 My name is Carl Blythe. I'm the Director of Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning and today we have a webinar and it's um that is all about remote language teaching activities for remote language teaching and it's could not be a more timely topic since with the COVID pandemic all of us are now teaching remotely and we're learning in how to do it and we're teaching each other how to do it even better. We have three speakers here today with us and I'll introduce them in just a minute but I do want to say before we begin that coral has a OER course remember OER stands for open educational resources we have an entire course on our if you come to our homepage there is a pull-down menu that says OER and then we have an entire online course that you can take to learn the ins and outs of OER how to read licenses open licenses how to find the content that you're looking for how to use repositories how to remix and on and on and on so um today we're having a discussion as I said with three people and we'll have a Q&A following that so there is a button at the bottom of your screen in the zoom a field that says Q&A so you can just click there and type in your questions we'll be monitoring the questions um and saving those questions for the very end but make sure that you type them in as the thought arises otherwise you might forget so questions and our comments everything is welcome okay uh so let's get started we have three speakers Olivier Gruggen a virtual uh a learning specialist in Arabic Spanish and German an instructor and she comes from us from the world of learning institute at Appalachia Intermediate Unit 8 which is in Pennsylvania and she'll tell us a little bit more about the world of learning institute and the work that they're doing how to how they interface with public schools next up we have Catherine Housselin who's a French teacher at Mount Vernon High School and we know Catherine from many years she's attended workshops at Coral and she's a heavy user of digital technology and knows lots about online learning and finally Daniel Verdugo who's a Spanish teacher at Huron High School uh and so the three of them are going to talk a little bit like five to seven minutes share their ideas for their various activities for remote learning and then again at the end we will um have a Q&A so I'm going to turn things over now to Olivier thank you Carl um I'm very excited to be with you all today I got to meet a couple um of you at Actful it was my first time at Actful last fall and that was of course a very exciting experience um I start as a brick and mortar regular public school classroom teacher um and I started in that environment um actually in the Middle East was my first regular classroom teacher job um and I speak Arabic German and and Spanish and for different reasons some of them I grew up with and some of them I've actually done the hard work of acquiring um as as a non-child and um now I work for the world of learning institute at Appalachia Intermediate Unit which Carl asked me to share a little bit about if you're outside of Pennsylvania um I think other states call them educational service agencies but a lot of states there's different ways to organize it of course um a lot of states have agencies that are that serve to provide services to school districts that individually may um have trouble providing those services based on their size um their budget their location and so one of the services that we provide through our intermediate unit which is in the center and in a relatively rural area of Pennsylvania um is the service of foreign language education or world language education and so we recognized a need within our our public school districts um to offer languages that they may not be able to find someone or hire someone or offer a full-time job to someone to teach in the school district so we say we're the next best option if you can't find somebody in your school district to offer that language but your students want to have access to them rural students should have access to language choices too so we offer seven languages um and we offer it through a somewhat unique format which is um our teachers are throughout the state they actually some of them live outside of Pennsylvania and they offer live virtual sessions in zoom just like we're all in here now um and students in their public schools access those virtual sessions on a set schedule and many of them are sitting in their school library guidance counselor office maybe an empty classroom with the power of professional and they're able to join with a couple of kids from some other rural schools and at the same time that that's a combination of students can come together and receive classes in Japanese or in Latin or in Arabic or a language that they might not authorize otherwise be able to um have access to so it was a compelling um vision for me as someone who speaks multiple languages as a teacher myself wouldn't have the opportunity probably to teach each of those in the school um and in some contexts wouldn't have the opportunity to teach them at all like Arabic so for me as a teacher it was a way that I could tap into some of my passions um but I also I was also having grown up early I think really compelled by the idea that that students who have may have trouble accessing opportunities should of course have them as well so that's our sort of that's our model at the world of learning and what that means is that we have been teaching remotely for years and so we are not making this transition right now like everybody like many others right and I think that's important to acknowledge because making the transition in April looks very different than when you get to think about it the summer before and prepare for the upcoming school year right so you know I've been teaching my my students who were sitting in their brick and mortar schools since September now of course they're home but we have a lot of our routines and norms established already so the students see me in most of our schools two or three times a week for about 45 minutes live um and then on the other two or three days when they don't see me they have work they have material to access and work through what we call asynchronously on their own time um online we use a platform called Canvas but there are of course lots of different platforms you could use to provide students with material um outside of those live sessions so what I want so that's that's a little bit about the background what I wanted to share with you as far as we were asked to share sort of one activity your thought and um making the transition for me from brick and mortar to virtual I'll caveat by saying was was a difficult choice because I really love being in the same room as my students right um so one of the ways that it has helped me to frame this transition that allows again allows my students access is to think about what is good teaching right of course there are lots of different ways to think about that we take our own vision of good teaching and to say we're not abandoning that we're just figuring out how to do that in this new context right so one of the like to me one of the key pieces of good teaching that I've experienced as a student um are routines classroom routines right and those can of course be varying degrees of effective but um they those routines provide consistency they provide as we know is as language teachers how important repetition is right so they provide repetition um they routines I think really allow us to stay in the target language in a way that is otherwise of course challenging but once students get familiar with the routine we can use the target language at a much higher rate than we might if we didn't have those routines I think they build confidence in our students because they come in and they know what to expect we do this this this I can do this I've done it before right um and and they make our teaching more efficient we have limited amount of time with our students in a remote environment our time is often even more limited and so those routines allow us to transition quickly and be efficient so I want to share with you today in my in my short probably moment or two that I have left um just a visual glimpse of some routines that I have utilized I want to show you my Arabic class routines because I know Arabic's a language it doesn't always get quite the same attention um some of the other wonderful languages get so these will be the visuals will be in Arabic but you can imagine them translating of course to any number of other languages um so three things that I do in my Arabic class this first screen is our um this first slide is our bell ringer screen our bell ringer slide um and I've actually started this year pulling parts of it out and leaving bits blank so this part up here in the top left at the beginning of the year would have the date and this would be a full greeting and this part over here on the right would say objective and this part would say um calendar dictation right so the students have seen these parts before and as the year goes along I start pulling some of those typical um sub headers out and then at the beginning of class I ask students I'll use my panelists I'll just use your names as an example I'd say Sarah can you put the date in here and Daniel why don't you complete the greeting and Carl can you write the word objective um and then the students use the annotate tools within zoom and they start filling out this first screen right so it gets them immediately kind of engaged but in a very routine way where they can build that confidence um and of course I have a bell ringer that they can do in the chat and we might start talking about some of our objectives for the lesson we might talk about the agenda so that's what you know I think of that is good teaching in the in the brick and mortar we try to do that in the virtual environment too um and to show you what that looks like when students are there and they've written on the screen this is after they've sort of um written some some of those pieces in on the screen right so that's what that might look like sometimes I use the first screen just as a real quick warm up too especially if people are gathering and in the target language I say point to the color pink point to the words that means peace point to the number three point to the color blue and students can use this arrow tool to just sort of point around and quickly show comprehension you know and warm us up while we're while we're getting started for the for the lesson so that's one routine another routine I use is a dictation routine where because in Arabic of course they're learning another alphabet so I say a couple words in Arabic have them write them in their own notebook there's nothing wrong with using you know an old-fashioned notebook even though we're in the virtual environment have them write them in their own notebook and then I'll choose four students we'll let them volunteer and say Daniel can you write your word up here Carl write yours there Sarah write yours there and then we can all look at the words together and we can identify you know areas for correction or growth so here's an example where students did some writing and then we might have written over top and sort of corrected some pieces or looked at their letter formation um collectively as a class and the third routine I wanted to share with you in the last one is a calendar routine which of course you could translate other languages too these questions ask what is today what was yesterday what will tomorrow be and these sentence starters say today is yesterday was tomorrow will be and then I have a reminder about the day the number the month and the year and so again I'll ask students either to write or to unmute and tell me how to finish each one of these sentences and we can do it in different styles each time whether they're unmuting or writing and what it might look like after they've sort of gotten to scribble on the screen is a little messy but this is them annotating within zoom on the screen and because we're all looking at it it would be like in a brick and water students coming up to the whiteboard writing on the whiteboard because we're all looking at the same screen we can obviously discuss um any of the issues that we want to discuss so those are just three of the routines and I you know there are other ones that I think are important in in other language areas and depends of course on the level of student but um that's what I that was my thought for today was about even if you're transitioning in April right even if you didn't start this at the beginning of the year um I think you can think about one opening routine and one closing routine our closing routine is everybody unmutes their mics and we say in whatever language tres dos uno right and then when I'm done with three two one everybody says goodbye um and that little quick closing routine gives that kind of sense of finality and makes it really clear when it's okay to click leave meeting and exit so that that's the piece that I wanted to emphasize today thank you um thanks very much Olivia that was terrific the concept of routines um because that that ties nicely together with the notion of formulaic language a lot of language needs to be repeated and you're right uh it helps teachers stay in the target it helps students stay in the target language because they they know what to expect so it's it just makes for kind of an efficient management of teaching okay so let's now move on to Catherine Catherine I mentioned is a French teacher at in Washington state in high school and she has a lot of years experience teaching online so Catherine take it away well many thank yous um I'm I'm excited to be here because yesterday was doing the flange and I see several the flange people in here so there might be some repetition I apologize but not really because we have a lot of people here looking for some new ideas as well um I'm really impressed with Olivia because I do uh French, German, Italian and Spanish and might might oh and so I work on Hebrew and I'm trying to see if I can pick some things out so thank you so much for that I love languages that have a different a different appeal to them so I'm going to share my screen right away because I want to show you um I am not a synchronous teacher because of the situation I'm in a rural part of Washington state where my students really just don't have access and we've only been um we're only have 30 minutes per week of work that we are supposed to give to them so when I do this I want to make sure that I'm I'm really connecting the students to a lot of interpretive tasks I don't want them trying to produce a lot of presentational writing or speaking or interpersonal speaking would be great we have ways we could do that but um I'm not the feedback on that is the kids aren't going to just do that easily so I'm working on a lot of the interculturality and interpretive tasks and I'm going to show you how I set that up for the students so that they can they can get to this when they feel like they have the time so I'm going to start over here the first one um first I'm going to show you is I was cruising twitter and I found um a tweet by Amanda Sandoval who is an amazing um she's a she's not a language teacher but she she does a lot with google templates and slides and I do too but I thought well if I'm going to create sort of a choice board or a path for my students like a path to proficiency oh I wonder where I've heard that before um I'm design this and we had just finished a unit in all of my um my classes when we closed the buildings so I thought okay I don't necessarily need to go on to the next one that I thought I was going to go on to so I opened it up and I said well we're all stuck at home anyway let's talk about food that's what we're doing we're eating at home and so I made sure for level two three and four that we have different global themes attached to food the first one for french two I'm gonna make this real big here so you can see it is it's um my preference alimentaire and it's also it's about food and your habits and what you like to eat and why now I chose that because usually that leads into our school lunch portion of the of the unit where the students are exploring school lunches from around the world and comparing them to ours but we're just looking at this first one that's week two I'm going to go back to week one okay so this is the first slide I send out to them so I have our um our guiding question right here I just put the one so what are my food preferences what do I like or dislike certain foods really that's a very you know novice mid task but I wanted just because I don't want to overwhelm them with a lot of new vocabulary making it pretty pretty um comprehensible so we have our can-dos I can identify a variety of food and their food groups I can explain my preferences so they've got uh my website down here that I've had for so many years they can go visit that and then there's of course a quizlet so that they can just practice on their own time but this fourth one is where they're going to do their work I also have two videos for them because I'm not there giving them the input both of these videos deal real basic language for little kids on what the food groups are so they're going to go watch that the seesaw activity that I prepared for them it's the first time I've done an actual activity I've used seesaw since it opened up but I've never pushed out an activity to the students well this is my first one ever thank you Nathan Lutz from New Jersey that's your second shout out this week so on the first page of seesaw and this is a free platform you have so many different ways to do that um go watch some tutorials I put out the directions on the first page so I tell them on page two you're going to look at the food and food groups what words can you recognize that's all I'm asking them to do the second one they're going to organize pictures of foods into the food groups and they're doing a drag and drop okay and on the third activity on page four they're going to um put food words under categories I like I don't like I refuse to eat I've never tried then they're going to record themselves saying six of those sentences so you notice part of my directions are in French and part of the bar in English just to make sure we all know what's going on so on the first page on this first slide after that they just seek pictures these are authentic resources from Canada and from France about the food groups they're very comprehensive they've got images and most of the words my students can recognize because French is their third language after Spanish or English so here was the first activity and this one's already been done you see that I just have the categories for the students and then there were pictures so there's basically very little reading comprehension but they had to have looked at this to get the new words from um from our set so then they drag drag drag and then I can just tell right away um the best part is is that I don't know that um avocados are fruits they don't know that zucchini are fruits they don't know that peppers are fruits so I get to give them some feedback I can send it back to them I can give them feedback and say if it has a seed it's a fruit so and then um a lot of them didn't quite get what a fig you know it's like a green or cereal so we have to go back and just look at you know make sure everybody's got that so then the third activity here are all the food words and those were on the sides before the students drag drag drag they need to know they do this from our from our quizlet and from my website what these new food words are so some of them I made very easy for them to understand so like fres and in Spanish and artichokes you know choose words some of them are comprehensible and some of them are new so it's it's a balance okay when they get that I did give them a gloss because they've never heard me say she never used to sing that's something new for them so I glossed it right up there and then they recorded themselves and this student hasn't done that yet but um he needs to work on that so I can see all of my students work right here I think if we go into Blanca's okay and then here's her recording so she chose six sentences so she has the sentence starter the sentence frame right there I really like to eat I don't like I refuse to like I refuse to like I refuse to eat they record themselves and then I can hear them trying out that new vocabulary that's a great way to do that and that that helps them sort of stay on task where they know here's what we're going to do here's some practice practice practice so that I can come to my task and meet it with with hopefully good confidence okay so they've got a new one this week where now we're we're describing food okay so they're the their first chunk was I like to eat cherries and our second one our second tax they're going to be working on I like to eat cherries because they're sweet and juicy so we're upping our level by adding on that because statement okay so we're pushing a little bit towards that intermediate low with giving description so I just gave them another quick vocabulary review how do we describe food and I put pictures I gave them images and I gave them some examples we're also looking at adjective agreement okay so I'm putting a little grammar in there I also have a video that I made with my plastic fruits and vegetables that they can watch I'm not sure if they're going to but I'm wearing the same shirt by the way and then I have a of Disney video it's called at table it's a really good series for french teachers it's pretty comprehensible but I'm having them fill out a google form that explains what they understood and I made these real basics so just like here go watch this and tell me what you understood so I'm just getting this interpretive mode right I also gave them this is so much fun last year's group worked on these little video avatars it's called my school avatars and app for iphones we have ipads at our school so the kids took pictures of foods they like and they don't like and they had the little avatar and then they were speaking in it and the avatar of course talks it's kind of like vokey from back in the day and that way now since we can't do this in class right I'm substituting that with the students watching last year's students who might be some of their friends so their names only the first and the first name in the first initial is there so they're going to go watch three of their friends speaking french describing exactly what we're talking about and they're going to come back and explain in english what did you understand what are some of the food vocabulary words that they used so I'm not having them produce it right away I'm having them listen to authentic material and then other students so that they can kind of compare okay um that's french too right so that's a nice level and then I was going to show you real quickly this is french three and french four and our goal is to look at identiteculinaire et géographique so food identity and geography how does the geography and where you live impact the the the regional cuisine that you're known for and that's a big term because we're going to start in the united states my students are a bit unexperienced with the united states and they needed some input so I started actually with english I've got two videos that show the most popular foods from each state and they came back because they had to fill out this google form and they were horrified by some of the things that people eat around the world I said you know or about around the states and said you gotta go out and that's why we travel is to learn about food so we're getting in this interculturality when we did that the students were watching those videos and then I had a google form up here the sondage and then a learning apps activity and that'll be probably the last thing I show you if you've never seen learning apps.org it's a free site that has so many different ways to make quizzes or games or activities and then you push them out to your students just by a link so this one is a map of the united states because really we need to work on geography at sometimes they click on a pinpoint and all these food pictures come up and they can actually click on here like walleye sandwich they're going to look at Santa Fe and they're going to say I think the food specialty is this and it says like this one and they'll know if they're right there's a little check mark over here when they're all done my next one is going to be it's gigantic it's with thing link if you haven't seen thing like before it can be kind of expensive they've gone back and forth with their pricing and this one a lot of the french teachers know it's somewhat intense so this is a map of France and there's for each region what's grown or produced or harvested in that region and then a dish that's made with it and a recipe and then you can go shopping to buy the ingredients and so they're going to find one of the regions and go shopping for that and decide what would you make if we were together because we always have a cooking night and this is the virtual shopping trip so all this intercalptorality is we start local we talk about washington state what are we known for savan and coffee then we go to united states and then we go global and so we start with friends we look at the geography we look at things that people would do and see etc and then we'll hit the world in the next um in the next level i have uh lots of things if you want to see or use any of these just send me an email or tweet me um i shared these out on flange yesterday so um old last thing really super quick for those french two kids this is the google map that i made and it goes all the way over to polonese franc says this is our school lunch menus from around the world so when the students click on it they get to see a picture of the school and then they get to see the menu the only problem is is that no one's eating school lunch right now so i have to give them menus that are a little bit from january but the school does have that on there so i just give them the january menu and say okay let's just pretend we're there today so carl with that i will stop sharing my screen and pass it back to you thank you so much very very rich uh resources i like like how you've taken from all different kinds of platforms and different images and put them together to make a really very very rich lesson thank you um so let's now move over to daniel but before but before daniel starts talking let me remind everybody if you have a question you need to write the question in the q and a button i see some questions are appearing in the chat room there's lots of activity in the chat room but the chat room is mainly to have kind of your own conversations to post links if you want a question to be directed to our speakers please put that in the q and a okay i see we have about 15 questions already so that's good so daniel will you are our finalist here so you're the last person take it away all right well thank you thank you for the invitation uh for me it's a great honor to be here in this in this webinar today and so for today i brought an activity that i'm working with my class remotely now i teach Spanish in in our republic schools and so this activity is related to a project that i'm uh that i'm leading i'm i'm sharing with with all of you here in the chat the link the link to the project and so let me share my screen let me share my screen and we'll go to the project to give more context right so this is any magazine we publish we publish a magazine at the end of each semester so this is a project that is developed entirely on google slides and it's a project that promotes collaborative learning by literacy and key digital skills so um currently the project is being developed as i say in our republic schools i have four different groups of Spanish for with the total of about 90 uh 90 students and this issue that i'm sharing here with you this is the uh the end product of the first of the first semester this year so um i wanted to let you know a little more context about about the magazine before i jump into the activity what i can tell you about publishing publishing student work is that really engages our students in the learning process right as it allows them to pursue their interests and and share them with real audiences you have here for example a group of students that they created this this green club and they wanted to share what they're doing their work with our school community so they wrote this little article here to share in our magazine the next thing that i want to talk about this magazine is that for us for language teachers it can be very interesting because with a magazine project with a publishing project we can incorporate culture the arts history in our classroom so for example the first semester we were celebrating the the 500th anniversary of the conquest of Mexico so students did a unit of inquiry in in the conquest and then they got to write too about more controversial topics like uh the uh la malinche and the role of the malinche in the conquest so that was uh that was very fun you can see here everything that you see again is all done in in google slides so it's also interesting that uh we can do this type of project without investing so much in new software right we did uh frida calo too as part of our integration of the arts so students ended up writing a biopic of frida calo and then an analysis of one of our masterpieces las dos las dos fridas right so um the last thing um i want to share with you that recently the project this magazine was uh well the hispanic latino commission of the state of michigan here featured the magazine uh for for what i think it's a very remarkable achievement and is that we are publishing the first bilingual magazine in our town in an arbor so uh this type of project publishing magazines or publishing newsletters uh it's a great tool not only for developing communication skills for students but also to engage them to engage them in uh the cultural life of their communities that i think that uh it's very important as well all right so with this i wanted to jump right away on the activity that i got here for you we are working right now remotely from home for our next edition of the magazine it's going to be our sixth edition so um this is what i what i brought to you i know that my students and your students are probably watching a lot of tv shows a lot of movies so uh um my proposal for my students was to do uh write a review a review of uh something interesting that they're watching right so i gave them a little little template here and uh these are two examples that i got also um i wanted to i wanted to let you know that um i decided to make this document open for my students i mean like a shareable document where they can read they can read and write what they can read what everybody's writing right um we know that learning is a uh social activity we learn from other people we learn with other people so uh at this point that our students are at home that they're not they're not seeing their friends i think it's important for them to for us to create this uh to create and foster these learning communities so um some of the some of the text that i got we got a review of parasite by cj we got another review about um el labrinto del fauno so what i did with this review is those are the um uh like the first draft that i got what i did was to take to take these first drafts and add i corrected i corrected and revised the content and then i added some uh visuals some visuals as to share back with the students so the students in the classroom they can read they can read what their peers are writing and also to catch their attention right in order to for them to invite them to write their own thing and then the the last step the last step of the activity would be the publishing so uh i wasn't planning on adding a review section in our magazine but given the circumstances we're gonna end up with uh with a two page with a two page full of the reviews right we're gonna have as you can see here the final the final part will be something like this the real review about parasite your line April and then el labrinto del fauno so this is my proposal um for you i know that many of your students are watching a lot of a lot of media invite them invite them to write about it invite them to reflect about it and share and share what they're doing okay thank you so much daniel that uh that's a terrific project again really wonderful use of multimedia um the way you've gotten your students then to the way you've scaffolded even the whole publishing process coming coming up with a first draft and then making the second draft better and and more media intensive so um i'm gonna turn things over now to uh my colleagues at coral natalie and sarah because we have a number of questions coming in people are are interested in general about how you're doing what you're doing and and in particular how do you how do you find all this content and how do you weave it together and how do you use how do you use seesaw and all these things that you've been talking about okay so sarah and natalie i'll let you you take things over okay great thank you yeah there were a lot of questions very specific questions about how you use certain tools and i'll get to those but um since this question um i don't know if everyone knows this but you can vote for questions that are asked so if a lot of people uh want that question to be answered you can vote for it so one question that received multiple votes was from edward he says he works in a very poor school district most of his students don't ask can't access technology and he has to make a packet for them each week so do you have any engaging activities you would recommend or i don't know any ideas about how maybe what you've shared with us could perhaps be translated into a packet i know this is kind of um difficult since we're talking so much about technology but if anyone has any ideas that would be great one of the things i have for um the students because as i i want to say rural it was it's not like sunny side washington rural okay mum Vernon's its own place i have lots of students who don't who didn't have access so we sent them chromebooks and then we tried to get them hot spots but even then they don't they just could not get connected so for all the stuff that i had i um i have little books that i've um pdfs that i've made copies of about food about regions so they're not going to have the same exact experience okay because we can't replicate the web we can't replicate that so i've i'm sending them home reading that that i've had before when we were in class we would have read these books so now i have them in pdf i had them photocopied and i'm giving those out that's the best i can do for for our situation when i see them in the fall we'll work together through whatever we didn't get to or whatever they missed for that interculturality part but we'll work on it books great thank you does any other panelists have any ideas about that or should we do it i like but i like the books idea too and i was gonna ask it depends on what level um i have my own classroom library of readers and so now they're home with me and i've been mailing them to students you know with my name in the front and i'll get them back whenever i get the back and then maybe they could keep a journal like a reading journal and if they do have at some point maybe not internet but if they can take a photo of their writing i have students who have texted me photos so if they're keeping like a daily journal in in spanish let's say after reading a little chapter of a book they could take a photo of that and text it to me so that might be an option that that's not a full year solution but it is sort of a stop gap if you're just here at the end of the year right thank you that's a great suggestion uh and now we have another question for daniel specifically about actually a few different questions about um how the different tools that you use to create the magazine and how did you make it easy for students to access the tools i think you might have mentioned google slides but could you talk a little bit more about that yeah right um yeah as i said the magazine is entirely done on on google slides and then uh so uh we try to integrate as much as we can with google we use google classrooms we use the entire google suits so uh that's what we use basically that's that's all there is and then of course from google from google slides you can you can download uh the file as a pdf and then we upload the file pdf in issue.com and that's where you can flip through the file as as it was a a magazine but google slides that's all there is really and someone asked if there is a template for that or you just kind of create your own yeah no we um we start with the blank templates and uh as i develop the project really what i want to do is develop templates for other teachers to make them available to them um but um i invite i invite all of you if you have an interesting maybe starting with a newsletter you can start with a um yeah a blank sheet in in google slides and then every time it gets easier as you as you do it over and over but uh yeah as i develop the project i would like to i would like to provide these templates ready to use for other teachers wow that'd be awesome thank you uh and just while we're talking about this too i wanted to make one note since we're the center for open educational resources and language learning um there's all all the presenters shared things with a lot of pictures here today and so i just wanted to remind everyone that i know we're in kind of dire times right now and so everyone's using whatever resources they can but um when when you have the chance we advise that you look into creative commons licenses too um or into images that have creative commons licenses so these are images that um you're allowed to use legally and all of your resources and there's places you can search for all these images so you can really make sure that what you're using is you're allowed to use but um yeah so just a little plug for that um so to go on to our next question this one was a lot of people upvoted so i think this is a big concern um marie asks my students don't have to do anything anymore and can take their grade as of march 13th the day we stop real school and i'm losing them little by little they're not interested in learning anymore and are giving up what is your best advice to get them interested again i want to jump in i'm excited about this question um then i'll back out but uh i there always the answer is going to be it depends right so if we were going to actually have this conversation one on one i'd want to ask you about what tools they have access to um you know what you're permitted to use through your district but i'll just say um the the transition the shift that i've made that has had the most success in and again i was already online with my students but it doesn't mean things didn't change they all went from being in their brick and mortar while the bell rang and they sat down in the computer lab and found me and now they're all at home the biggest transition that i made was i shifted from bell schedule classes to what i've sort of called a coffee break model and the coffee break model and and again this is on your own availability too what it means for me is i've told my spanish students i'm available i'm in my zoom room every single day at 10 a.m from 10 to 10 30 week days right monday through friday and it's a coffee break um so it's not a lesson with a lesson plan because there are also a lot of them are not required to do this work anymore um i'm not necessarily going through all my classroom routines even though that is what i showed you at the beginning of this um but we play games we read children's books with coffee with chocolate and milk or cookies and milk you know i invite them to bring snacks um which is of course they couldn't do before um we i share my screen and we play tic-tac-toe and hangman and you know different games in in the target language um and none of it is directly connected to the curriculum but it's all in the target language and then i tell them um come i'm on there five days a week come to two of them or try to come to three of them recognizing again that may not be required either but rather than saying our classes on tuesdays and thursdays and it's at 904 to 957 which i've shifted to this um coffee break model that's open and daily and i keep getting more students in it and i'm not i don't have my full class percentages i have around 50% just to be transparent but week one of going home i had two kids coming one kid then i got three four five you know now i have like eight or nine coming to a period that maybe had 15 students originally in it and new kids are still popping up so i think they're sitting at home at some point they're starting to get a little bored it doesn't have a great attach to it it doesn't it's fun they get to see their friends because it's live um i do sometimes put them in breakout rooms kathy mentioned breakout rooms earlier i put them in breakout rooms and i let them chat with each other and i move between breakout rooms and listen to what they're chatting about and they're chatting in the target language um so it's been very encouraging to me because i think that in some ways they're a little bit hungry for something to be going on in their lives you got to get the right time though if you schedule it too early in the morning they are not awake so i learned that too we're shifting you know a little bit later breakout rooms are available in free zoom i just saw that so i wanted to say that they are available in free the free accounts great thank you any more ideas daniel or kevin um it's it's a tough question really uh we see that yeah that our students they're they're kind of done with uh with the year with the school year for them some of them might be going through a hard time too and and they just want to be done right so anything that we do in our classes to keep them keep them motivated to see that what they're doing that what they're doing has a purpose uh other than maybe just the grade because the grade doesn't matter anymore so they have to find you know new motivations to to keep learning just real quick i would add that um say for freshmen i i i know high school kids mostly um for for 10 years we've conditioned the students and ourselves that school is what happens in this building olivia is a little bit different okay but when we've taken them out of that box and we've said okay school is now in your living room or it's in your bedroom or it's in your basement the kids how can't that's not a that's not a concept that just flips on a dime nor was it for us so when when we're losing that motivation that that's to be expected because they don't i mean homework was maybe one part of this world but now they're being asked to go watch their teacher if it's synchronous that be patient with everyone because they are going to disconnect that's just that's just a reality we'll see them hopefully in the fall i say hopefully because be patient they'll come back they love us thank you uh so we have another question and i feel like we could do probably a whole new webinar on this but someone asked what do you think about the evaluation process how do you grade your students anyone have honestly i'm just looking at like those picture matching things i look at it and did they get it no so i sent it back and i'll say try it again and if they don't i still have an engagement from them one person sent it in and it was just like that kid just pushed pictures and know whatever thing and there i said really i'm not going to score this i want to mean score is i have to click on our gradebook attempted that's what we're doing we're looking at attempted and i'm not going to give 93.2 percent there's just that's not the world we live in right now and that's okay because at least they attempted they looked at it when they don't engage then it's an i it's an incomplete and that work will need to be made up when we see them again when we see them again yeah on on grading it obviously depends on your district and because i work in different districts that's the whole couple of students they're probably 12 or 13 different districts i'm seeing a lot of different versions of this so for some districts that are doing pass fail yeah it's it's it's completed or incompleted i have some districts that are still trying to stick to a graded model um and in one of those they are one of the districts that i have participating in my daily coffee breaks and so for that district i said um it's 50 points a week and you can get 10 points each time you attend the coffee break just attendance and then if you can't attend five because they might not be able to then another you can get 10 for submitting a free write where you write in spanish for 10 minutes take a picture of it and send me a picture or you can get 10 points for doing a chat conversation like texting with a friend in spanish take a picture of your screenshots and send it to me so they kind of have like ways to get 10 points it's all still completion right just did you do it um and for the student that might not be feeling that self-motivation at home or whatever they can attend the live session and for the one who doesn't have great internet and can't attend the live session they can do more free writing so just being very very flexible about what gets you those points and that's just because the district is still requiring grading a lot of other districts are not thank you uh someone else had a question for kathleen about the choice board how did you create that is that through an app that you created it oh i think you're on mute they're back is it okay if i share my screen on that okay thank you i'll come back so um somebody asked about my school avatars just real quick there it is it's $1.99 that's why we have it on our school iam ipads okay this is just a google slide and i there so i put a background on it and if you look up amanda sandoval i'll put her in the chat in just a minute she's the one where i got this idea from to like make a a path but her first one that i saw and i tweeted this out so if you follow on twitter i was so excited um hers are a lot more visually intense and i made that one first with tons and tons of boxes and pictures and everything and someone gave me some feedback and said that's overwhelming you know we just need the kids to go one two three four five six done it's like um snakes and ladders or i don't know it isn't english but it's that path game that you play um so how i did it it's just a text box and then i typed in the text and then you can add links so you highlight that and then make a link to the thing that you want to do you can add videos just over here and insert videos this is a background and when you click on your background it'll say right there use a use an image so i chose an image that was hopefully uh copyright free because i did go to um uh i did go to the correct creative comments ended that sometimes i try the bit mojis those are from my ipod because i have mine in french and so then your bit moji is in french so we try and do that um and then i just duplicate it for the second one um just a second this one it's the same idea this is for the higher level i just took a background image added the the boxes you can make pictures links so you can do a lot of things like that it's it's pretty um copy paste and you're done great thank you um and so someone asked i think this question was for daniel but probably any of the presenters could answer it uh what are movies you suggest for high school students if someone did want to engage their students talking about movies that they're watching um yeah i in my activity i i started the activity recommending recommending movies all i can think is that when when we recommend movies we should be aware that uh uh not to recommend something in netflix not to recommend just just as a matter of equity right we don't want to uh to be working with things where we're not all our students have access so uh try to recommend something that is available on youtube there's is available on uh b-mail so there's a i recommend it in in this activity of the reviews there's one one sure movie called bird boy bird boy and uh it's interesting it covers uh themes about bullying and substance abuse and it's the setup is in a post apocalyptic setting you know that it's very uh you know for the for the times right now so uh yeah that will be my my recommendation try to make it as equitable as possible great thank you um someone asked for some quick activities for early levels in zoom that's a little vague but um if anyone if Olivia or anyone else has i wonder yeah i wondering if we can get a little more guidance on more like types of activities but understand i mean the basic concept being that you want to think about what early levels can do and this year i taught an arabic one and i taught a spanish one um and um i you know that just a basic because i feel like sometimes again we're getting onto this theme it's april and both of my co-panelists have mentioned this we may need to keep things sort of basic and focus on the where areas where we can have successes so if you have students in there live with you in zoom the first tool to explore is the chat box and allow enable it so that students can send private chats you don't have to navigate out you don't have to go anywhere else you don't have to share your screen right but i did a session and and some of my students their internet is not good now that they're home so in some cases they're turning off their videos because the video takes up an extra bandwidth they may not be using the mic and yet the chat box is there they can still hear and see me so we're in there live they're looking at me and i had a spanish class this week where i decided and it was a spanish one just to start asking some questions that were pretty much almost all yes or no questions and i had them responding in the private chat so i can see everybody's name they can't see each other's answers and it was a very quick check for comprehension and i was saying things like you know i was just pulling things from my room what color is this what's my name how many students are here how many teachers are there um is the teacher a boy or a girl very closed questions that were really basic and they were answering in the chats and i i mean i it's sort of a boring activity but we we got a lot of momentum out of it like we stuck around with it for a while and then the more confident student unmuted their mic and started asking some basic questions um and again i was able to check comprehension because i could see all these little answers pop up cc cc cc and then one student says no and then it's very quick oh that student didn't understand that right and you can follow up however you choose to follow up so there might be ways to do some i mean there are ways to do some really basic stuff within zoom just one idea i don't know if that actually answers where the question was headed yeah well yeah um i think anina asked that so she can ask a follow up question if that sounds great thank you um someone asked has anyone success successfully used extempore i don't know what that is but anyone yes it looks like kath fame has kath fame do you want to tell us a little bit about it's um it's a great way to mimic states practice for the ap um they're offering it for free right now which is really generous because it's not a cheap site app when you go there you can record the audio or you if you have some recorded audio from native speaker not from a cd um you're uh able to put that in there and then you can choose how much time the students are going to record themselves and you can have this non you know it's an asynchronous conversation but the students hear the prompt and then reply and then you can keep going back and forth like that and then you get their recorded answer as a complete conversation great practice for the ap great thank you so it looks like we only have four minutes left we're running out of time and we have still a lot of questions i'm gonna try to save the questions and maybe see if we can collect some answers and send them out afterwards um i think that's the best way to do it but we can maybe try to answer one more question uh someone asked i'm really enjoying this online magazine idea we did this years ago for esl my comment is there are lots of ads popping up as we looked at the magazine wouldn't it be fun if the students could create ads as well that's so that's not a question but an idea so that sounds like a quality uh i think the question about translation is interesting about because there's several quite there's several people who ask the question about what do i do with students who are now using who are obviously using google translators do you allow that do you uh forbid that what what is your take on that and that's directed to anybody anybody want to hand because that's that's uh that's an issue now and in remote is it their original production or are they using somebody else's but how do you handle those issues i'm gonna just jump in i that's why in the beginning i said i'm not focusing on presentational speaking or writing um we're asking our students sometimes i saw prompt the other day for a french one's okay i'm not criticizing but i i saw a french one prompt and it was so far above what it was it was asking for full sentences and we know that novice learners are words and lists and and of course the teacher was saying oh these these kids used to google translate i said well look at your prompt are you giving them the language are you giving a prompt or a task that they can do within their level if not the first thing that they're going to do is resort to the translator if it's something that they can do like you remember those pictures that i had them do right that's something they can do without having to fake it so just make sure that when you are when you're creating your tasks keep them even one level lower yeah thank you i think that's a great tip and i i also think that you can create sort of input based assignments where the attack you know the student is reading or watching something and then demonstrating their comprehension even if they're demonstrating in their first language they're summarizing it or if they're just answering yes or no questions or true false questions um but they're getting they're they're getting the input and they're showing that they understand it but they're not required to put an output up there that's that's higher than their level i'm 100 in agreement with you on that great so i think um since we are coming up on the hour it's time to wrap things up i uh want to thank our three speakers um so Olivia thank you Catherine thank you Daniel thank you i think you have so many interesting ideas um so many engaging ideas i love how you're using all of this media that you're finding and also student generated content it's also it's really wonderful so let me end by mentioning just a couple of things here at coral we actually put on summer online workshops uh we have two this this summer both in june uh we have a proficiency workshop for um anybody who wants to learn more about proficiency language teaching and that will be june 24th these of course are all online workshops so they're available for the public just go to our web page and you can register there and find out all the details and then the second workshop we have is the heritage spanish workshop that's june 25th and 26th and again that that runs all day and we have um we have a number of different speakers and they'll have breakout rooms and they'll have all kinds of activities planned finally um i want to mention that we have something at at coral called the learn community and that is the language oer network these are people people like the three presenters today who are creating their own content and they're making what we call oer so using a content from the internet that is uh that has an open copyright and they can share that back to the community so if you're um if you're already doing that and you want to learn more or if you want to connect with other people to find out how to do that because a lot of the questions today were about which tool did you use and what is that app and so forth there's a lot of knowledge there in the community so come and visit our learn community to learn more about how to create oer and finally i mentioned at the beginning we have our own oer course it's a totally online totally open totally free and you can learn the ins and outs of open education thank you again to everybody for your participation we had over 190 people today you're listening in um and thanks especially to our presenters olivia uh kate kate kate and daniel okay everybody stay safe and stay healthy thank you thank you thank you so much