (IATEFL panel discussion recording – I was on the panel)
• How do we teach when we’re teaching online (a guest post by Laura Edwards)
• Mentimeter and word clouds
• TEFL (online) Tantrums (a guest poem by Jenna Edmondson)
• Fortune teller decision maker
• A post-corona SWOT analysis

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)

Dictionaries, corpora and using notebooks

Here’s a selection of links I compiled for our teachers following up on a workshop I ran on Friday 27th March. I showed them around a few online dictionaries and corpora, and we briefly talked about how students could make use of their notebooks to record language. I know there are many other useful resources, but this is what we managed in 60 minutes. Feel free to add them to the comments!

Dictionaries

http://www.oald8.com – Oxford. Good for having a really short link (!), clarity of information and layout, checking levels of words, finding out if words are academic (they have academic word lists), depth of information

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/ – Good for checking levels of words (3* = most common, 0* = not common at all), really new words (people can suggest additions), the ‘red words’ game

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ Good for the Essential British English dictionary, some bilingual dictionaries, checking levels of words, the grammar reference

https://bab.la/ Polish-English bilingual – good for seeing example sentences in both Polish and English, starting to expose students to reading definitions in English (not just translations)

https://www.wordreference.com/ bilingual dictionaries in a range of languages – has some example sentences (though bab.la has more). The forums can be quite useful, though students should use them with caution as there are occasionally incorrect explanations.

Corpora

https://www.english-corpora.org/ has a collection of corpora. When choosing, think about the date the language was collected (how recent is it?), the sources (spoken/written/internet/balanced?), and the language varieties (British? international?)

Some of the functions are hidden behind the ‘more’ button on the search page.

• List = examples of the language in use (these are called ‘concordance lines’)
• Collocations = write the example word, then click POS to select the part of speech. The numbers tell you the positions before or after the word you want to search in. e.g. ‘depend’ + ______  PREP    L 0 + 2 R     gives you a search for prepositions that appear in the first and second position after ‘depend’. You can also put a specific word in the second search box, e.g. ‘depend’ + ‘on’    to only get results with that pair of words.
• KWIC = Key Word in Context. The one that goes multi-coloured depending on what part of speech the word is.
• Word = the one that I love 🙂 This function isn’t available in all of the corpora. It shows you everything: definition, synonyms for different meanings, topics, common chunks, collocations, and concodance lines. It also links you to the pronunciation of the word in different contexts on the three sites below:

http://playphrase.me/ clips from film/TV containing your word/phrase (though can’t see wider context) – good for comparing how a word/phrase sounds in different accents/voices

https://youglish.com/ pulls from YouTube videos. Gives link to whole video with phrase highlighted. Speed adjustable. Gives you pron tips below.

https://getyarn.io/  Pulls out the key phrase and enables you to see the next/previous clip to give you more context. Shows you more links below with the same phrase. Has a ‘next line’ quiz which could be addictive! But no clear content filter!

Another great corpus for language learners is SKELL: Sketch Engine for Language Learning. I like the Word Sketch and Similar words functions.

Find out more

https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/iatefl2016corpora/ – including links to activities using corpora, and guidance on SKeLL, which is another easy-to-use corpus to explore, specifically designed for language learners

https://eflnotes.wordpress.com/ for Mura Nava’s blog and free ‘Quick Cups of COCA’ ebook which teaches you how to exploit the COCA corpus.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/corpus-linguistics for a free online course in how to exploit corpora and make your own (they’re also used in the social sciences, history and all kinds of arenas!)

https://reflectiveteachingreflectivelearning.com/2014/03/02/helping-language-learners-become-language-researchers-wordandphrase-info-part-1/ about wordandphrase.info – another corpus to explore. Good for checking how difficult the sample text you’ve just written might be for your students, and for finding out whether a word is more common in spoken/academic/newspaper/etc usage.

Using notebooks – examples

Maria’s notebook: https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/when-i-teach-fce-again/ (link in the flo-joe section)

https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/howtolearnalanguage/ (the ‘think about colours and layout’ section)

https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/russian2/ (the ‘writing’ section’)