In my current situation teaching part-time as a retiree remotely, I do find it useful to call on students in remote classes. Keeping students engaged in the lesson in a virtual class is a high priority for my attention during a lesson. This is perhaps moreso than in an in-person situation. I think it’s in the nature of digital devices with their many distractions and also due to the limitations placed on human interaction through these tiny windows!
When I am teaching new vocabulary to my French students, I like to use Innovation’s flashcard app. I use this all the time, especially in my beginner level French classes. The app allows me to execute a number of instructional operations: I can show the word, show the meaning, shuffle the word, save out only those words that are problematic for review of a narrower list, practice from definition to term or from term to definition. It really is very flexible.
Now, Reader, in one online high school I work for, all my lessons are one-on-one. So, using the flashcard app is really easy: I share my screen and conduct the instruction.
But teaching to a remote class, even as small as eight students, offers a challenge to maintaining engagement and attention. Last week, I was trying out a new strategy that turned out to work very well. The instructional context is a group of eight students in an AP French class. I needed to teach vocabulary using direct instruction. Here’s what we did: I showed a new term and pronounced it several times. next, I randomly called on a student to repeat and pronounce. then I showed the word’s meaning, then randomly called a different student to type in the Zoom chat to only me the meaning. This protected them from any embarrassment if they got it wrong, although the exercise is set up to be so easy as to limit that possibility. After the session, I sent them a link to a little quiz. The whole thing took about 15 minutes for ten words.
But I was not really great at calling on all students evenly. Some faces were hidden in the way Zoom displays them, so some students did not get called on as much.
There’s a new application now at Innovation that helps teachers to randomly select the next student to respond. It is installed in two places at present, in the main dashboard on the right and inside the flashcards app.
It’s very simple to use. In the flashcard app, click the “Call on Random” button on the left. On the right will appear a simple form. You type in the names, save them, then just click “Select random student”. Voilà ! Your next participant!
The app randomly selects a student from the list and then removes them so they cannot be called again until everyone else has been. You can update the list any time.
Look for the random call app to be installed in a number of other places at the site, such as the improvised dialogue app.