Triptico

Triptico is a great online tool to bring some fun into the class. You can create, save, share and use other users' interactive learning context. You can can create tasks for any level of learners for any kind of topics, it's limited only by your imagination.

Here's a short introduction for three apps:

Word Magnets

You can type words and make them 'magnets'; it means you can move them with the mouse or with your hand, in case of a smart board, to anywhere you want on the board. This is my board I created for one of my students who was reading a book about nocturnal and diurnal animals as a revision task. It was ready to use in a minute, which is always a big advantage when using technology. Using it on a smart board can increase not only kinaesthetic but all young learners' engagement of the task.

Student Group

Type in all your students' name and save it as a list, so you can use if later again. The programme creates and icon for each student, then you can create groups.

Things you can do with it: 

•  set the number of groups
• mark students who are missing
• create groups manually or let the programme create them
• choose a leader for the group manually\ automatically
• let the programme select one or two names from the whole group
•  save a snapshot of the groups in case you would like to use the same set of groups again

Doing the selection with the application is so much more fun for the students and for the teacher as well. Plus none of the students will blame the teacher for not putting them with their friends in the same group. Because of the colour coding everybody can see who is in which group straight away. This is a snapshot of a demo from the programme's website.

Flip Timer

You can always make good use of a timer app. You can set the count direction, whether you want ticking sound and alarm sound. Setting the timer is very easy, you only need to click on the upper or lower part of the boxes then you click on the start button. You can also stop the clock and continue, which can be useful.

Find 10

With this app you can create simple quiz, where students have to find 10 correct answers out f 15. You can change the number of correct answers by clicking on the 'tick' button. By clicking on the magnifying glass icon you can add a picture (good for students who have limited or no reading skills) or some extra text to the card. When you play the game the app colours the correct answers to green, the wrong ones to red. This is a screen shot of my game for day and night animals.

The limitations of the applications is that the they are more suitable for use by the teacher to engage his\her students, although you can always ask them to create their own revision task using one of the apps and present them in the class. In case of some apps, like the words magnet there is no feedback that tells you if the answer is correct or not. This feature also supports the idea that they are better to be used by the teacher to generate interest in the topic from a different angle.

I hope I managed to generate some interest in Triptico because there many more apps that are worth  a try on the website: www.triptico.co.uk

My first WebQuest with QuestGarden

  This WebQuest has been designed for young learners aged 5-7, studying English for 1-2 years to learn about animals and practice their computer and Internet skills. The task follows the process of KWL (What do I know?, What do I want to know?, What did I learn?). For each step of the process students have to create their own slides on the website of StoryboardThat. The slides are easy to make, using only the 'drag and drop' function. As students have limited reading skills they can listen to the instructions by clicking on me, the Voki Dobermann.

Skills students practice:
 

Listening skills: students have to listen and understand the instructions, also they have to watch an online story-telling with subtitles as their first input material

Reading skills: students read the instructions, read the story together with the story teller, read the labels of the two pictures as their second source of input material

Writing skills: StoyboardThat online programme enables users to create texts as well as speech bubbles for the characters of the slide, so when students create their own slides they will also have to add some sentences. Students also practice typing the new words when they label their picture in Kid Pix.

Click on this link to look at the WebQuest: Ducks and crocodiles

I've designed this WebQuest just to give you an idea what it is all about without the need for perfection. The process was quite time consuming but the WebQuest has its individual advantages that make it worth. It is a very good tool to introduce autonomous learning, and working alone for even very young learners with some computer skills. Other online tools like Voki scaffold their limited reading skills, also makes listening for instructions different\ interesting. On the other hand, the slightly robotic voice may make the instructions more difficult to understand. Although creating slides and labelled pictures of the animals with StoryboardThat and Kid Pix can be substituted with a piece of paper and a few coloured pencils, these apps can provide new experience and they are really easy to use for a 5-7-year-old child.

How to make good flash cards and use them effectively?

The first reason why Hungarian people are not so successful at learning languages is probably the fact the our language is singular from the aspect that it doesn't resemble to any other languages (that is why it is also one of the most difficult foreign languages to learn). There's not much to do about that, except accept it. But the second reason is something we can actually work on. I think this reason is our learning techniques. We spend a lot of time and money on language learning with little success, although only with changing the way we learn a language could save us a lot of money and time. 

Until now I mostly have had adult students. Their most common concern was the lack of time for learning a language. When I met the flash card technique a few years ago on Gabriella Szalai's  website, the most appealing feature of using flash cards was that because of its forms - small paper cards, or in certain cases online cards- they can be used anywhere, anytime, so sts no longer have to find the time to actually sit down at the table with their books or in front of their computers, it is enough if they use the few-minute idle time intervals that we all have for sure, like sitting on the bus, standing in the line,lunch break, waiting in the surgery, cooking dinner etc. In Hungary using flash cards (FCs) as a learning technique is not particularly well-known, consequently we don't know how to use them. So I thought if sts would understand the concept of FCs and could make their own this would not only help them to reach short-term goals quicker thus increase their motivation but also would lead them to the road of autonomous learning, another idea we need to work on.

What makes a good flash card?

According to Gabriella Szalai, a good flash card has at least a phrase containing 2-3 words instead of only one word. It is important to learn chunks of the language, that we can put into use easily. We make language learning much more easier for us if learn the words together with the words we usually use them with. These can be lexical chunks i. e. set phrases or grammatical chunks i. e. grammatical structures that follow certain rules. Leo Selivan refers to these language chunks as co-text, i.e. the surrounding words \ the linguistic environment of the word. Also it is clever to avoid phrases camouflaged as grammatical rules that you can only find in dictionaries, like 'talk to sy about sg', instead we should make a short sentence with it. Make it personal by putting the sentence in the first person singular, as that's how we'll use them most of the time anyway and learn vocabulary related to your needs and interests. Use colour coding to differentiate different topics or different grammatical groups, or draw on the cards, they will help remember if you are a visual type of learner.

Examples:

talk to my friend about the weekend
I'm reading a book about animals.

How to use flash cards effectively? (According to Gabriella Szalai)

• use those few-minute idle time intervals we all have during a day; flashcards are made for using them in situations like this for it's not about how much time you study them at a time but rather the frequency of the use. In other words use them more times during a day but only for a few minutes, with lots of repetition; this is the way for new vocabulary to get into our long term memory
•  use only 6-8 cards at a time, this way you can avoid the rule of 'the first and the last'. It means that we remember better for the first and the last and we tend to forget the ones in the middle.
• you may write the translation of the phrase in your L1 on the other side of the card, in this case always learn from your L1 to English as it is more difficult for our brain to recall than to recognise phrases
• few examples how to PLAY with the cards: choose 2-3 cards and put them into a sentence; if they are sentences make them into a story; choose a card presenting a grammar rule and use it with a phrase card to make a sentence; choose a phrase card, make into a sentence and put it into as many tenses as possible\ as you can; choose a 6-8 cards, put them next to each other and make yourself to put each of them in a sentence one after the other creating a story- the funnier the story the better, emotions has a huge role in remembering things, in our case words; the latter one is even more fun if you do it with your friend, 'study buddies' make the process fun and enjoyable, you no longer feel you are actually learning a language.

Gabriella Szalai's website: www.angolnyelvtanitas.hu
Leo Sullivan's post about co-text

Flash card websites: Quizlet and wordjuggle

 One of my students (age 5) was learning about the book Town Mouse Country Mouse by Jan Brett. As this book is difficult for her English I used an other version by Bev Evans and created some flash cards based on the latter version.

Quizlet

Creating your flash cards is really easy; the cards can be used in literally minutes. You have to register, though. You have access to some pictures through quizzlet, although the choices are very limited. If you upgrade your account you can add your own voice and own pictures to the cards. Once you saved them you can share/copy/embed/export/print/add to a class. Also you can edit them later. The students have the following options to ‘play’ with the cards:

Cards

Here students can brows through your flash cards to familiarize with them. Flipping from definition (example sentence) to the new expression is already part of the learning process.

Learn

At this stage sts do a gap fill exercise with the same example sentences, where they have to write the missing vocabulary item themselves. If they don’t know the answer they click on ’give up’ and they can see the missing word, but also, which I think is a brilliant idea to help remember the word, they have to copy the answer by typing it. Sts can also listen to the definition if they click on the ‘speak text’ button, which helps them to remember the whole example sentence. It tests sts' productive knowledge.

Speller

This is a listening and spelling exercise. Sts have to listen to the vocabulary item and type it. Sts can listen to it as many time as they want, also they can set the ‘Speak English’ function fast and slow. It tests sts' receptive knowledge.

Test

Here sts have to different types of question, like gap fill, matching, multiple choice, true/false questions. Here you also have the option to print the test. It test sts' productive knowledge.

Scatter

It is a drag and drop exercise. If sts match the correct items they disappear. It is a good exercise for those who like competing as when they finished they can see how quickly they did it and where they are on the top list. It tests sts' receptive knowledge.

Race

Probably the most challenging task. The definition/ example sentence slides across the monitor and sts have to type the missing word before the definition disappears. If they are not quick enough/ don’t remember the word the answer pops up and sts have to copy it again to reassure it. It tests sts' productive knowledge.

Once the sts finish the exercises you can see how well they’ve done.
Click here for the whole quizlet.

Wordjuggle

Once you register you have one month free access to the site as a teacher, student access is free but also need registration.

Creating your flash cards is easy and quick. Compared to Quizlet this one is made for printing materials. The authors of the website promote interaction between classmates compared to individual learning behind computers. There are different games to choose from according to the nature of the card collection. I used the same vocabulary items as with Quizlet, so they are appropriate to be used with the following games:

Match word and definition 

It tests sts' receptive knowledge.

Make someone speak

Sts have to say the definition and get another students to say the word or one student have to use the word in a sentence. It tests sts' productive knowledge.

Letter jumble

Letters in the word are jumbled, sts have to reconstruct the word. It tests sts' receptive knowledge.

Print on both sides

It’s for creating real flash cards; words are printed in the front side of the cards, the definitions are printed on the back.

The advantage of this site is that neat flash cards can be prepared in minutes and each game type is printable so there is no need for computers. It is good for classroom practice or individual practice at home.

Both of my examples are based on the book The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse by Bev Evans.

www.quizzlet.com
www.wordjuggle.com