The Teachers' Classroom App - By PeacheyPublications

 The Teachers' Classroom App - By PeacheyPublications

This app has been designed to help teachers in the physical and remote classroom.

• The app is a combination of teaching and teacher development tool.
• You can use it to launch one of over 200 media rich digital lessons with engaging interactive materials for students to work on together or at home.
• You can use it to develop your knowledge and understanding of a wide range of issues faced by the contemporary English language teacher.
• We add new ideas and materials every week.
  
• The app includes workbook apps for students that can help you cut costs.
• There is also a Digital Toolbox to help you choose the best free resources from around the internet.

 

Check out our site to find out more: The Teachers' Classroom App

Explore or catalogue with hundreds of lesson activities and great ideas to combine technology with learning English: Our Catalogue

Thanks for reading

Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications

Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking

This is just a short post to anounce the publication of my new ebook 'Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking'.

Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy, which is a collection of lesson plans based around infographics, and looks in more depth at the genre and how infographics can be used as both sources of information and as creative learning tasks for students.

The tasks that accompany the infographics are intended to encourage students to think more critically about the information they are exposed to and to question the sources of information they find whilst browsing the internet.

Exploiting Infographics should help teachers to start creating their own tasks, activities and lesson plans for students and to integrate infographics in a way that will enhance students’ critical thinking, digital literacy, language and communication skills.

Exploiting Infographics was conceived as part of The Digital Classrooms Series which started with the award winning Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers.

The series is intended to help teachers, teacher trainers, materials writers and course designers integrate digital technologies into their classroom practice in a pedagogically sound and impactful way.


I hope you enjoy these books and find them useful.



Related links:

• My Lesson Materials

Nik Peachey

Using Phraseum to learn lexical chunks

I recently revisited Phraseum, an app which I first discovered and reviewed in March 2014. I’m glad to see that the tool is still around, has gathered a loyal following and has developed both in terms of design and functionality since that first review.

In this article I’d like to show you some of the new features and also share some ideas for how you can use it. Let me start though by recapping what Phraseum does.

Phraseum is a tool that students can use to capture lexical chunks, collocations and expressions while they read online text. It helps students to collect these expressions into theme based phrasebooks that they can then use to revise and share their learning. 

Within the platform there are also a number of features to help them learn the phrases, these include tagging of phrases and links through to Google translate. Phraseum also records the source of the phrase so that students can go back and find the phrases in their context. 

A new feature that’s been added since the last review is the ‘Learn’ feature. This is great as it  helps them learn and memorise the phrases using a process of spaced repetition. To use this students just select a phrasebook and then click on the ‘Learn this phrasebook’ button.  

They can then select key words to remove from the phrases. After these have been clicked, they will have to select them in the correct order to put them back into the sentence. 

They work through the phrases doing this a couple of times and each time things get harder and more words are removed. Eventually the prompt words are removed and they have to type in the missing words. 

Once the students type in the words they will be able to compare with the original.

Phraseum can also create revision tests so that the students re-study a selection of the phrases in their collection. When students have learned new phrases, each session begins with a test. This test is designed to identify exactly what they can remember. In each test they are required to type in phrases with minimal prompts. Their success in the test determines whether a phrase is learned or marked as weak and repeated again.

As a teacher you can also create your own phrasebooks just by typing in the phrases you want stusdents to learn and then sharing the phrasebook with them.

Getting started with phraseum. 

Once you have registered on the site, one of the first things to do is to add the ‘Clipping button’ to your browser. You can find it at: https://www.phraseum.com/page/clipping-button and just drag the button onto the bookmarks bar of your browser. 

Once you have done this all you need to do is highlight some text while you are reading and then click the button and it will open the clipping window which helps you to save the text chunk into the correct phrasebook and add tags and annotation to it. 

It’s also wise to decide how you want to organise the phrase you collect and create some empty phrasebooks too, then these will appear as options when you clip phrases from a text. Once you have done that you (or your students) are ready to start clipping as you read.

Activities for students

Here are some activities you can do with your students to get them started with Phraseum.

• Choose a web based text that you would like your students to read. Collect phrases from the text into a phrasebook. Share the phrasebook with your students and get them to check their understanding of the phrases. Ask the students to try to learn the phrases using the Phraseum ‘Learn’ feature. Once they’ve made an initial attempt to learn the phrases, get them to read the text.

• Give the students a web based text to read. Once you have completed comprehension and reading development activities ask the students to look for sentences in the text that have vocabulary, collocations or lexical chunks that are new to them and save the sentences into a phrasebook. Then get students to use the learn feature and choose the specific words from the phrases within the sentence that they need to learn. Students can then practice them regularly.

• When using a text that has a lot of dialogue such as a play, you can get the students to choose one of the people in the text and grab all the sentences they say into a phrasebook with that person’s name. They can then use the ‘Learn’ feature to try to memorise the lines of the text. You can then get the students act out or recite the text.

• Collect some different lines from a range of short poems into a phrasebook. Share the phrasebook with your students and get them to try to decide which poem each line came from (You’ll need to give them the titles of the poems, or use poems they have already read.) 

• Get students to collect wise quotes or sayings ( these could be based around a specific topic or just any that the students are interested in) once they have 5 to 10 quotes get the students to use the ‘Learn’ feature of the site to try to learn and memorise the quotes.

• Create or get students to create a phrasebook containing each of the lines from a short poem. They can then use the ‘Learn’ feature of Phraseum to try to memorise the complete poem. 

 If you'd like more ideas for how to use Phraseum to develop your students' vocabulary, check back to my original review: Creating social phrasebooks with Phraseum

Related links:

• Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Free ebooks
• A River of Images 
• A Tool for Comparing Words

Best

Nik Peachey

Brainstorming and polling with AnswerGarden

AnswerGarden is a very simple tool for creating short answer polls and displaying the answers as word clouds. It’s really simple and quick to use and can be used in the classroom or embedded into webpages, blogs or in online courses.

To create an AnswerGarden poll just go to http://answergarden.ch and click on the + sign at the top. Then you can either type in a topic to brainstorm or a question.

AnswerGarden poll responses are limited to either 20 or 40 characters so be sure that the type of question you use doesn’t require a long complex answer. AnswerGarden works best when only a single word answer is required.

Once you have added your topic or question you can just click enter and your poll will be ready. Then just share the URL with the recipients.

You can refine your poll and add some security to it if you wish.

• There are a number of modes you can choose for your poll.
• You can allow different users to repeat the same answer, in which case the repeated word will appear larger depending on the number of people who enter the word, or you can allow each word to be entered only one time.
• You can set the poll to be moderated so that words only appear once you approve them.
• You can add a password for the poll and add your email address to get an admin link for the poll.
• You can lock the poll so that nobody can add to it, but this would usually be done once the poll is complete.

Once the poll has been launched there are a number of other nice features including an automatically generated QR code to make the poll easy to access for students on mobile phones.

 You can also share the poll quite easily through a range of social media or get an embed code to add it to a webpage or blog. You can even geo broadcast the poll through your local network so that anyone can discover it on their mobile phone or laptop.

Once your students have completed the poll there are a number of export options including export to Wordle, Tagxedo which allow you to customise the word cloud and save or edit the results. You can also send it to Twitter or save it as a PNG.

AnswerGarden in the classroom

• You can set a topic and get students to brainstorm vocabulary connected with that topic. Once all the words have been added you can ask students to peer teach any they don’t know in pairs or small groups or research the words in an online dictionary.
• Example: http://answergarden.ch/view/216363
• As a warmer you could get students to enter all the verbs, nouns or adjectives they know that start with a particular letter. You could even create two or three AnswerGardens with the same task and give them to different groups and see which group produces the most examples.
• Example: http://answergarden.ch/view/216365
• You could do a variation of the above game by getting students to brainstorm nouns that have specific qualities. For example, students could add anything they can think of that has feet, or anything that can fly, or anything that is green.
• Example: http://answergarden.ch/view/216364
• You could start with a route word and ask your students to enter or collect words that collocate with it. This doesn’t have to be done in one lesson but students could use a number of these AnswerGardens to collect collocations. They could do a similar thing with phrasal verbs using either a verb or a preposition in the question.
• Example: http://answergarden.ch/view/216366
• You could use AnswerGarden to get your students to create anagrams from a route word. Again you could have a different poll for each grup and make this competitive.
• Example: http://answergarden.ch/view/216367
• You could use an AnswerGarden to find out more about your students by getting them to enter things or people that they like or don’t like, such as favourite sports or actors.
• Example:http://answergarden.ch/view/216368
• You could find out how students feel about something by getting them to enter adjectives to express their feelings about anything from politics to action research on specific classroom techniques you use. Or they could just enter adjectives to describe how they are feeling. This is a good way to take the temperature of the room.
• Example: http://answergarden.ch/view/216362
• You could use AnswerGarden to get students to decide between two or three options. They just type in the one they want and the most popular one will appear as the biggest word.
• Example: http://answergarden.ch/view/216369

Because AnswerGarden is so simple and quick to use and doesn’t require registration it would be great to get students using it to create their own small research questionnaires. They could then share these within the class or through their social media networks and then present the responses in class.

I hope you enjoy using AnswerGarden with your students. Please post any additional ideas or links to examples you have created in the comments.

Related links:

• Digital Video - A manual for language teachers
• Managing the digital classroom - Using a backchannel
• Managing the digital classroom - Getting students' attention
• 20 + Things you can do with QR codes in your school
• Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students

Best

Nik Peachey

Evaluating authentic mobile apps for learning

Back in April 2013 I delivered a workshop at the IATEFL 2013 conference in Liverpool. The topic of the workshop was 'Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps' and in the workshop I encouraged participants to share and explore their subconscious criteria for deciding which apps and web based tools they used with their students.

I particularly encouraged them to think about 'authentic' apps rather than those made for learning. This is because in many ways I feel that most made for learning apps have made very little pedagogical progress beyond their roots in CALL from the last century.

I also believe that encouraging students to get 'hands on' with authentic apps has a much more important role in helping them to develop digital literacies which they can use outside of the classroom.

Check out my ebook

As a result of that workshop and the research that developed from it I've now developed this list of criteria for evaluating mobile apps for educational purposes.


Here I've divided the criteria into 4 categories and given some explanation of each. I welcome your comments and feedback as this is still very much a work in progress.

Technical

Accessibility - Will all the students have the necessary equipment to use it? Will it work across all / most mobile platforms and also work within a desktop web browser?

• Unless teachers are working in a teaching environment where a uniform set of physical devices are provided for students, such as a complete set of iPads or Android tablets, then they need to check carefully that all the variety of devices that their students possess are all supported. The safest way to ensure this is to check to see if the app also has a browser based version, so that students without up-to-date mobile devices will still be able to participate.

User friendly - Will students be able to learn how to use it reasonably quickly?

• Apps that are complex and take a long time to master may not be worth the commitment. Teachers need to ensure that they plan how to teach the students how to use the apps in a reasonable amount of time or have a strategy for gradually uncovering more features of an app as they develop more activities with it.

Registration - Do students need to register to use it?

• Getting students and teachers to register and remember passwords can be laborious and time consuming, so apps that don’t require registration and particularly those which run in the browser on mobile or desktop can be very convenient to use. Registration does however offer students more protection and makes any potential misuse or mischief trackable back to its source.

Security - Is the app secure?

• Although it can be difficult and time consuming to check, teachers need to determine that the app is secure and the creators will treat their students data and personal information responsibly and confidentially. If there is any form of social interaction enabled through the app teachers need to check if there is any mechanism or process for blocking and reporting abuse.

Financial

Price - Is it free or affordable?

• One of the great advantages of apps is that many are free, freemium (have both a free and a commercial version) or are quite low cost. Having said that, even if low cost apps are being used it needs to be decided who will pay for them, especially if each student in the class needs one.

Business model - Is there a business model to support the app? Is it clear how it makes money?

• Every app producer needs to make money somehow, so it is important to identify the business model supporting the development of an app. Although teachers and students are keen to use free apps, apps that have no visible business model may be generating money through advertising or by trading data. An app that has no visible means of financial support, may have a very short life span, rapidly become unreliable, and fail to develop and evolve due to lack of funds.

Motivational

Digital literacy - Does learning and using the app help students to develop a useful or transferable digital literacy?

• Just using an app in itself doesn’t necessarily constitute developing a digital literacy. The use of the app must in some way develop a digital skill that can be transferred outside of the learning context and used in some authentic way either in the workplace or as part of the students’ lifestyle.

Authenticity - Does it have an authentic purpose beyond language learning? Is it an app that a native speaker would use for a genuine purpose outside of a classroom?

• Apps that are motivating for native speakers to use for a genuine purpose should also be motivating for language learners for that same purpose, so authentic apps that involve some sort of linguistic input or output are ideally suited to language teaching purposes.

Personalization - Does the app enable user to express some aspect of who they are and what they believe?

• It’s important that language learners have the opportunity to use language creatively to express something of their own personality or identity. Apps which support this kind of creativity can be potentially very useful.

Pedagogical

Learning goal / outcome - Is there a a possible learning outcome that use of the app will lead to?

• Using an app is not in and of itself a learning outcome. Use of the app needs to lead towards some form of learning goal. In some cases it can be easy to see what learning goals can be achieved through using the app, at other times teachers may need to think carefully what learning outcomes can be achieved through building activities which include the use of an app.

Interaction / communication - Does it support interaction and communication between users?

• Apps which are developed around social interaction and communication are much more likely to be able to find a useful place in the language classroom and should be easier to base tasks around as communication naturally fits with the aims of language acquisition.

Prolonged use - Does the app need prolonged use to achieve a satisfactory outcome?

• Many apps are designed around short daily tasks build up over a period of time to achieve an outcome. If teachers choose to use these kinds of apps they need to factor this long term approach into their timetabling.

Assessment - Is the work on the app assessable by the teacher? Does the app support the delivery of teacher response and feedback?

• Students need to know that teachers are evaluating, assessing and responding to their work, so apps which can support this kind of teacher intervention can be potentially very useful.

Collaboration - Does the app support collaboration between users?

• The ability to collaborate on projects or producing some form of tangible outcome is viewed as being a potentially significant digital literacy so apps which foster these kinds of collaborative interactions in a meaningful ways have great potential.

Context - In what context would the app be useful? For whom is the app more useful?

• There are a number of different contexts in which apps can be used. Some may be more appropriate for use at home by the student, or in the class by students, whereas others could be more appropriately used by teachers for their own development or the development of content for students.

Reusable - Does the app have sufficient depth of purpose to support multiple activities and tasks?

• Many apps have great novelty value which can be motivating for students, but novelty can soon wear off, so it is wise to weigh the amount of benefit students gain from novelty apps against their potential for extended use and the amount of time it takes to download install and register them.

Learner autonomy - Can app be used independently outside of the class by the student to support some form of learning?

• Apps that can be used by students working independently may well help to foster a degree of learner autonomy if there is some in built learning outcome.

As I said, this is still a work in progress, and I did struggle with which criteria fell in to which of the categories and with the categories themselves, so all comments are welcome.

I hope you find these criteria helpful in evaluating the apps that you choose for your students.

Related links:

• Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers
• Making lectures and lessons more interactive with mQlicker
• Creating interactive video on the iPad 
• Tools for learners
• Video communication apps and mobile learning
• Mix Images and Animation on Your Mobile 
• Peer editing in digital and mobile environments 
• Taking notes from the web on the iPad

Best

Nik Peachey

Peer editing in digital and mobile environments

For years now I have been happily using EtherPad based services like http://primarypad.com/ and http://sync.in/ to get participants on the training courses I deliver to work collaboratively to create and peer edit texts. Increasingly though I've been having problems with the reliability of the free services these companies provide and the lack of reliable compatibility with mobile devices.

At last it seems that now I have a very elegant solution in the form of https://quip.com/.
Quip looks a lot like Evernote and has a similar interface with documents contained in notebooks, but one of the big differences is that Quip was designed specifically to enable peer editing and collaboration on documents and has a very clear way of showing and tracking the changes.

Here's a short tutorial showing you how it works:


Why should we get our students peer editing?

• It improves their awareness of accuracy
• It can improve the quality of their writing
• Pushes students to accept that writing is a process that needs revisions and redrafting
• The ability to collaborate in digital environments is likely to be an important real world digital literacy

What kinds of peer editing activities can we do with students?

• We can give them texts with planted errors (10 - 20) in to work on a find and correct together. These could be the lyrics of songs they like or stories or articles they have read.
• We can get students to correct each others' compositions before we look at them.
• We can give them texts with specific features missed out and get them to work together to add them. These could be linking or referencing devices, punctuation, vocabulary words, grammatical features such as prepositions or articles etc.
• We can get them working together to rearrange parts of a text into a better order or structure.
• We can give them the bare structure of a story and ask them to embellish it and make it more descriptive and interesting.

What I like about Quip

• It's free
• Nicely designed interface
• Works and looks well in both tablet  app form and in the browser
• Clearly tracks and highlights changes to documents by different users
• It looks secure and enables you to limit who sees and works on the document while editing
• Has a kind of chat messaging feature which works along side the notes for changes
• We can use it to get students collaborating and working together outside the classroom

What I'm not so sure about

• It requires registration, which can slow things down in class, but it does also add a degree of security
• I haven't tried it with larger groups yet so I'm not sure how reliably it will function when scaled up to say having a whole class work synchronously on a single document
• Not sure how long it will stay free (There is a Quip Business already available)

I'm now looking forward to my next course so that I can try Quip out and get a bit more experience with it. I hope you also find it useful with your students. Do drop me a line and let me know how it goes.

Related links:

• What do you feel are the key digital literacy skills that 21st century learners need? 
• Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation 
• How I use social media for my professional development  
• Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology 
• Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why
• Developing your digital study skills
• Temporary Bookmarking
• Creating a personal homepage
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers 

Best

Nik Peachey

Criteria for Evaluating Web Tools and Apps

I'm often getting asked what my criteria are for choosing the tools, apps and resources that I feature on my blogs and in my teaching and do be honest I don't really think about it that much. I look at so many sites and apps that I just get a feeling when I see something that I think will work.

As that isn't a very satisfactory answer to give people I decided to start exploring my own criteria for what influences my choice. I ran a workshop on this topic at IATEFL 2013 on looking at apps and how we can evaluate them.


I came up with a number of 'first impression' criteria that I think I apply before even thinking about 'how' I will use the app / tool.

Here is the presentation / workshop recording



You can download a copy of the presentation from here: Evaluating Web-based Tools

Please feel free to browse the list and add any 'pros' and 'cons' for anything you think I've missed.


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I hope you find these criteria useful as a starting point for your own reflections on why you choose to use certain apps and not others.

Related links

• My learning technology reading list
• My collection of tools for learners
• My Facebook page
• A Mural of my work online

Best

Nik Peachey