Flip Lesson 2 - planning!

So we have one lesson down in our Flipped Learning experiment! Not ones to slack off, we have set about planning lesson two for early next week. The main reflections from planning the first lesson were that although the flipped model enabled us to effectively differentiate for mixed abilities within our groups, we perhaps took this a step too far and created too many activities for pupils who were too similar in ability. We are fortunate that in this particular population, the pupils are set in to four classes. We had aimed for four mini groups within each class of our flipped lesson -  on reflection, this time we will go for three.

This is because, as expected, pupils require varying amounts of time in which to complete activities, ending up at slightly different points depending on how long it takes them to complete a reading, writing or speaking task. Having many activities to then get them through and have to micro manage only creates more confusion and in actual fact more work on the teacher's part. The concept of flipped learning is that the teacher should, through careful planning and structuring of the lesson, become a facilitator to the learning (or hopefully practising) taking place and therefore pinpoint their attention more accurately to those who need it. A lesson should effectively run itself, or at least that is how we envisage it in our planning stages. This is probably the part that as a languages teacher I will find more difficult to get to grips with and I suspect some of our students will feel this way too. They are so used to us being the expert, the source of knowledge in the class, that to have to rely on their own brains and the information available to them from a previous task will require a shift in attitude. I'm hoping this will build independence and, here's that Ofsted word again, resilience. 

So this time through we are planing three groups - Purples, Ambers and Greens. The context of the lesson is future tense with year 8 Spanish on the topic of La Comida.Using the Explain Everything app for the iPad (that took a while to get to grips with, I'll be honest - this 'flipping' is nothing if not a steep learning curve!), we created a video demonstrating using the future tense. We introduced time phrases to stretch our most able and their preparation task was to complete a Google doc matching the translation of time phrases Spanish to English and then manipulate the language independently to create some future tense sentences of their own. We will then use the lesson itself to build confidence in using the future tense through reading and speaking activities. 

As before, purples will be those who didn't complete the homework task and will start by watching the video on iPads. Ambers completed their homework but perhaps not grasping everything without some additional support and greens were those who from the Google task were most able to use what they have learned with some success. The tasks this time will be a card sort activity, putting a sentence into the correct order (we have prepared 3 to varying degrees of difficulty), a reading activity consisting comprehension questions and a verb finding task and finally some speaking practise. We are hoping to encourage those more able pupils to offer support to their peers in listening to pronunciation or peer assessing reading. Watch this space!

The first flipped lesson in MFL - Reflections

As part of our ongoing work with New Technologies for our School Improvement Group, members of our MFL dept at Wildern are experimenting with flipped learning. If you aren't entirely sure what Flipped Learning or FlippingYour Classroom is, see this video here or follow the #flippedclass #flippedlearning hashtags on Twitter. You may have seen me blog some time ago about wanting to start the flipped classroom this year - I had big plans as the Summer months left me with ambitions for the new school year, some of which I have been able to get my teeth into, others not so much!

Unfortunately I don't have a year 7 class on my timetable this year so it wasn't an option to embed the 'flipping' from the outset as I had first intended. Actually what I hadn't anticipated was quite how long it would take me to decide just who we would flip the learning with. I worked with Rhiannon and Javi in my department as we decided not to duplicate (or even triplicate, is that a word?) workload and we set about going back and forth deciding whether to flip with year 8, 9 or 10. Year 10 was ruled out due to the restrictive nature of Controlled Assessment - it just wasn't feasible to experiment at such an early stage in the term when pupils were due to start their first speaking task and it didn't seem fair to throw their learning up in to the air without knowing how it would pan out and risk losing their engagement as such a crucial time. Our year 9 scheme of work is quite unique with art modules, beauty modules and British Airways Language Flag Award assessment at the end of the year. Some of the units we are teaching are new to us this year, so again we thought it best to settle with the material first rather than start mixing up two things in one. That left us with year 8 - fortunately we all had a year 8 class studying Spanish and with different abilities so it would just be a case of differentiating our materials for our individual classes. 

We are currently studying a unit of work loosely based on Listos 1 Module of La Comida (food). We have so far covered basic food vocabulary as well as giving opinions so we decided to schedule in our flipped lesson in the context of buying fruit and vegetables at the greengrocers. We created our own video using a FlipCam, where we presented vocabulary and then demonstrated a mini role play taking place between customers and the greengrocer. This video can be seen here. It was quite simple to edit the video using iMovie on Mac so that we could add subtitles. We chose not to subtitle all of the speech - just the key vocab or key phrases we wanted to teach. The video was embedded in to a page on our school VLE (virtual learning environment) where students usually collect their homework from. In order to ensure pupils had actually watched the video and to help us set groups for the flipped lesson, we asked students to complete a Google doc. We also managed to embed this on the page too so that pupils could scroll down and complete the answers in the Google form immediately below the video they had watched and thus ensuring they didn't need to remember lots of links (and therefore forget them, meaning they weren't prepared for the lesson!).

When it came to the lesson itself, we had the results from the Google form to support group setting. We divided pupils into four groups - Purple if they hadn't completed the homework, then Red, Amber or Green depending on how well they appeared to have understood the material from the video. The activities they completed were as per this lesson plan:

As a three, we reflected on the lesson immediately after. Rhiannon had a dual language accelerated set and the initial feedback was that her class really were on board with the lesson and went with it, feeding back that they enjoyed the task and as a teacher Rhiannon commented that it ran very smoothly. She had no Red group - the pupils in her class coped well with the stimulus video material so perhaps next time we will think about whether to subtitle or not, or perhaps run two versions of the video. My class were the set below - mid to high ability pupils - and seemed to engage well with the task. There was no doubt that seeing their teachers on film was enjoyable and motivating as a homework task. I felt like my class required a little more micro-managing; pupils were on different tasks at different times as we had anticipated but to keep this working either needed more intervention from me or perhaps none at all. Javi felt the same from his class and with his lower ability set they didn't get on to the final written aspect of the task. We are hoping that as pupils become more familiar with the concept they will start to develop independence which will see them through the running of the lesson and ensure as teachers we can be used as facilitators to the learning taking place. I did notice there was far less off task behaviour or opportunities for it to take place - there was no point in playing the class clown or trying to distract other people as they were all doing something completely different anyway.

We are now setting about introducing a second flipped learning lesson next week, looking at using the future tense to say what you are going to eat and drink. We welcome any comments or questions!

Online tools for MFL learning - Kahoot

The second website I want to share can be found at www.getkahoot.com and was recommended to me by a couple of members of the #mfltwitterati. If you are familiar with Socrative, then Kahoot is a brighter, noisier and all round funkier version. The idea in its simplest form is that it allows teachers to design their own quizzes which students access and answer in real time via any device they connect to the internet, making plenaries and quizzes a lot more fun. The questions are projected on to the interactive whiteboard and pupils access the mobile site via kahoot.it on their devices, give themselves a nickname and tap the correct answer to the question displayed on the board.

I trialled Kshoot today with a year 8 class, testing the rather dry topic of verb endings. After an active lesson, using actions to practise the different conjugations of comer, beber and tomar in the present tense followed by a quick table game of Otra Vez por favor, it was time to consolidate pupils learning of the verbs from the lesson. I always hate teaching verbs -  a mass of different endings wind up blurred into one and pupils leave the lesson only to have jumbled them up ready for the next time you need them, thus ensuring you revisit them all over again. I can only hope that our rather kinaesthetic attempt at miming them out would help get them into their short term memory, but in order to check this was the case I set up a 'pop quiz' of 10 questions.

Kahoot is really user friendly. I think I prefer it to Socrative as it has the ability to personalise your quizzes with an image, and not just questions. Teachers can save their quizzes publicly so sharing among departments should be quick and easy. Adding questions to quizzes is as simple as clicking 'add question' and typing your next choice in until you have had enough and can save your quiz as it is. The colours are really eye catching and the fonts are fun. It screams 'look at me', whereas I felt Socrative perhaps could do with 'jazzing up' a little - that's not to say I won't continue to use both. 

Pupils really loved the colours too and having tried both, some preferred Kahoot whereas others liked the simplicity of Socrative. Kahoot plays 'lobby music' as users wait for the whole group to have answered the question - this really added to the atmosphere and tension and made the plenary really engaging. What was ultimately the most exciting was the competitive element. Kahoot gives users a score depending on how quickly they answer a question and a leaderboard is shown after each question, and again at the end of the quiz. This was so much easier for me as a teacher, as deciphering the Socrative answers was a bit hit and miss at time (perhaps that's just me however!). 

I would critique that as with any online site, it can be problematic if pupils lose connection and get kicked out, so have that in mind and maybe book some laptops or computers with a decent connection rather than using mobile phones. I would also add that pupils thought it would be easier to have the question displayed on their device as well as the projector - but perhaps they just wanted to gain extra points by answering that split second quicker! All in all, a really fun end to the lesson and after the positive feedback from year 8, I shall be trialling it with other classes this week. It will be hard to forget the buzz in the room today, and all for learning present tense verb endings!

Online tools for MFL learning - Memrise

This academic year i have found myself trying to exploit the new technologies we have in school to boost language learning. I thought today I would share a couple of websites I have been using with various classes with some success. I should add that neither are subscription based, nor are they MFL specific, but my classes seem to really enjoy using them.

The first of which is www.memrise.com. Memrise (not a typo!) is a website dedicated to committing items of vocabulary, facts or figures to our long term memory using the neat metaphor of watering a garden. Pupils choose a course of vocab to study (handily, some kind soul has already uploaded specification lists for the AQA exam board for German, French and Spanish) and plant seedlings, which through watering, develop into flowers, and hey presto - vocab learnt forever! 

Each vocab list is learnt two words at a time which are tested immediately. Correct answers gain points; the quicker the answer, the higher the point scored. Students are encouraged to revisit topics frequently, and reminders to 'water' plants they may have planted some weeks previously ensures that old content can not be forgotten; it is always revisited. The memrise strategy is based on the three concepts of science, fun and community for 'effortless learning' and as they put it:

"we've turned learning facts and language into a game where you grow a colourful garden of memory. You grow and water your memories in a garden of memory, you zoom up the leaderboards, and you learn alongside your mempals. It's like a guiltless video-game"

www.memrise.com 

It's this video game style and the competitive element of the leaderboards which has boosted my set two year 10 class into really learning their homework. I have set up an account and I 'follow' the pupils in my class - this gives me the option to see a leaderboard, organised into weekly, monthly and 'all time' top scores. We have created quite the competition in class and prizes have been awarded for particularly impressive results - be it reaching a certain score in a certain time frame, moving a certain number of places up the leaderboard or simply gaining 10,000 points in a 30 minute lesson. 

The brilliant part is that pupils can pick a topic which matches a context of work as the lists are sorted to the exam board. I can even set up my own lists of vocab for them to learn, which I will be exploiting more nearer exam time by creating lists of tricky exam words. I can only speak from my own first hand experience but with three classes using this now, all of different abilities, pupils find it a very quick, motivating way to complete homework. There are corresponding free apps for Android and Apple devices meaning pupils can learn on the go. Points tot up very quickly, pupils can see their progress in real time and if they choose to follow one another, seeing their position on their very own leaderboard spurs them on to study for 'just another 5 more minutes' in order to beat their friends. I really recommend giving it a go - or at least telling pupils about it so they can try it out for themselves as independent study.