Live question and answer session about resources

Hello. Welcome to our live Q&A. I’m Anna Lloyd. I’m head of Education Technology here at Cambridge English. Hi. I’m Mary Whiteside and I’m Digital Content Manager for teachers. So what we’re going to do today is answer as many of your questions as we can. We’ve had a look at all the ones you’ve sent in already. Thank you very much. And we’ve organised them into four main areas that we’ll talk about. You can also ask questions during the event. If you post them, we’ll try and answer as many as we can. So the first area that we’re going to talk about is pros and cons. We had lots of questions about this.

We’ll talk about things like how to make a choice, what are the things you have to worry about, that kind of thing. The second thing we’re going to talk about is device types. We’ve had lots of questions about this as well, particularly about mobiles. The third thing we’re going to talk about is how to get started, how to choose what tools to use, how to train yourself, how to set rules for your students, that kind of thing. And the last thing we want to talk about is particular apps, websites and tools. Lots of you have posted really good ideas, and we have some more to share as well.

We’d like to start off, though, by telling you our three top tips for working with digital tools or resources, in fact, any resources. So my first tip would be make sure that the resource you are using adds value. So does it add to the value of what you’re teaching? Does it improve the lesson? If so, choose it. The second thing would be, is it easy to use? So you might see a tool that looks great. Try it out yourself. Ask a colleague to help. You really need something that you feel comfortable with. So try it a few times. And third tip. Does it actually help the learning outcomes for the learners?

You have to think, does this improve the student’s English language? So if you answered yes, then definitely go ahead with those three tools. So we’re going to start with some of your questions. First one. I’ve got one from Yunita, and it says, is there any certain learning resource that can specifically be used for passive classes? I think there are lots. I think, generally, students are more engaged when you have technology, partly because they’re interested in it anyway, but partly because it means they have to interact and they can’t just sit back. I’d recommend something called Kahoot as a good place to start. We’ll put all these links up on the step afterwards, so don’t worry about taking notes.

Kahoot is something that any student can use with their own device. Or if you have devices to use in class, you could use those. You make a quiz. Just the normal questions that you would ask. You give them a code. They all just use their mobiles and vote something like A, B, C, or D. Kahoot isn’t the only one. There were some that will work offline as well. And we’ll share resources about that. When they have to vote and they have to engage and they have to think, it’s impossible for them to be passive. And you get to find out if they have good understanding of what you’re asking.

And any tool that you use, you can ask your students to use as well. So when you’ve used Kahoot a few times, you can ask the students to make their own Kahoots for each other. So that’s an excellent way of making sure they’re active, and also getting them to teach each other, test each other. I have another question about how to reduce teacher talking time using resources. So I think, again, try and put the emphasis on the learner doing things. So maybe get the learners in groups to produce presentations on a grammar point or a topic.

Getting the emphasis onto the learners with any kind of resources, I think, is a really good way to increase their activity, but also that has the effect often of reducing your own teacher talking time. Thank you very much for the questions coming in. So we’ve got more questions. Please write any questions as they come up. So another question, is the - thank you, Amal, for your question about the whiteboard. So is it considered to be a material? So I think the whiteboard is an excellent resource and you can use it in lots of different ways. It’s definitely a tool in the broader sense.

So lots of people use their whiteboards in the same way they use other things, but there are lots of different ways that you can use them. Again, talking about interaction, whether you have a normal whiteboard or an interactive whiteboard, getting your class to use them, as well as you, is an important thing, to get them up and doing something. And you can also have - some people have very small whiteboards that their students use. And this is a really nice thing to do, where you get the students to hold up the whiteboard and it says yes or no in answer to questions.

And that’s a really nice activity to keep you aware of what your students know and keep them involved. So yeah, I think that’s a really good resource. The most obvious thing for your whiteboard, if this is a interactive whiteboard, this will work anyway, but if you don’t have one, the whiteboard’s a good place to get - you can get quite inexpensive projectors that work with, So if you only have one device, a teacher’s device, and you want to project that onto your normal whiteboard, that’s obviously quite a good thing to do as well, and quite low tech and not expensive. Yep. And we were talking about - we talk about the pros and cons of resources.

So obviously these are pros that you keep students active, you keep them involved, you keep them, learners more autonomous in the lesson. But the con, of course, is that if you introduce too many tools or resources or different things, sometimes students can get distracted. So I think I definitely recommend choose one thing that you want to do or one new thing you want to do in an existing resource you have and then carry it out, try it out. That’s a really a good way to get better and understand what works, what doesn’t work. And have a reasonable expectation.

It can take while for a class to get used to a new routine or you to get used to new technology or them to get used to it. So always give it a decent amount of time when you’re trying. I’ve got a question from Amal, but I’m not sure I understand Amal. How can I make resources from simple materials? Maybe if you could add a bit more information. I’m not sure what you mean by simple materials. We’ll try and answer that one for you then. So I’ve got a question from Dante. It was from before. So one of the things we said we’d talk about is specific sites and specific apps. So this is the question.

Do you think tools from Google educational apps are good for the classroom? I’m sure a lot of them are. And I’m sure a lot of the apps in any app store probably are. But it’s quite hard to tell. There are some really good sites. There’s one called - it used to be called Graphite. Now it’s called Common Sense Media, I think. We’ll put a link. And this is a site designed for teachers - it’s mostly in the US, but it’d be useful for anybody - where the site review apps and so do teachers. So it has two reviews.

Those sorts of things are the best places to go to to look for apps in general and to check that ones you want to use have good reviews. They also usually have tips for how to use them and things like that as well. There’s also a really good list on Twitter. If you use the hashtag #mfltwitterati, there’s lots of people - this is mainly teachers sharing about teaching. Lots of different languages, French, Spanish. But there’s lots of resources there that are really useful. So that’s definitely a good place to go and find resources as well.

And if you’re not sure where to start or you’re not very confident with technology, I think start with one of the ones that we talked about in the webinar recording that you saw. So something like Quizlet or Kahoot or Padlet are really widely used. And you’ll find thousands of YouTube videos from people explaining how you can use them. Yep. Sara’s given us a good question. So what’s a good novel to introduce to beginners? So yes, Sara, thanks for your question. That sounds very challenging for your beginners. I think if you look for maybe short stories and short texts, that’s quite a useful thing to do. For a novel, that might be a bit more difficult if it’s a longer book.

But definitely there’s loads of specially graded readers that you can use with beginners. So if you look on some of the publishers’ sites, you should be able to find some samples and see what your students like from them. So we’ve got another question here that somebody submitted before. So this is from Marcelo. Are textbooks still a good resources in class? My students think that this kind of material is boring. I have textbooks as my guide, but I’m always bringing extra material. So I think they are still a useful resource. They’re very well-structured. When a teacher is very experienced, they know, understand the curriculum well anyway.

But for a lot of teachers, this is the best way to make sure all the objectives in class are covered. Even if the material is a bit boring, you can sometimes replace that or supplement it as you suggest. But keeping the structure will make sure that you cover everything in the curriculum. And actually, going back to Sara’s question, I can see, Ganit, you’ve answered - given Sara some suggestions. Thank you. That’s great. So Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton. I think that is a really good point as well, Sara, that you can ask your colleagues and other teachers if they can suggest books they’ve used with their class that work really well.

So the best way to find things suitable for your learners, ask similar teachers who are teaching similar level students in similar areas, and you’ll get great ideas. So that brings me to kind of one suggestion. So another question we had was, when there’s so much choice, how can you choose out of all of the tools and resources available? So a good thing to do is you just choose one tool, make sure it adds value, and relates to the learner outcomes, and then try it for one week. And in your school or in your organisation, you can have lots of teachers all doing this. Everyone tries one tool.

You maybe create a shared area, like a Padlet, and you post your opinion at the end of the week saying what you liked, what you didn’t like, and whether you’d recommend it. And that’s a really good way to try new tools and also to share with colleagues. Yep. Then you don’t all have to experiment. You can take it in turn, then learn how you go along. So we’ve got a group of questions around introducing mobiles in class. We said we were going to talk about devices. Most people, judging by the comments, don’t have one computer for every student.

But it’s more and more common that students either have their own mobile device or that you have some that can be shared in class. So we’re going to talk mostly about that. Because if you have a device for every student, you’re very lucky. So we wanted to talk about some of the ways that you can introduce mobiles in the classroom without it being too much of a negative distraction. So we had some really good ideas posted in this MOOC and the last time that we ran this course, around working with your students to set rules. So obviously, you would never just introduce something without agreeing with your students what it’s for and how it would be used.

You would probably want to talk openly to parents and your colleagues about this as well. But the same bit of advice came up time and time again, which is to sit down with your students and put together rules for how they should be used in class. And that using a device is a privilege that they’ll need to earn by sticking to those rules. Yep. And there’s lots of things you can do with - so mobiles, if they’ve got them, you can use lots of activities with pictures, using cameras. So students go around the building, they look for pictures of things related to water, for example, and then they show them to each other, and then you name the item.

So that’s a really nice activity with just a single resource that the students have. That also works well if you can’t have devices in class for some reason, either because they’re not allowed or because you don’t have internet. So something like that, some project where they can do outside of class and then bring in or send in or send to you by putting it on a Padlet means that you can also use technology without having to have it in the classroom if you can’t do that. We’ve got another question from Amal, who says she has some cards and charts. So how can you make resources without them being really expensive?

So I think, like in Monica’s handbag lesson, you can make resources out of anything that you have around. So if you have charts, maybe you my thought would be you have half the students have the chart, the other students don’t have the chart, then the person who has the chart has to explain it and their partner has to draw it, for example. Same thing with cards. You could get students to make their own cards, and they could make their own pictures of a vocab set that you’ve been teaching. And different groups could make different pictures. Then you could use the cards, and use them as a game at the end of the week.

Maybe you show the pictures and the students have to say what the names are. So lots of ideas for, yeah, really simple things you can do. And again, ask other teachers. Ask other teachers on the MOOC, ask other teachers in your school. I’m sure they’ll have lots of other ideas that they can share with you too.

So there’s another question here about large classes. So obviously, it’s a lot more difficult with large classes. But something like Kahoot or Plickers, which we’ll send you a link to, which is a card that they hold up instead of using their phone to vote, work well in large classes, because everybody has to be engaged without you having to watch everybody and listen to everybody. So they’re perfect for that kind of thing. And another thing. So for a large class, small class, there’s loads of existing resources. So TEDx talks are really good. You can give them to your students. If they’ve only got internet at home, they can watch it at home.

They can come in and retell the information or summarise it, something like that. Or you can give different groups in the class different topics to watch, and then they retell each other what they saw. So when you look online, we talked about YouTube, but there’s also other sites. We’ll put them all on the step where you can find other people’s lesson plans and ideas. So most of these are for large classes, because that’s what’s normal.

And they’re usually organised so that the good ones include a main set of work, but also a help sheet for those who are having more trouble, and some extension work for those who finish more quickly, because of course, that’s what most teachers have to do. So you can usually find lots of good ideas. Yep. So yeah, Sara’s asking for resources for very large classes of 90-plus. That’s very big. Yeah.

So here probably I would try and put people into smaller groups, getting them working on projects. I think you would have to have some of your class where you were talking to the whole group, but then you could put them into projects where they have to - so a nice activity is to get your students to decide how they would introduce themselves to the rest of the group. This works really well with a really big group, because there’s so many people, they often don’t know each other very well at least at the beginning. So if you put students into small groups, they can choose the resource they use. And it could be something on paper.

It could be PowerPoint or Prezi. They choose what they want to say about themselves and then they deliver it. So that’s a really nice activity to get big groups to know each other, to get them to produce something, and also to share information personalised about themselves. So as Mary was saying earlier as well, anything that you would use - well, most things that you would use yourself in class, like making a quiz on Quizlet or creating a presentation on Padlet or project on Padlet, you can ask students to do for each other. So they can make quizzes for each other.

That cuts down on the amount you have to do and it keeps them busy in groups, and it’s a different kind of understanding they have of the language that you’re teaching. Yeah, so a really good tool for this is probably Quizlet. You can get your students to make a set for your class so that they can all revise it. They recycle the vocabulary when they make the set. But also, it means at the end of the term, you’ve got lots and lots of vocab sets for them to realise what they’ve learned, to practise, to revise it. So that’s a really nice collaborative, useful activity to do.

So some people have been talking about designated mobile time. So that’s a good idea. That probably brings to one other point. If you are using mobile or internet or devices, then you probably need to involve the parents, and think very carefully about eSafety. Make sure your students know the kind of information they can give, they can’t give. Make sure you’re thinking about where you might share that information, how you’re going to share it. If you’re sharing something internally in the school, that’s probably fine. But on an external, Facebook, then you need to check. Check the ages and check that everyone is happy. It depends. Your school might have their own policy.

If they don’t, for some reason, or if you’re just looking for resources, if you just search for eSafety, and in any subject, because it’s mostly the same, it doesn’t have to be in English, you’ll find lots of lesson plans and guides and good ideas and videos how to talk about this topic with your class and how to talk to parents about it.

So we have a question that we had before from Adolfo about adapting materials to meet the learners’ ILPs. So ILPs, individual learning plans. This is really where digital resources can really add value, I think. So if you ask students to look on a site where there’s lots of different activities, a really good one is the Cambridge English one, which has lots of different activities to practise, different grammar points, different vocabulary. And you can ask students to find activities that will help their particular area.

So if your ILP has noted this person needs to extend their vocabulary, they need to practise third person ‘s’ for their grammar, they can go find the activity, practise it, and tick off to say they’ve done it. So yeah, I think technology can really help add value there.

Lots of comments about how learners find using technology motivating. That’s definitely true. But when we talk about pros and cons, they also find it distracting. Lots of comments about that. And again, this is just about setting rules and having use of mobiles as a privilege. The students will definitely want to do it. So there’s no reason that shouldn’t work.

So if you’ve got any questions, then please add them. I think we’ve mentioned about novels and large classes. Passive and active. Okay, so we also had a few people saying that they just don’t know where to start for themselves. They don’t feel as confident with technology as their students. I think the most important thing is to realise that that’s OK. For a lot of teachers, you’ll probably never be as comfortable with technology as your students are. And it doesn’t really matter. You’re much more confident with the subject. It’s only a tool.

It can be OK for students to lead in terms of deciding what technology to use for what, especially for things like project work or taking pictures or making quizzes. And I think it’s fine, especially with older students, for them to go away and find things that they find are useful and present to the class why they are. Then you can learn. You know that you have their buy-in. And they’ll find things that you probably won’t come across yourself. Yeah, so you can also get them to come in and talk about the resources they use, which maybe aren’t language-related, but then they can talk about them using language. So they might compare three games that they love playing.

Maybe they like Minecraft and Toca Boca and another one. If they describe them, compare them, that’s great practice of language. We’ve got another. We’ve got Natalia. So Natalia, thanks for your question. What’s the difference between a resource, a material, and a tool? So for me, I think maybe people use these in different ways. So for me, a tool, I’m thinking of a digital tool. So this is something that you use for an activity. So things would be examples like Padlet or Quizlet, they’re tools. Materials we often use to talk about authentic and published material. So often, materials is talking about course books or reading texts or newspapers. Resources, they can be anything. They can be the course books.

They can be the digital tools. They can be real things that you bring into the class to show the meaning of something. So that’s realia. So those are the three ways that I use those terms, resource, material, and a tool. So we have a particular question here about when you need to use things that are offline, because there’s no internet in your school or because the students don’t have it at home. We talked a little bit about this before. But just to say that one thing that works particularly well and has an offline app is Quizlet. If you don’t know about Quizlet, you can watch the video in the other step, and we’ll send a link.

But you can set quizzes for your students. They need to download them at some time, either at home or at school, whichever place you do have internet or internet cafe, wherever. But then they can do them offline, especially if there’s a lot of work or a lot of words you want them to learn and you don’t want them to have to use the internet. And then when they reconnect, it works in the normal way. You’ll be able to see everybody’s score. We’ve got a question from Huong asking about CLIL, CBI, EMI, and ESP. So you’re asking for the differences between the following models. So for this, actually, we’ve got a course running at the moment on teaching CLIL.

You can still access the course. It finished last week, and it’ll be coming again next year. But there’s lots of information about teaching CLIL. It’s called Teach Your Subject in English. Same on the Futurelearn platform. So by CLIL, it’s when you teach your content subject through English so that you’re teaching English as well. So we’ve got a question that we received before about what to do when your school bans phones. Lots of schools do this. It’s quite widespread. Sometimes there’s a very good reason.

But sometimes it’s a case of the fact that phones were banned when phones were more like phones, when people used them for texting or calling or being distracted rather than when they were used as devices that could access the internet and be useful as education tools. So sometimes it is worth having a conversation once you feel confident yourself, and explaining, specifically, all the ways that you’d like to use it and what benefit it will add. And keep having that conversation, because obviously, phones are changing very quickly, and smartphones are very different. And even if your school has a rule in place now, it’s sometimes worth challenging it, if you think it would add value. Yep.

And of course, mobiles can be used for homework as well. Sara has made that point. Yes, definitely. You can always set digital activities for homework and get your students to report back when they come in. And again, that doesn’t have to be something where they require the internet. It can just be taking photos.

Yeah, and Natalia, you made the good point: yes, it depends on the different situations. For some learners, this will be more suitable than for others. Definitely. Yeah, most of the things we’ve talked about today would be easier with students in secondary school. But a lot of them would be fine for primary students too. Another thing that we haven’t talked about, which people have been asking about, is video. And again, video is something you can do offline. It’s something that allows you to do all sorts of different things. We know from research that a lot of times when students are nervous, they don’t perform as well as they normally would.

So something simple like getting students to record an audio file and send it to you, rather than do something in front of the class, or a video. Same reason, they can practise and they can become more confident. And they can send you the one that they’re happy with. The same as you would expect them to edit their writing before they give it to you. And also, for drama, somebody had a good idea about doing role-play work with video. Again, that’s something else they can do outside of class. Or even if you only have a few devices, you just need one for every group. And you can record a play, a role-play, something functional. It’ll work well for things like that.

And we’ve got another question from Gisella. Any advice or suggestions for first-time teachers or thinking of becoming a teacher, sites? So probably there’s two things here. If you want information about becoming a teacher, then you can find more information on our site about CELTA and TKT. If you’re thinking of becoming a teacher and you want some materials ready to use, so some resources, there’s lots of ready-made lesson plans. So this can be a really useful way to start, where you have a ready-made lesson plan, You know it’s structured well and pitched at the right level. So there are some that we have on our website. So we have some lesson plans called Virtually Anywhere.

It’s a really good audio drama about two students who are doing a project. It’s very exciting. And there’s activities for you to do in the class. But there’s a very structured lesson plan, so you know what you’re doing and when. And there’s activities for the students to do at home, self-study activities, which are different, so you don’t have to do the same thing. And it’s related, the homework and the classroom work. So that’s really useful. There’s other sites as well. So there’s a site called, I think, it’s Lessonstream, and that’s using video. So as Anna said, that can add motivation. Here students are watching videos, short videos, and then there’s a lesson around them. But again, there’s ready-made materials.

So that’s a great place to start, where you have the materials that you can work from and you can adapt it for your students, but it’s a bit easier if you haven’t really planned your own lessons before. The other good thing about using ready-made lesson plans is every time you use one, you get ideas about a structure that you can use yourself. So for example, you could use the Virtually Anywhere ones - we’ll put a link - but then you know that that will work with any kind of audio drama. You can do the same kind of structure of a lesson. And David’s got a question about tips for giving tuition one-to-one. So yeah, that’s a really good question.

You can use lesson plans for one-to-one. Look through them beforehand. You can be the partner in the activities. So that’s a good way to start. There is also a very good book Teaching One-to-One. I can’t remember the author, but we’ll put a link up. But it had loads of tips and ideas for it. If your one-to-one is somebody either academic or for business, again, video and audio. Recording themselves and having them listen back. Because it’s one-to-one, you can spend time with them. Getting them to identify their own areas for improvement or things they could do differently. And video and audio recording is the best way to do that if they need to practise speaking.

Yeah, and a great thing is to find out exactly what do they need to do in English, and get them to do that, and then analyse that performance. Because if they need to give presentations about something their company sells, then give you the presentation and you can help them make it really good. If you don’t know where to start with one-to-ones, textbooks, again, are a really good idea. So you can just take a textbook, talk to the individual, and get them to show you in the contents page what things are important for them. And that means that you’ve shown them all the things that you could do, and they’re selecting the things that are most important.

There’s another question from Ganit about what kind of interesting homework is appropriate for young learners with no access to technology. So for young learners I’ve taught, I’ve found things like songs are great, maybe drawing pictures, talking about pets, and drawing pictures of their pets, what they eat, what they do. So there’s loads of things. If you tap into their interests, get them to not focus on the grammar exercises or vocab exercises, but to talk about pets, to talk about their family, to talk about what they enjoy doing, and to draw pictures, those kind of things work well. Any sort of project that is designed for primary age learners, it’ll almost certainly help with their language as well.

So if you look for lesson plans and projects for maths, history, geography, anything, you’ll be able to pull - doing those sorts of projects or some parts of them will certainly give good language practice. And sometimes they don’t need anything at all, because they’re designed to be imaginative. Yep. And you can look for sites which aren’t about English language teaching. So Times’ TES is a good site. So it has the different classes, maths and other ones. You’ll find some good activities there. I think we’ve probably got time for one more question.

Oh, OK, so Ganit, you want examples about tenses or active and passive. So here for young learners, if I was wanting them to practise maybe present simple, I would get them, in the class, to invent some imaginary pet they have. It could be anything. Three heads, five legs, eats elephants for its tea. It could be a monster. At home, they have to draw pictures of food, clothes, sleep. And then they make sentences, “He sleeps in a shed.” “He wears trousers.” So this is all about their imaginary pet. So you can make the topic, and try to make it generative. So that’s what Marie Therese and Monica were talking about last week in their end of week video.

So it produces lots of sentences on the tense you want to practise. And of course, they can ask questions to each other. And again, you can have group work. It works well for everything like that. So yep. Please, OK, you’ve asked us to introduce new tools. Yes, we’ll put links to the resources, and we’ll add some more resources that we think are useful that we’ve not mentioned. So we’ll put links up to Padlet, Ted talks, Graphite, different things.

If you come back to this step in a few days, what we’ll do is add links to all the things we talked about today, all the good suggestions that we had from you, and also anything else that we didn’t have time to talk about, which we think would be useful. It’ll be a PDF for you. We have two last questions - OK, two last questions. - that we can manage. So we’ve got Leah. How do you put a limit on your students’ digital time? So for me, I would say, you have a set time of the day where they use iPads or devices and you stick to that.

And maybe you can say, if they’re really good, they get an extra half hour on a Friday afternoon. So I think having it the same every day, having it everyone knows what it is, when it finishes, I think that really helps to limit the time. And again, you probably want to talk to parents about - make sure they know what homework is coming and how long it should take and that sort of thing, because it’s hard for them to tell if their children are working or not sometimes. And Gisella had, what’s your top favourite resources? I think mine’s Kahoot. Yeah, I think mine’s Kahoot. It’s quite new, so perhaps that’s why it’s top of our mind.

But it is really interactive, really simple, well-designed, easy for the teacher, completely - all the student has to do is put a code in. And the best thing is that it’s really solid learning, because you get the results straightaway. It’s a formative tool as well. You can see if your students have understood what you’re teaching them right then in the moment. Yeah, and if I had to choose another one, I would - Padlet? Well, Padlet’s very good. I think I’d really like to use - I’ve seen Skype field trip. So this is Q&A sessions you can have with people who are doing various things or working in different places.

So you can have a Q&A with people in the zoo who look after the lions. And I think that’s a really nice thing to do, because it’s in English and you’re practising English. But it’s not practising grammar, but it’s practising a topic that students might get really, really motivated about. So I think that sounds good too. I thought of another one, actually. If you are confident, then I think some of the things around 360 video and virtual reality are really interesting. If you search for Google Expeditions, you’ll find some ready-made lesson plans, ideas for teachers. You don’t all need a virtual reality expensive headset.

There’s something called Google Cardboard - you can look up - which means you can do it quite cheaply. And you just get a few sets to use in your class and it’s only a few pounds each. But that sort of thing, it’s a bit like Mary was talking about. You can go on a field trip to somewhere completely different. And I think it would be easy to form a language lesson around those things. And it’s cool, interesting technology. Yep. So I think that’s all that we’ve got time for. Thank you very much for all your questions. We’ll put up the resources on the PDF, and that should be up Friday morning. And we’ll see you again soon. Yep.

Thanks very much. Thank you.