Like a slap in the face. I don’t know about you, but that’s kinda how I felt with the onset of COVID19, school being closed, teaching from home (not to mention taking care of my kid simultaneously). I am VERY grateful to have my job and health insurance. But teaching Spanish via my computer has not been an easy transition to say the least. The first week was overwhelming and I wanted to cry. Suddenly I was faced with all the worst parts of teaching– mind numbing grading, answering millions of emails all day long, posting everything online– but with none of the rewards. I missed my students’ laughter, their creativity, and the engagement. Yeah, that first week really sucked.
Week two I decided had to be different. I had to start thinking outside of the box and find some new tools that would help to make this manageable and keep my students engaged. Read on to find out about the 3 websites that saved my mental health while distance E-learning.
Gimkit
I found out about Gimkit from this amazing post by La Secundaria. Since then my students have been obsessed with playing it. They practice vocabulary while competing with one another (they really love the power ups). For distance learning, you can assign the game as an assignment and choose the parameters of how long the students play.
Why I love Gimkit?
The teacher sets how much money students need to earn to finish the assignment. When students get questions right, they earn money. Wrong answers subtract money. So students will progress at their own pace, naturally differentiating.
Edpuzzle
Edpuzzle is an amazing platform for hosting videos. You can pull videos from youtube or upload your own. Then (the best part) you can add questions to check for comprehension- multiple choice, open ended questions, true false. It records the students answers and for how long they watched it. Finally, you can set the videos so that students can’t skip ahead.
Why I love Edpuzzle?
Even though my students aren’t getting spoken input from me live, I can send them videos for them to watch and listen. Later, I get a clear list of who watched, for how long, and what their score was on the questions. Bonus- there are already tons of videos with questions on Edpuzzle that you can copy and use for your own classes.
Quizizz
Quizizz allows students to practice vocabulary at their own pace. For distance learning, I can assign the vocab list as an assignment and it will give me great analytics which I can easily take as a quick grade.
Why I love Quizizz?
My school has discouraged us from giving any summative assessments since, you know, cheating. I can however assign this as a small quiz grade to keep them practicing vocab.
My week two of Distance E-Learning was definitely more manageable for me and interactive for my students. Gimkit, Edpuzzle, and Quizziz will definitely be my go-to websites for the near future. I hope that they are as helpful to you as we navigate E-Learning. Please share this post on social media to help out your fellow language teachers.
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