How to use FLIPGRID for Speaking Lessons?

What is Flipgrid? 

Flipgrid is a website that allows teachers to create and  facilitate video discussions. Teachers can create  groups for each classroom and in each group teachers can post questions or topics of discussions. Students can respond to the questions and topics by responding through video responses that appear in a display. The videos can be shared with classes, small groups, or any collection of users interested in a common strand of questions. However, in order to protect my students' privacy I have made the setting private and the video responses sent by my students are only available for viewing and commenting by peers from their own classes. 

What do I use Flipgrid for? 

I find Flipgrid to be a student - friendly application and it makes my speaking lesson more interesting and interactive as I could see my students' responses via video messages in Flipgrid. This helps me to assess their speaking skills especially during the pandemic where teaching and learning is conducted via online and conducting speaking lessons online is very challenging.  Besides, making all 24 students in a class to speak during an online lesson is an invitation for disaster. Therefore, I have started using Flipgrid to facilitate learning during my speaking lessons. Flipgrid allows me as a teacher to take time to watch and listen to my students' spoken responses and also provides opportunity for them to practice their speaking skills from time to time.  (from one unit to another)

Not only has Flipgrid made it easier for me to carry out online speaking lessons with ease, it also has a large space for storage (this storage is free if you use your MOE account to register) that I could keep all my students' video responses as evidence for their learning (PBD filing purposes). Flipgrid makes it so much easier for me to organise students' tasks and keep their responses without endangering my devices.  

Records in my Flipgrid 'Teacher Account'

Another good thing about Flipgrid is that it is linked to our MOE _ DELIMA account, so teachers can actually 'import' students' name lists and monitor their video submissions via Delima account. I watch my students responses on Flipgrid and keep their scores in Delima. I also leave written or sometimes video comments at the end of their videos to help them to look into  mistakes and contents. 

The video below shows some examples of students' video responses : 

Please be reminded that students can respond via the Flipgrid with any camera - enabled device. Teachers can also set the duration of responses for the topics given. Responses can be as short as 15 seconds and the longest response can be five minutes. Another interesting feature in Flipgrid is that teachers can also enable peers to respond to their friends' videos via video replies. I have enabled this feature for students within the same classroom. 

If you are interested in using Flipgrid in your lessons, click and watch the videos below and after that you will be all set to get started! 

a) Introduction to Flipgrid - Click Here 

b) How to Teach with Flipgrid  Video 1 - Click Here 

c) How to Teach with FLipgrid Video 2 - Click Here 

Online Tools to Develop Writing Skills

The mid-year school holidays have come to an end and the next semester will be a stressful one as SPM and PT3 examinations are just around the corner. I believe teachers and students will be bogged down with preparatory activities geared towards the public examinations. 

If you are one of those not – so – lucky students taking the public examinations this year, you’re are right in the thick of it and I believe you will have essays to write. And let's accept the fact that writing is not everyone’s cup of tea and I have also had students who struggled to build sentences. If you struggle to write essays or if you abhor writing lessons, then writing essays can lead to frustration and stress.

Fortunately, there are ample tools and resources available online. They are also free (for basic use). I have listed the 10 most useful online tools that I have introduced to my students and they are my favourites too. Some of the tools may need you to become a premier member, but I don’t think that will be necessary as the basic use of the tools is good enough to help you write better. So don’t worry about making mistakes, use these tools to improve your essays and score well in PT3 and SPM. 

The online tools below have very similar functions. Therefore, I am not going to review them one by one. Just click on the links below and it will direct you to the websites. 

All you have to do is type your essay in the text box and get it checked for grammatical errors. You may try different websites and get your essays corrected.

I believe this is an easy way for students to learn to correct their mistakes and write better as well as grammatically correct essays!

So good luck and happy writing... 

Polish My Writing

Virtual Writing Tutor

Paper Rater

Grammar Checker   

Scribens  

Online Text Correction

Spelling and Grammar Checker 

Grammarix

Grammarly

Slick Write

Answering SPM Literature Component (Sing to the Dawn)

The question given in the slide above requires students to relate an event and how the event has affected the way they look at life. The question may seem to be difficult but if students have good understanding of the story it would be very easy to link one of the events and how it has changed their perspective towards life. 

Students can always start with a brief introduction but they should always keep in the mind that they should answer; in this case the event and their view on life. 

It is essential for students to always make things very clear in the beginning of their answers. In this case, they should make it very clear which event they are to narrate. They should also know what is an event so that they do not deviate from hitting the nail right. In many cases, students do not understand events and end up narrating the entire story as event which may not fetch them a high score. 

Sustainability is also important while answering a 'literature question'. Many a time, I have noticed that students would start off well but get carried away and write answers which are irrelevant to the question. It is important for students to stay relevant at all times. To stay relevant one should always stop and read their answers and think how it is related to the question. The elaboration in the slide above has linked to the event very well. In this answer, the student has chosen to write about Dawan's encounter with Bao in the marketplace and has related to her own life on how things are better for her but not everyone has a good life, therefore she has learnt to appreciate what she has. 

The student has also further elaborated how her perspective on things around her has changed based on that one event. To answer well it is important for a student to think and plan the answer well. There may be many events in a story but selecting an event that we can elaborate better is important as we will have more ideas to link, but always remember do not try to dump everything in one idea, that may make your composition messy. 

In this slide, her elaboration leads to the ending note. It is important to notice that, from the beginning till the end the student has linked her perspective towards life based on only an event as required by the instruction. The utmost important thing is we should not only read the story but  understand  the content well and try to link the ideas. I notice that the questions for the literature component has changed and they are most likely to be HOTS. 

Peer Correction Activity for Writing Lesson

Writing lessons can be thought - provoking when teachers involve peer correction activity. This activity is a way to help students to correct themselves and their friends. It is simply an evident that students will be much aware of their mistakes and correct themselves when peers correct their mistakes. It is greatly effective with low - proficiency learners. I believe the activity would be a festal in classroom when done in groups as no individuals get insulted for making mistakes. Any mistake made is from the entire group. The activity would be more conducive if students of the same proficiency level are put in the same group as they work within their level. Here are the steps for an effective peer correction activity :

Material

The task

The teacher should ensure the task is right for the students. For this task I chose an intermediate writing task where the students have to elaborate 12 content points for directed writing.


Step 1 

Students are working in their small group

Group the students in small groups. Preferably 3 to 4 in a group would be ideal. it would be better if students of the same proficiency level are put in one group as it would help them to work within their level and when the weak ones are grouped together they will struggle to construct sentences. Let them struggle as that is how they learn. If they are assigned with others most likely they will be left out. 

Step 2

Assign each group one content point from the task given and ask each group to write an elaboration for the assigned content point in about 30 to 40 words on a piece of mahjong paper/mini whiteboard. Do not allow them to refer to any materials. The idea should be solely based on their discussion. Give them about 15 to 20 minutes to complete their paragraphs. Once the task is complete,  students should display their work for other students to read. The teacher should prepare an empty space below each completed task for the peers correct. 

Step 3 

Students discussing their peers' work

Once all the groups have put up their work, students from other groups will walk around from one group to another to do the correction. Be aware that some students might correct the right thing, don't say anything until the entire correction process is done and do not let the groups that are being corrected to retaliate. Also please remind the students that they should not correct their own group and also remind them that they should not correct the corrections. 

At the end of the correction process you will find that some errors are corrected 'correctly' and some errors are not.  Remember, this is a process and students learn from their mistakes. This is one way to help them to correct themselves from the  frequent errors they make in composition writing.    

@lousyteachersaidthebulldog

Creative Writing Workshop During Holidays

I conducted a two - day workshop for  form five students during the holidays. I thought nobody would turn up for a workshop during holidays but could not believe that almost all the students who were hand - picked to attend the workshop turned up and it was almost a full house. The commitment from the students  lifted my spirit and I was more than enthusiastic throughout the two days. 

Discussion of task 

I decided to have a creative writing workshop this year as in the past I did not have much time to guide students to develop ideas and creative expressions during formal lessons and most of the time I only shared with my own students and did not have the opportunity to share with students from other classes. Therefore I decided to have this workshop during holidays so that I could work with all the students. 

The objective of the workshop was to help learners to develop ideas and techniques to write creatively. The workshop started with word level activities where students were taught how to use adjectives creatively to make their composition interesting and then it was followed by creative sentence construction. 

The final slot was paragraph writing. It was time for students to let their creative juices flow without any limitations. At the end of the day they shared their ideas with other students. Pondering from the workshop, I could see that many of them have got the talent in them and if guided to the right path they would turn up to be better writers one day. 

Sample of powerpoint presentation 

I hope through the workshop the students have learnt some new ideas and techniques for essay writing that would help them to obtain a better grade in their SPM examination. 

For those who are interested on the materials used for the workshop. Please click here to download them. Sharing is caring. However, I do not provide answers as I don't believe in spoon feeding.  

'HEBAT' MODULES

Here is the compilation of HEBAT modules. HEBAT stands for "Hayati Eksplorasi Berfikir Aras Tinggi. This module is developed to develop higher order thinking skills through reading activities. Each unit comes with lesson plan and also relevant materials. I think they are quite useful. 

There are 20 modules altogether and every module is developed for students of different level. The one thing I like about this module is, they are all focusing on issues and topics relevant to the current generation. Honestly, I do not use textbooks anymore as they are very outdated and I don't think the contents are relevant anymore. I use to make my own worksheets and I find this modules to be interesting and will be able to arouse students' interest if  the lessons are planned carefully. 

Thanks to my friend Aishah for sharing this.

UNIT 1
UNIT 2 
UNIT 3
UNIT 4
UNIT 5
UNIT 6
UNIT 7 
UNIT 8 
UNIT 9
UNIT 10 
UNIT 11
UNIT 12
UNIT 13
UNIT 14
UNIT 15
UNIT 16
UNIT 17 
UNIT 18 
UNIT 19 
UNIT 20 

Using Songs in the English Classrooms

I believe in making my lessons as interesting as possible in any ways which are possible. One of the ways are using songs to teach language skills to our students. Here are a set of worksheets which are based on songs sung by Ricky Martin, Britney Spears, Christina Arguilera and so on... I have been collecting and using them for years so now I think it is time to share some of them.... However, I don't have the links to the vevos  as I downloaded the songs a long time ago using Youtube...you can do the same as well....Click here to download the worksheets.

My First Lesson 2013

I call this activity 'New Year Resolution'

I carried out this activity as my first lesson for the year 2013...

Materials Needed :
Mahjong Papers/Manila Cards and Marker Pens

Activity :

a) Students are divided into groups ( five in a group)
b) A leader for each group will be chosen
c) Students will be required to discuss in their groups,
                       -  things they want to achieve in 2013
                       -  things that they want to stop doing in 2013
                       -  things that would want to start praticing in 2013.

d) group leaders from each group will present their resolutions to the class.

Post - activity :

Students will be required to write an essay entitled ' My New Year Resolutions".

I carried out this activity with all my form 5 and form 3 classes. This can be done and goes along with the theme 'People' in the textbook....