Rewarding journey in this semester

Reviewing all the sessions about CALL, I can't tell how blessed I am to walk with our professor Paul and all of my classmates in these four months.


It has been an amazing and fruitful journey to learn how different online tools that can help with the language learning.  Truly I would say English learning is a fun and exciting experience with interactive and attractive online learning tools. This is something I have never expected before attending Paul's lessons. With the knowledge of different tools, I am excited about designing my own activities and trying it out in my class. When you know you can make use of new tools that can motivate students to learn English, it would be hard for you to stop trying out more and more.


Although it is a bit tiring to attend evening class, I look forward to learning different new tools introduced every lesson. I am inspired by Paul's passion for teaching. I love the sharing by Paul and Zoe on their flipped lessons and how they put different e-learning tools together in a lesson. It is encouraging and inspiring to know the positive response from the students. After the lessons, I have learnt to look for different opportunities to make use of the new tools in vocabulary learning, writing and speaking. It is great to reflect on my teaching approach and improve it.  

 

Paul mentions, "There is no such thing as 'good teaching'. There are only good teachers." =)

 

 

 

 

Thank you very much Paul for being my teacher! You are amazing!

 

 

 

Session 13: Connecting with students inside and outside of class

1. Use Google Forms to create a simple questionnaire (Click on it if you want to create one)

Though I have tried to create and fill in the Google Forms before, I haven't thought that using Google Forms would be a great idea to facilitate teaching and learning.

This is one of the most amazing features of Google Form. After collecting responses from students during lesson, the results can be shown to them in a graphical way instantly! What an efficient and convenient function! Students would be thrilled to know their classmates responses right away!

I have created a Google Form about "my dream job" to collect my students' opinioins. They will be asked to do this survey at the beginning of the lesson to find out what they think about their career. Students can view their peers' responses generated in charts before having discussion about the criteria of choosing a job and the concerns they have in mind.

You may refer to this link below if you are interested in taking this survey.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXSxA9virhXBNGrW5v6UYFfOQWeYOyOIzn1mQke9-acDti_g/viewform




There are two other popular survey tools suggested by Paul. Why don't you try to make a survey with them and see which one you like best?
- Survey Monkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/
- PollDaddy (integrated with WordPress): https://polldaddy.com/

2. Use GoFormative to create a quiz

To conduct a quiz to find out students' prior knowledge or test how well they know about the concept, Paul suggested we can try these.

-Quizizz: https://quizizz.com/
-GoFormative: http://goformative.com/  (mobile app; or web page)

They are student-paced, easy to make and fun to use. Compared with Quizizz, GoFormative has a powerful function. It allows users to upload worksheets (DOC, PDF) we created and add questions (MC, short question, True/False, draw) and add content (image, text block, view-only canvas, Youtube). More than that, live results can be generated immediately.

 

 

 

This GoFormative quiz can be one of the while-lesson activities or homework to test students' understanding of a concept. Teachers may discuss the results and clarify the concept with students if thier opinions are greatly divided. This would be useful to let teachers know the overall performance of the class and which area they may need to focus on. Moreover, teachers can find out how well students answer for every single question by showing green (for correct answer) and red (for incorrect answer) boxes.


You can find out more by clicking on the GoFormatvie quiz I created for my students about understanding an email reply. Try it out now!

http://goformative.com/student/#/assignments/YVFN799

Session 12: Flipped Classroom and E-learning lesson with Nearpod

Nearpod (Click on it if you are interested)

I haven't come across this tool in my lessons until tonight, which is mind-blowing. Introduced by our Professor Paul Sze and Miss Zoe Chan, Nearpod is a useful presentation tool for teachers to conduct a teacher-paced lesson with a wide variety of multimedia and interactive elements. Many thanks to Professor Paul and Miss Zoe their valuable sharing on how to make use of Nearpod in teaching!! It is impressive to see that Miss Zoe's students really enjoy the lesson and they able to master the new tools quickly!


As shown in the pictures below, teachers can add contents such as slide, Nearpod 3D and field trip.  For adding activity, teachers can add open-ended questions, poll, quiz, fill in the blank, etc. In this way, it would be easy to engage students and keep them busy participating in different activities. It would be less likely for them to feel bored.

I have tried to incorporate different kinds of elements in my first Nearpod, which is powerful. However, some functions are limited to a free trial of 30 days only. Thus, you need to pay for these functions in case you want to enjoy more features and enrich your presentation.

Through distributing a code to your students, teachers can control the pace of the lesson. Teachers can play a leading role in the teaching parts while requesting response from students in activities like quiz and fill in the blanks from time to time.

Let's take a look at my first Nearpod about invitation or you may refer to this link.
https://share.nearpod.com/vsph/na9qOSCcRy