Huge thanks again to Michelle Worgan for showing us the wonders of Thinglink. She mentioned embedding activities from Learning Apps and Proprofs into the image. You can find Michelle’s video with a step-by-step tutorial for creating the Thinglink she showcased on her blog. You can also contact her via her Facebook page if you have any further questions. If you make a Thinglink and want to share the resource with other teachers, feel free to leave a link to it in the comments. As Simon said at a TEFL del Sur conference, “Our best resources are each other.”
Here’s a link to the blogpost I mentioned by Scott Donald, where I got the handy tip about using the waiting room feature in Zoom when you want to give certain learners instructions for a task but not others (for example for a charades type game). He makes some good points about how and when to monitor during our online lesons too.
This is the link to Joe Dale’s session at the Virtual Round Table – well worth a watch as he shares ideas on using tools such as Jamboard, Flipgrid, Charlala and the Scramblinator.
There are SO many edtech tools out there that it would be impossible to showcase all the most useful ones in just an hour, but we had a brief look at Glogster, Triptico and Baamboozle (thanks to Richard for correcting my spelling!). Here’s a link as well to the slides from my part of the webinar.
I also mentioned how you could use tools such as a fake WhatsApp chat generator or a Guardian headline maker to raise your students’ awareness of how misinformation can be spread on the internet. It reminds me of a talk Daniel Barber in which he recommended looking at infographics with a critical eye as info can sometimes be cherry-picked to be more dramatic. Also, here’s a link to Pride and Prejudice in the age of social media, in case you’re a fan!
We finished up looking at some interactive adventures for younger learners and teens. The one I created is available for you to share with your students – as I said, it was created to be used in class but when I get a few minutes, I’ll take out the pairwork activities. I think having shared the folder with you, all the audio should play but drop me a line if you have any issues. For teens, I shared this great YouTube adventure – probably not something your students could create at the moment if they’re still in lockdown. However, it might give them ideas for a storyline to create a written version using inklewriter. One thing I forgot to mention about inklewriter is that you have to create an account to save and share your story – but you don’t need an email address as the site lets you create your account through them.
And, on that note, a reminder again to check your school’s policy on using any tools with your learners. Here’s the link to the article Jen Dobson prepared for IATEFL (not the British Council as I said in the webinar, my apologies) as well as another article she wrote giving ideas of other ways to showcase learners’ work.
If you have any other favourite edtech tools, let us know about them in the comments!
