Making emergency remote teaching manageable for students, teachers and parents is a challenge all educators are learning about (on the hoof). In this post Sophie Liggins, teacher and PhD candidate at the University of Essex describes a method of staying on top of it all by setting activities using Microsoft or Google Forms.
The struggle to work out how vigilant to be when encouraging students to develop their English language skills while maintaining wellbeing is a tricky one at the best of times, let alone when we are miles apart from our learners. Once my demand for students to send me a screenshot of their online grammar quiz scores began to seem a bit militant, I thought I should develop something that maintains the need for completion but without quite so much suspicion on my part. An online form seemed to strike a good balance.
Acts of kindness was my first attempt. I found a video lesson on http://film-english.com/ about a man carrying out random acts of kindness and created a form which includes the video link and asks the student to produce some written reflections prompted by some questions. To make it, I chose the Forms App from the menu on Outlook Apps (you could use Google Forms if you don’t have the Microsoft suite of apps), clicked on New Form, and entered the task title, instructions and questions. You can choose the question format (multiple choice, free text etc) and you can also set it to a long answer to give the students a chance to ramble if they so wish! You can also add an attractive background or colour theme of your choice. Once you have finished, you click on ‘Share’ and you are provided with a link to your form which you can share via your e-learning platform. Once the due date has passed, you go back to forms and view the responses to your form and admire the good work of your students such as this response to why someone would want to be kind: “To make himself feel better, connected with other people and share emotions”.
Link to my Acts of Kindness form here.
And here are some more Forms which can be useful for a range of levels:
A short film about taking photos, here.
A reading comprehension on multicultural society, here.
A reading comprehension on why dog’s noses are cold, here.
If you like this idea, do share what you create in the comments below.