I love using technology in my classroom. I’m lucky in that every single school I’ve ever worked in has been 1:1 – each student has their own device. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to integrate different sites in my classes throughout the years. Things like Google Form exit tickets, Quizlet games, Gimkit, and Google Maps make their way into my classroom regularly.
Over the past two years I had kind of slowed my new tech adventuring. My focus has been on comprehensible input methods and I was debating whether or not my use of technology was consistently helping my students acquire more language. It’s not that I love tech any less – I’m just trying to make sure that I’m very purposeful in my inclusion of technology in my classroom.
Watch a Quick Tutorial
Sites with a Focus on Acquisition
I’ve narrowed down the sites that I use regularly to those I feel best help my students with their language learning. Señor Wooly is huge for that, as are Quizlet and Gimkit, but I’ve also started to play around with Textivate and TeachVid a little bit!
Textivate and TeachVid come from the same creator – a language teacher who is consciously designing the site to get more uses out of a single resource and they’re both pretty amazing.
TeachVid allows you to create resources based on any YouTube video, or you can search & use pre-existing resources. Students can complete a variety of activities with the video – listen and select the chunks they heard, fill in the missing words, fill in missing letters, put the spaces between the words where they belong – TONS. You could have them do a specific number of activities OR you could do what is called a “Live Competition“. Essentially, students complete activities and get points based on what they do, and the points go up on a leaderboard!
When I tried this site last week, I wasn’t aware that TeachVid had this option, so I jerry rigged a version using my Leaderboard and Country wheel from my Juegos Olímpicos post. I would LOVE to try their version where it does it automatically, but here’s some pros and cons for you about doing it manually:
Pro: Using the country wheel to put students on teams means students can work together. This means no individual student is called out on the leaderboard (for good or ill).
Con: Manually updating points is a bit of a pain – definitely not a low teacher energy kinda day. I think the automatic version would be better in that sense! Sometimes they complete the activity so quickly I got a bit of a build up needing to enter their points.
Pro: It’s fun to tie in the Olympic march and country names!
Con: Like any time you have students work in groups, sometimes one student will shoulder the burden and others will kind of…glide along.
Reflection
I will DEFINITELY be using TeachVid again! We used a video that was a minute and a half long for almost 40 minutes and the students were so into it! There was a ton of reading and listening involved and I loved that! It was also so easy to set up and use – very low prep for me! Next time I think we’ll try the temporary session with the class!
Have you tried TeachVid before? What are your thoughts?