 OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Welcome. So, so great to have you here, ESL teachers. This is really about ESL, but if you teach ABE, this will pertain to you as well. This is about writing and how we can integrate tech with writing and have students collaborate, and all of those things combined create community and help with your student persistence as well. So my name is Christy Reyes, I'm an OTAN subject matter expert, and I also teach ESL at Miracosta College Continuing Ed. It's an adults program just like yours, so it's non-credit. And so this is an overview of what we're going to be doing today. I have found that collaborative writing really helps those students who say, I can't write, because when they see that their classmates can fuel them on and help them, then they can become more independent. So through images and videos, we can integrate technology, and we can have students do the vocabulary and grammar that we're teaching. Instead of the boring old worksheets, they can be creative working together and have fun and use language that we're teaching them in new and interesting ways. So I'm going to show you lots of different activities, slides that you're going to see are available. I'll share this. So our agenda, I feel that, you know, anything we do needs to be research based, grounded and evident. So I'm sorry if that's a little boring for you. I won't spend too much time on that, but I want to go over a little bit of the research and standard spaces for a collaborative writing, because there is strong research behind this. And then I'm going to go over a ton of different writing activities. I always overclan for my classes and my presentation, so I may not get to everything. But when you visit the slides, you can see a wealth of different activities that I may not have to cover. But you can go back and visit and feel free to email me if you have questions at any time. So some of these activities are to practice and just reinforce the language structures and vocabulary, and to help students connect the spoken grammar or the speaking aspect of the vocabulary that they're learning to written production, but also to kind of check in and get a diagnostic, maybe the formative assessment to see if what we're teaching is really syncing in. And then I love to have students do error correction collaboratively. So for the grammar that I'm sure you've seen this, when you're teaching grammar, they know how to correct their own grammar mistakes. So how can we do that? And then about the writing process, I find that students give them a little bit of a long time for the introverts, but then together they can generate so many ideas for a writing prompt. So it's really great for pre-writing activities. And then I like to have students in the beginning parts of my classes before they start writing more independently, collaboratively work on summaries, descriptions, and narratives. So all of these activities that I'm going to show you, I've done face-to-face in the classroom, remotely in Zoom, and even sometimes I've had them do on the learning management system at a distance, not even in sync. So people contributing at different times to something maybe in Canvas. So my goal is that you'll walk away with at least one new activity that you can try in your class to have students work collaboratively on their writing. So the research says that we really need to teach writing as a process. One time many years ago, I saw a teacher in my program. She was long retired, but she had students sitting at the computer typing the first draft of their paragraph. They had not done any pre-writing, any idea generation, and they were just sitting there staring at a blank screen. Well, we need to teach and build in those scaffolds because our students, if they walk away from our classes with anything, they need to walk away with how to approach a writing task, how to think of their ideas, list their ideas, all of those strategies. Okay, so no one, not you, not me, not experienced writers sits down at a computer and just starts typing away, right? So we probably might do that, but then we arrange and we walk away and we talk to someone. So that will serve our students better. Also, the research shows that yes, grammar is important, it is important to help our students be accurate, but we should focus first on the content, the expression, the meaning, and later on that accuracy. Because if we go in with red pens and start marking every error, that is very demotivating. So the lower order concerns as they're called come later. And then finally, when we are teaching grammar, make sure that we teach it within a context. So when I'm teaching a certain unit, if I'm teaching this coming week, I'm going to be teaching about favorite places. And students are going to be writing a place, a paragraph about their favorite place. And with that, they're going to be using passive. So you have to draw it out of the context. I'm not going to teach grammar in isolation. It has to come along with the reading, the theme, the writing that they will be producing. So there are benefits also of having students write together. Because as I said in the beginning, they can help each other generate better ideas. So can you answer in the chat? You saw back there the stages of the writing process, pre-writing or generating ideas, writing the first draft, getting feedback from you or their peers on, first on the content, then revising the content, then getting feedbacks on mechanics, those lower order concerns like grammar or punctuation, all of that, then editing. So fixing the mistakes. And then finally, publishing. So can you answer in the chat? Of those stages of the writing process, do you have your students write together collaboratively at any of those stages? And if so, what stage can you please share in the chat? Yes, brainstorming. So what, it just fits together, right? You know, as I tell my students, two brains are better than one. And discussing the topic, coming up with the topic. Yes, two brains are better than one. And, you know, in isolation, they may not have many ideas. And when they come together, wow, the number of ideas they can generate. And sometimes they come up with ideas I had never even thought of outlining. That's very interesting. Thank you for that. But it seems like a lot of us are talking about brainstorming, but I want you to even think beyond brainstorming. Even in the drafting stages, okay? And the editing. So when you do have students do the brainstorming, for example, or the outlining, how do you do that collaboratively? So maybe some of your teaching remotely still, if you're using Zoom or some other sort of video conferencing, do you have them go into breakout rooms? And how do you do that with the technology? And then do you have them report back? Or how is it that you're doing that? Or if you're doing outlining or coming up with a topic, how exactly do you do that? Or if you're back in the classroom, I remember when I was in the classroom, I would have those very large flip poster boards that we could rip off and tape around the classroom. Right? Well, how do you do all this? Jamboard, awesome. Google doc, share Google doc. Breakout, yes. Breakout rooms of three or four is kind of the magic number in case someone walks away, right? Students draft first and then share their work in a breakout room and partner, peer review. Seeing how someone else approach the same writing assignment is so valuable, isn't it? Re-enactment of the discussion, wonderful. And finally, you mentioned a couple tech tools. Google docs. Prometheum is that kind of like a learning management system. So you mentioned Google docs. You mentioned Jamboard. Any other tech tools that you use for collaborative writing assignments that you can think of? Padlet, thank you, Polina. Yes. Just sharing in the chat, yes, exactly. That works very well, doesn't it? Google slides, Jodi, yes. Okay, so you may not learn a whole lot of new tech tools, but you're hopefully going to see some new activities, okay? So you've probably heard of by now, but if not, at least you're going to walk away with learning this. The standards in a moment, okay? The CCRS are more for ABE and adult secondary, okay? And there are the common, they're from the Common Core, college and career readiness anchor standards for writing. As you can see, we need to have students develop and strengthen their writing by planning, doing the writing process approach, writing narratives and using technology. So here we are, standards-based, right? And for English language proficiency standards for ESL, you can see standard three at each of the levels. So if you're working with very beginning levels, that they should be able to communicate in writing about familiar topics, their feelings and experiences up to our highest level of ESL students. They should be able to develop something more fully and integrate graphics for multimedia when useful, right? And for English language proficiency standard, number six for the ELPS, you see at the lowest level, our students should be able to make, understand and be able to point out what an author or speaker makes and at the highest level, they're analyzing and pointing to specific text evidence in their writing. So what do you think? Can you answer in the chat as far as the benefits of having students write together? I've mentioned what I feel is, but can you think of any other benefits of having students write together? Comfort, lower their fear, exactly. Model, if you, okay, we say multi-level, but isn't every single class we ever teach multi-level? The collaboration, the support, exactly. Speaking practice, discussion. If you can talk it over, I don't know about you when I'm trying to write something important. I want to talk to someone about it and get their idea. It helps them feel gaps. It helps them feel relaxed, not alone, exactly. Discovering the fragile nature of communication. Yes, exactly. So this is a lot to read on one slide. So I've just highlighted some of the important research, that planning strategies can really help the lower-level students in particular when they're working with the higher-level students, they can, the modeling that you mentioned, they can see how the other higher-level students approach it and it kind of helps bring them up. So you take some of the teaching responsibility, I won't call it responsibility, but some of the work off of you, and then it results in higher quality products. And there's a positive correlation when students are working together in collaborative writing, not only to the writing skills, but it transfers over into their reading and their fluency. You mentioned comfort, deeper thinking, construction of new knowledge, all of that. And it's active learning. I don't know when my students are just sitting, writing individually. I get really bored. I kind of prefer that they don't do that during class time when we were in person, right? That's, there's nothing for me to do. So I love this quote from Anne Rimes. She writes a lot about, and does research in the field of teaching of writing. And this I just love, this just made me really think about how I should do more collaborative writing activities with my students. Writing does not need to be heads down like that in silent classroom, because why not have students talk more about their writing? So it's something that I've been working on, having students read each other's writing, talk about what they're going to write about, talk about what they wrote about, and throw ideas off of each other and see how they can improve on their writing. So we're going to look at some different activities. Some of the types of activities are for just practicing and reinforcing the grammar vocabulary that we're teaching them into their writing. So this first activity, some of you know Jamboard. If you do not know Jamboard, can you type no in the chat? It's become, it's part of Google suite. So if you have Gmail, if you use Google slides, if you use Google docs, you have Jamboard. You already have it, you just didn't know you have it. It's really simple. It's kind of like palette, but a bit different. So what it looks like is it looks like this. Okay. And you can put images. And what you will see on the side, it's kind of small in this image like blew it up, is a toolbar like this. And there are different tools. You can draw with a pen. You can erase if you've drawn with a pen. You can select to make something larger. And most of the time, what I have students use is the sticky note. And that's what you're going to use in a moment. This is where you can add images. You can draw shapes. You can add a text box. And this is just for highlighting. Like, look at this. Wow, that's it. Okay. So when you'll get these slides and you want to just practice them a little bit, you can try it with this link. We're going to try it together in a moment. In groups. Okay. So I teach ESL. And how many of you use EL civics. In your classes, you assess. And you're teaching ESL. And you use the EL civics assessments. A lot of you. Okay. So most of, um, I've been using it. I've been using it. I've been using it. I've been using it. I've been using it. I've been using it. ESL programs. Do use EL civics. Or a little more denerrow. It's a little bit hard to do with remote instruction, but I'm sure you found your way. Well, there's one unit that our program uses. And I've been using it. Quite a bit recently. Because this is a really big topic. Discrimination and harassment is the topic of this. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's got a few different tasks. The tasks are that students. Report orally. In invented. Act of discrimination or harassment. They fill out a report. And. There's another task that totally slips my mind. But I wanted to build it out into a bigger lesson with grammar included. And I think it's a lot of work that's been going on. And it's been a lot of work. I think it's been a lot of work that's been around since I think the early 2000s. I don't know if it's on TV anymore, but the YouTube channel is there. Have you heard of this one before? What would you do? It's a show by. This man. I'm King Jonas. I forgot his first name, of course. And. It's, it's really. Got a lot of different situations. Ripped from the headlines. I don't know if you've heard of this. I don't know if you've heard of this. I don't know if you've heard of this. But I think it's a lot of different scenarios. But of course, before all of this, we had some really. Honest discussions about. How our world is these days. And how there's 10 spit looks like there's a lot of racism. Discrimination. Ugly acts. Let's just face it. And so. I wanted to give them some grammar. I wanted to give them some grammar. I wanted to give them some grammar. I wanted to give them some grammar. But what they seem to fit with this is unreal conditional. Because what would you do? So I found some different videos from what would you do that fit with this workplace environment rights. Unit. And I'm going to show you one of the videos. Okay. Hopefully our streaming will be fine. So this is one of the videos. I'm not going to show the whole entire video. I'm going to show you one of the videos. I'm going to show you one of the real situations. But the people are actors. The people are reenacting a situation. And they, there's a hidden camera. And they are. Filming the. Reactions of people watching the situations. And here it should be coming. It was all queued up nicely. We'll have to do that in just a second here. Okay. Here we go. You guys can have a seat right here. Thank you. Yeah. And then we'll be off to get you started shortly. Thank you. Enjoy. I can't wait to order. I'm so hungry. This place has really good food. Hey, how are you folks doing today? My name is Miguel. I'm Manuel. Agua. Four for four. Excuse me. It's Miguel. And I'll be your waiter today. And today's special is. Is this a Mexican restaurant or something? Ma'am. Look. I'm Manuel. Nothing personal. Just grab our waters and send her with that nice lady to take our orders. Sorry. She's the hostess. Is there something wrong? Honestly. Yeah. You in this country. Lord knows how many real Americans you've taken this job from. It's happening. Okay. So, um, of course. Well, uh, you know. Some emotions came out. But my students really wanted to talk to each other about this. Let me tell you. So what we did then is, um, yeah, really painful. Right. And so what we did then is I created this jam board. And I'm going to have you do what my students did. Okay. So this is the, what would you do? Jam board. So I took a screenshot of that video. Just one on part of the video. And this is the first video. So I'm going to take a screenshot of that video. And I'm going to take a screenshot of that video. And I'm going to have you jam board. You can have many slides. This is the first video. You see up here at the top. I have the second video. And I forgot to take off. I forgot to take off with my students had written a repurpose theirs. And here's the third video. And here's the fourth video. I'm going to have you practice what my students did with that video. So I'm going to take a screenshot of that video. And if I were the food server, I would. And if I were a customer in the restaurant, I would. So we're going to try this out. We're going to go to breakout rooms. And what you're going to do is you're going to. Have one person in your group. Share your screen. Okay. You're going to have one person in your breakout rooms. I'm going to make sure that someone. In your breakout room can share their screen. Okay. So this is going in the chat right now. This link to this. This is the jam board. And whoever decides to share their screen. You're going to go to the right side over here. I'm sorry. Left side. And you're going to go to the. Right side of the screen. And when you click on it, it's going to appear like that. You can change the color. And you're going to listen to your teammates. And you're going to work together to write what you would do. If you were the food server. And what you would do if you were another customer in the restaurant and you overheard this, what would you do? So I'm going to send you to the breakout rooms. And I'm going to show you how that works. Now, you know, not, not all of our students are really good with technology. So the one who kind of feels more comfortable can do this the first time you use jam board. And the next time they can kind of coach the other student, right? But you see how they're kind of working together. And it really helps if you have that multi-level, but I teach a class as one level, but some students don't really, they maybe didn't get my, they didn't get my class. And I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that for the first time. So they're, they're kind of pure teaching. And they say, no, it's not if I, if I was, it's, if I were, it's remember what the teacher said. So they kind of do that. And this could be for many different things. So what you notice here is I have this image that I just put that's movable. Okay. If something like your image ever disappears. There is a history. There is a version, but also in Jamboard, you probably know that you could set a background. So let's say you're having, you know, students right do descriptive writing together. You could set a background that's, it's not mobile. It's the entire slide. And then students could be writing or even at lower levels of ESL, labeling the vocabulary with sticky notes on a picture. So of course, very versatile Jamboard, but this is how I've been using it. One of, you know, different ways for generating ideas, but also for the productive practice of grammar. So going back to how that went with this particular EL civics unit, the students then met with me and zoom one, one to one to do this oral assessment where they report. A made up situation. It really broke my heart because at the end of, you know, making this oral report of reporting a situation where they had experienced discrimination or harassment. At the end of each made up situation, they all told me that that situation that they were telling me about had really happened to them. So, you know, it was an interesting time we're living in. We need to give our students a voice. So moving on. Another thing we can do. I just, I'm starting to feel my age a bit. In my daughter's class she has at the community college. She has a millennial instructor and he uses memes. He says, okay, students get on your phone and text me a meme of you're feeling about the class right now. And I thought, I need to, I need to get with the 21st century, I guess. So we can have students do things with memes. There is something called in, it's down here in the bottom right. I am G flip.com. So let's say you're teaching some vocabulary. In this case, my situation was I was teaching vocabulary, but it could be grammar and you want them to work together, maybe in Zoom or in a computer lab or on their phone in the classroom together and come up with a meme, a sentence and a definition to show that they understand, in this case, the vocabulary or to use the grammar structure in a novel way. So memes are now. So maybe we should do more with that. And that's how we could do that. This, this is something that I do a lot. This could be any vocabulary, any vocabulary at all. But for my students, besides the vocabulary that we were working on from the readings that we did in class, I wanted them to learn some idioms. So every week they, they would watch some YouTube videos from a channel. And I have the playlist here. If you want to see what that channel is. And they would take notes on what that idiom meant with example and the etymology where this, where this idiom came from. And then they would have conversation in Zoom, break out rooms with questions. I gave them to use the idioms and they would do the discussion board on canvas, and they would take a quiz using some writing, using the idioms. So this could be any, any vocabulary, but then they also would then take a quiz. Well, when we got to the end of the term, we had all these new idioms that they have learned. And instead of giving them a traditional test, I decided to have students make the test. So in the last evening of class, I was going to have students make the test. I was going to have students make the test. I was going to have students make the break out rooms. And I created a shared Google slide show. I won't read you the instructions. You can return to this later. And I said, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to share you this blank. You know, Google shared slide show. To your break breakout rooms. You're going to go there and you're going to wait for me. And you're going to type in your group number. And everybody's going to have your group number. And you're going to type in your name. I'm going to visit your room and I'm going to tell your group, three idioms. Do not write the idioms on your slide. You write a clue, a dialogue, a picture. So you can see it could be for any vocabulary. And then when everybody's finished, we're going to come back together and have our test. I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm going to show you how to do this first of all, my sample. So what do you think this idiom is? I can't believe this storm. Yes. It's raining cats and dogs. Yes. Very good. It's raining cats and dogs. So that was my sample. So see if you can get these other ones. It's not hard. It's a piece of cake. Yes. So you see idioms are hard, but they were able to think of an image. So I'm going to show you how to do that. So I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm going to show you how to do that. This one's a little harder. It has to do with boxing. We don't have boxing fans here. You'll learn ropes. Don't give up. When the coach wants. You to stop. The match. Never heard of that one. Don't throw in the towel. This one's easier. I haven't seen you for a long time, but we meet each other again. What up? Small world. Yes. So you see, they came out with really great examples. And that went even through you all off, right? They, I mean, this is really advanced. I was so proud of them that they really remembered. Because sometimes we teach vocabulary or in this case, an idiom. And we just go too fast. But I kept repeating every week. And here was the test. And they all. Got all of them so fast. We finished that test like in a matter of minutes. But it was really fun. And so you can do this with any vocabulary. Low ESL. It could be a picture. Higher level, you know, ABE higher level. ESL. You could even, you know, with very abstract words. That would be a challenge, but it's not a challenge. That would be a challenge, but a good challenge for them, right? To try to think of an image or try to think of some sort of dialogue or a sentence. Not the exact definition, but some context where someone may use that word for the others to try to understand what that word is. Christie, a question you made up. You made up the test. They didn't write. They wrote all of this. They wrote the A and B and got the picture. Yep. So this was one group. All I did was make a blank slideshow. Google slideshow. And then. They put in their names. So I said, okay, Oleg, Ophelia and Judith, your group three put in your names. And then I went to their zoom room and said, Ophelia, your idiom is what a small world. And then two others. I can't remember. Yeah. So everybody had three idioms, every group. Yep. And they created this together. One person was sharing the screen in their breakout room. And the others were giving ideas. So then one person who felt a little more tech savvy with Google slides was doing the work, but they were all sharing the language. Yep. So this adverbs of agreement. So to either, neither that's really spoken grammar. And, you know, when you have a large class to have everybody in zoom, or in the classroom, give their oral presentation takes up a lot of class time. Although I love it. I just want to see really quick. I just want to see how they can. Use this and it's really hard when, even if I'm going from zoom room to zoom room or walking around in the classroom to hear everyone. So what I wanted to do for this spoken grammar. Is to see the students could do it and for them to help each other and correct each other as well. So it's not really written grammar, but it's just a way of giving each other and coming up with how they could construct that. So what students did, they were paired up and they had a set of questions, which you can get from this link right here. And they tried to find their similarities and differences and made a Google slide show or PowerPoint. And so these two young ladies. They created this. They put in their images. And these were their sentences. I won't read them, but they put in the images. And after they created their sentences, they showed me that they could use the words. So to either. And neither. And so how I in, in, I'm still teaching remotely. So I have. You know, one class I have 25 students still. And so I feel a little bit bad. But I feel like it's just, it's just not enough time to hear everyone. So I don't know how you've been handling it, but I'm, what I've been doing is dividing the whole class into two zoom breakout rooms. And they kind of. Half and half do their presentations because. It's such a valuable important thing, especially for ESL students to find their voice and to speak in front of an audience, even if it's not an audience that's face-to-face, but it does take up a lot of class time. So moving on to activities that we can use at the pre-writing stage, you said that you all do this really fantastically. So I don't think that I'm teaching you probably anything really new here, but padlet is really useful. You said that you use Google docs. And I think there was one other tool Jamboard for that. And I like to really use. Palette shelf because I teach an advanced class. And I'm trying to get a little bit away, although I still love the personal narrative for writing to more of the academic writing, the opinion piece, because that's what they're going to do in high. And I'm sorry, some of the high school classes, but definitely in college, they need to take I out of the picture out of their writing and give an opinion with evidence. So we did a whole unit about fast food and nutrition. And we talked about how many things that are bad for us have learning labels. And we learned how fast food, it's even causing depression for teenagers to eat fast food too much. It's like an addiction. So the topic was the prompt was, is fast food need to have learning labels? So in palette, there's something called the shelf. And it lines up posts in rows going down columns, I guess, instead of rows. And so this is what we did. I divided them into groups and group one, they were putting reasons why yes and reasons why no. So even if they have formed their opinion to this, to this question, their answer, they had to think of both sides. So this is what we're going to do. We're going to go back to your same breakout rooms, because now I know that someone in your breakout room can share their, share their screen. And we're going to answer this question. What you're going to see is a tablet that looks like this. And this is your question. How have the past two years affected your teaching? And your students in positive and negative ways. So let me get this open. So let me go back to the breakout rooms and I'm going to share this in the chat and let me explain how you do this. So this is going to be in the chat. This new link. And we'll have the same people is everybody still here who was sharing originally and in the breakout room. So I'm going to send you to the same breakout room. So group one. You are Elizabeth, Jan, Lois and Mary. Whoever is sharing your screen. We're going to do this really fast. I want you to think of maybe just one positive. So you click right here. And you can type on the plus under positive. And what's going to pop up. It will probably be in the bottom right. And you can type right here in the subject line is fine. So you just type something like that. And publish. And you know also that with Padlet, you have all these options for, for linking to things on the, on the web, to putting in an image and a gift. So that's what these icons are for, but we'll just do it text-based unless, unless you're really, you want to answer just with an image that would be acceptable for me. So let's try for one positive and one negative for each. So group one. That's Elizabeth. Jan, Lois and Mary. This is your positive. This is your negative. Group two, Christina, Karen, Lisa, Polina and Sophia. This is your positive and negative. Okay. So group three, Linda, Archana, Christina, Elaine and Lars, you are group three, positive and negative. And group four, the, Andriana, Ellen, Jody, Kay, and lane group four and group five, group five, if your screen is big like mine, you might have to go to the bottom and scroll over like that. And here is your positive in your negative. So we're going to do this super fast. After you type in, you click on publish like that. You can also delete like that. Okay. So I think a lot of you have used pallet. The link is in the chat. If you are your screen shareer for your group, please click on the link in the chat now. We, if you want to, Karen, if you want to type for your group, you're welcome to, but I do want you to join your group. And we're working on collaborative. So talk together with your group and share your ideas. Here we go. Please join your room. We're going to do this really fast. In about three minutes. I'm sorry, but I have a lot to share. So let's go ahead and join your room now. All right, everybody. So sorry to cut you off. I have, I want to save time for my favorite activity. But, um, you know, what you could do then is we're, let's say that this is your class and whatever topic. I can just do a quick visual. I'm seeing, I'm seeing a lot of positives. But you, you could go over this and, um, as with, you know, pallet or anything that's online, students are seeing live what other students are putting and getting other ideas from other groups. Well, the positives are the tech skills. I mean, compared to two years ago, we and they, the students have really gained a lot. Zoom fatigue, not so fun. No more parties, but no commute, less stress. So many positives and negatives. So the students could then, you know, um, yeah. Um, so yes, use this for an in-person class as well. Our students have phones. Um, the last time that, I mean, you could go to your administrator if you do not yourself have access. New students do this tech survey. And, um, the last time that I saw the data when it was part of the OTAN tech plan was I think in 2017, 18 and 90% of the students who were taking Matt had cell phones. So I think, I think it's saturated. I think all of our students have phones. So in person, they can be huddled around, or if you have Chromebooks or something like that. But you know, when they're talking together, kind of like you, you know, we've got multi levels of language. We've got multi levels of technology. So they can be teaching each other both the language and the technology at the same time. That's the benefit I really think. So here, here's their, you know, their pre-writing. And it's all in one place. So now you assign them to go and write their first draft, right? It's all in one place. It's not on the board in the classroom. It's online. They can take it home and look at it. So moving on. I just love tablets. One of my favorites. You know, though, however, with a free account, you only get three padlets. Well, I just use different accounts or I delete. I use the same account. And I'll delete that one probably in a couple months and reuse it, repurpose it, but I have like many different Gmail's that I use for having different accounts. So I've also used, of course, Google docs for brainstorming. I won't show this one, but you're welcome to look at this. This was a more about, you know, what I thought was that students were not, that's a positive in society. So students listed pros and cons of that. And that was, they came up with things I had never thought of. And so again, all of the idea generation was in one spot for them. And so they could see what other students had thought of and other groups when they went to write their own, their own paragraph or essay. And so I think writing is so important for students to take something that they've read or heard and encapsulate it in their own words. And so for ESL, I like to have students listen to me tell a story and then have them write it in their own words. It's a great diagnostic for me to see how their grammar is. And so I like to do this early, but then I'd like to have them work on it together because they can really help each other clear up a lot of doubts about past tense, for example. So what I do is, you know, it can be any short narrative. And you create a slide show with some images and you have them listen. I like to include a printout of the slides. Like maybe about eight slides per page where they're listening and they take notes. I don't have a lot of words. They have to, they have to listen. It's a listening exercise first. And then so this is a whole lesson that you can go to these slides and replicate with your class. So we have some conversation first to think about this story. And then they listen to the story and I asked them some questions after they listened and taken notes. And then they do a story retell. So I share the slides that I used and they have taken notes on a piece of paper that looks like this, but now they have to retell the story. So it's connecting the oral to the written. And then they get together in a breakout room or in a computer lab around one computer. And I give them a frame. So this is really good for intermediate level, but I even use it with my advanced students as a first writing assignment sometimes. So I give them the frame. They need to fill in all the missing things. And this helps them understand how we construct a narrative. So this is a whole lesson that you can take right here from these slides and try with your class. If you would like to. So it's worked out really well. I mean, what they end up with is so much better than the original story usually. Do you do error correction with your class? Can you type yes or no in the chat? I'm sorry, Christy. When you said we can use it, where do we get all this from? I'm going to share these slides in the chat. And when you, at the end, I'm going to share a link in the chat. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. But I've made a video. Of these slides. So you could have students watch this video. Listen. Wow. And then here is the summary frame. So you could have students click on this. And then they click make a copy. And it's going to look just like this. Of course they're going to take out my name and put your name. Right. They're teaching. Thank you. Thank you. Sure. So with beginners, you do dictation lane. And for error correction. Yeah. Dictation can be very useful. Making sure that they're they're training their year. For error correction, I like to take students own writing. Like for example, if they were doing that summer rewriting. I take some of the errors. And before I go and start marking up, you know, what I think they need to. To correct. I take the errors. And they distribute it back to the class and they work together to find the errors and. 99% of the time they locate even their own errors. I don't know if you've ever noticed that. So what I've been doing in zoom, if you heard of the New York times, what's happening in this picture. Type yes or no in the chat, New York times has this website with different pictures from the past and recent you have some of you have, and they're really interesting like this one. And so I model the activity. Okay, look at this picture. And I maybe type. A question that I would have about this picture in the chat. Is this a human. Is this like. Homo sapien museum. Is this a museum of human beings? Or, you know, so I type some question in the chat to model. And then I elicit some more questions. Okay. So I kind of model it like that. And then I have a series of different pictures from the New York times. What's happening in the picture. And this, this explains the process. I won't go over that. But here's one. Can you type one question. About this picture. In the chat right now. Yes, how did they train the sheet. Of course, Elizabeth is an English teacher. So her English is perfect. Her question is perfect. Why are the people there? How much does the model get? Where is this? So all of your questions are perfect, but you know, they're selling the sheep or the wool is the sheep for sale. So as you know, question formation, though, for our non native English speakers is a bit harder. Their questions are not perfect like yours. So what I'm going to do is I, this was in zoom, but this could be, you know, on a Google doc, I suppose, students around one computer. The reason I don't do it on Google docs. Why do you think. If they type something wrong, it's going to have the underlying auto correct. It's going to go out. Correct. I don't want auto correct. I want authentic. I want to know how they really are using question formation for real. So then I have them, you know, type just like you did questions in the chat. And then I can download the chat. You know, before I close out the zoom room. And then so. Then these are some of the questions that my students wrote honestly in their advance. What they do. Is it a ships contest? You know, little things like punctuation, you know, it's in chat. I'm not, I'm not going to be, you know, harping on starting with the capital letter. You know, who knows, maybe they were typing on a phone. It was hard. But what kind of event is. That's a common error for a lot of our. Tend to be a romance language speakers. Is a animal contest, right? So I type it out like this. On the, on a slide or. Better to maybe put it on a photo. Like to hand write it. Or to put it like this. And I did, I did the spell check and I said, everything is fine. And then I projected it to their brain. And then I said, I did the spell check and I said, everything is fine. And then I projected it to their breakout rooms. And they had to talk. And, and discuss what the error was. So that's a way to ship sheep. Got to love it, right? This, these. And then the pictures, because then they're really curious, what really is this picture about the New York times, then does have the, the captions. So this is really what the picture is about. And I'm not going to read it to you right now. I won't read it to you right now. We don't have time, but you can see what the real picture is about. So I, we go over that. It's so amazing. We come all back together. They found all the mistakes that they made. Of course they did. But for some of them, they didn't. We, we had a little mini lesson on that. Yes. Yes. So let me go back. Where did the link is right here in the description. So what's going on in this picture. This is the hyperlink when you, when you click on it, it will take you to that website. Okay. So you could do the same with verb tenses. So this could be present continuous. Or what do you think is going to happen? Okay. So for the first few years, my computer is getting so full of stuff. Okay. Descriptive writing. So for descriptive writing, same different pictures I've collected. But again, from the New York times, what's going on in this picture. And I wanted to have you do this activity, you is we were working on descriptive writing, first of all, together with this little activity because my goal was for students to write a description on their own. But we went over what our adjectives in a different class, not this particular one adverbs to you. And so I made a shared Google slideshow. And each group had two slides, one with a picture and a blank slide. And every group had a different picture. This was group four, they had this particular picture. And they had to work together in their breakout rooms to write a paragraph or so with as many adjectives as they could. So this was the winning team, they wrote there are many happy people in the tiny village somewhere in South America, the beautiful excited bride wearing a long multi layered pink dress is on the antique pinkish pinkish convertible car on a sunny day, the bride is marching on the dusty road with a pink and red balloon. I don't think that one of those students along could have constructed such a beautiful descriptive short paragraph, they worked together and they were the winning team because they have the most adjectives. So what I have here, we don't have time to do this. Can I ask a question? There were no errors in their writing. Was it all? Well, here's the beautiful thing. While they're working in their breakout rooms, if I see something, I can go and say, what did you said persons? You wrote persons, what's correct there? So I can either or I can make a little comment. You know how you comment on Google Docs, you can do the same on Google slides. So either I go in and I kind of give them feedback. So I'm not just sitting here bored while they're working, I kind of go around and give feedback. Yeah. So but these were, you know, because they were working together, there weren't many errors, honestly, they really weren't, they were correcting and helping each other a lot. And you just don't see as many errors, especially at the higher levels, when they're working together. So right here is a slide show that you can replicate this activity with your class, if you'd like, you would just click on it and make a copy. Okay. Narrative time, how much time would you get for an activity like this? You know, um, that I say about 20 minutes for that. But please, I have another question. Sure. With any kind of grammar vocabulary or topic, you're trying to practice with all of these strategy, you know, aren't there always like the weaker or the shire students that even in a group, or maybe even distracted students, the one with the kids at home, that they will possibly allow others to do all the work and contribute very little? Do did you ever find that? Well, yeah, and there's no way I can control that and zoom whatsoever. I you know, so they I tell my students the beginning of my classes, you get out of the class what you put in. And right now we're in a pandemic. And if they have kids at home and they need to walk away, I just have to respect that have students coming into zoom at work. They want to be in the class so badly that they're willing to risk their boss, possibly knowing that they're also taking a class. So I'm very forgiving with that. And in my classes, students know the ones who are only able to participate minimally. And that's just the reality of where we are right now. So thank you for that question. Narrative writing. Let me check the time. Okay, so this is really my favorite one. And I don't think we have time to do the full activity. I want to show you the fuller one, but that would that takes a lot more time. So I'm going to do the reduced one. So this, you know, narrative really would apply to I love the personal narrative. I don't know if you've ever had students write these personal narratives of stories from their lives. Wow, you really learn a lot about them and connect with them. That's not always what they need to do for college and careers, though. But when they're in their jobs, they need to be able to report something that happened in the past. So they need to be able to report using past, obviously. Okay, so in this activity, you could use an image. I like to use a video. And so I have lots of different videos. They're on the slide show that you can see. There's some of them pretty old, but they're my tried and true activities. I'm sure you will have those. An activity that you've used many years that just works so well for you. So what I do with an image or video, I think of what what are some of the main words that are really important for this story of this image or this video, I get those the word bank, and I provide that word bank to the students in this case, on a slide show, every student has their own or I'm sorry, every group has their own slide with the same words. They go to the breakout room or if we're in person, they have one computer that they're working on and they're around one computer, and they have their group slide, and they're working together looking at those words. What is this story? And they're writing the story based on the words that they have. Okay, so you can make a copy of slides that I'm going to show you of an activity, a longer activity, that will probably take about 30 minutes with advanced students. But we're going to do a shorter one. Okay, together. And this will probably be our final activity. Let me check my time. Yeah, I think we'll have time to do this final activity. And let me go right here. It's this one. This is my shorter one. Okay, so the way that I introduced this one, I introduced the longer activity with this shorter activity. Okay, so let me ask you all. We've been, you know, we've been working on this grammar of past and past continuous. What are some good reasons to miss work or school? What are some acceptable reasons to be gone, to be excused from work or school? Oh, I love that, Lane. Great idea. COVID, please don't come. You have, yeah, don't miss work, you're sick. Those are good reasons. Your child is sick. Anything else? You don't have child care, you can't leave your child alone. Appointments depending on the nature, the appointment, right? And what do you think are some bad excuses? Teachers, I'm sure you've heard it, all of them before. Mine, and you know, the one is there's a soccer match. Like, can't you record it? Shopping hungover, transportation is, you know, sometimes, sometimes good, sometimes bad, you know, like, couldn't you think of another way? But I'm busy. I'm at the beach. I'm tired. I have company coming for dinner. There's a baseball game. Okay. So, um, so I kind of build this out into a bigger lesson that we're making it short. So this is what you're going to do. I'm going to send you back to your group one last time. And your team is going to find your team slide. Okay. And these are the words you need to use. You need to work together on your slide. Whoever is sharing their screen, you're going to listen to your teammates, and you need to write about three sentences. What is the story? These are the words. Announcer, call friends, golf, loudspeaker, man, name, sick, trouble. What could this story be? Try to add an adjective and advert. Okay. If you I'm going to give you let me check my time. I'm going to give you about eight minutes. If your team finishes early, you can go here insert image and browse the web for some image that goes well with your story. Okay. So here's team one, you're going to put your team members names there, team two, team three. So you'll need to go over here on the right left. I have a problem with my left to find your team's slide. Do you have any questions before I share this in the chat and send you to your breakout rooms? Christy, I have a question. Are we supposed to be using past tense and past continuous because that's how you Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I forgot to mention that. Yes. You've been studying past and past continuous. Okay. There is the link in the chat. If you were a screen shareer before, please click on that. Or if you want to take control and you want to share from your group. So I'm going to send you again to the same breakout rooms. Okay. So it looks like many people have clicked on the link. I'm going to open the breakout rooms. You'll have about eight minutes. Find your slide. Work together to write a few sentences. Here we go. All right, everybody. So I'm sorry if that wasn't enough time. I just want to give you a taste of this. Put you in the shoes of students to see how this would go. Of course, I wouldn't cut them off in the middle. I would let it go longer. So now what we would do is look at all of your stories, have a volunteer to read aloud your story, and then we kind of have a contest to see whose story is closest to the actual story. So this is the actual story. Let's see whose is closest. Here it goes. Yeah, sir. This is James Horner. Yeah, James Horner. Actually, I'm doing pretty lousy, sir. I have a sore throat and a headache and I've been puking my guts out all night long. So I figure I'm not going to come into work today. Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to lay low and try and keep this thing. Horner force under the T. Horner force under the T. Hello? Everything you need to play. So, I almost said kids. Students get a get a kick out of that. But usually what I do is I do this as the example. What I have is a longer story that I use and I don't have time. I wish we had more, but that would probably be a much longer workshop. But you can see it here. It's based on a longer video. It's maybe like four minutes or so and it's really cute and you can use this. I have I have it right here, right here that you can use that. And and my students, it was really funny. They worked really hard and one group came up with a story that was almost identical and I was thinking, how did they do this? This is what they did. They took the words that I provided and they put the words in Google and they found a YouTube movie trailer. I don't know this movie. It was back when Hugh Grant was really the it guy. Mickey blue eyes and there is a scene from that movie that is kind of similar, but it's kind of raunchy. There's some bad words, but it was just so hilarious. It was very clever of them and their story was so good. Here are some other videos that work well with that. Emoji generator is another fun tool that I've used where students get some a set of random emojis that I create or that they create with this tool and one team writes a simple sentence. The second team gets the same sentence, but they have to build on it and then the third team gets that same the second team sentence and they have to make it even more descriptive and better. You can see the progression here. Another really great tool for collaborative online writing is picklets. It can be free right or there with each picture which changes every the group of pictures that change every day. There is a set of words that is provided that students at beginning level could do a drag and drop and write a poem or write a story or write a sentence or even write an essay. So my time is up. I'm going to share in the chat right now the link to these slides and you may find something there that you can replicate. I hope you have at least one new idea for integrating technology, creating community, and having students write collaboratively in your classes.