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One of my favorite lessons teaching any time period of social studies has always been working with extended length primary sources.
Students’ initial difficulty completing these tasks usually stemmed from habits I like to help them break. The first bad habit was to copy sections of the source text verbatim instead of paraphrasing. Another was the expectation that all the answers were in the source text. An important, if not vital, competency in studying primary sources is to be aware of the outside knowledge and possible biases that the reader them-self brings to the source. This task calls on students to bring prior knowledge to direct awareness.
My primary source analysis task is a short essay. The process is the same for every source no matter the time period or even the grade level. Students address the source type, purpose, and audience. They provide relevant historical context from their own knowledge. They summarize the source. They address reliability factors. For middle schoolers, these “essays” are really more like short compositions. My high schoolers came to compose more extended length essays. Here’s one you can have for nothing:
Up to my retirement, I was teaching in a small, rural K-12 school where I had students for three or even four years. This was a great benefit for so many reasons, one of which was they became “skilled at the skills”. I integrated a lot of writing and reading in my courses.
The Important is Not Always in the Text Itself
Most elementary level reading comprehension tasks call on students to locate an answer in the text to prove they understand. Working with primary sources means understanding what was going on in the historical period that produced the document. Getting students to grasp this takes patience and perseverance. This task asks students to deduce how the audience was expected to react to the source, who the intended audience was, what was going on historically at the time, and factors affecting reliability of the source. None of this is in the document explicitly itself.
A Great Way to Teach Critical Thinking and Deduction
I cannot recommend this assignment strongly enough for my fellow social studies teachers out there. I assigned this right after I completed the content delivery in a unit. It lent itself to long-term retention of the historical content because students needed to apply this newly acquired knowledge to the text. It promotes reading comprehension. It stimulates discussion in class. Often, a student would have a question about the source or how to answer questions of bias and audience and reliability. It would make a great opportunity to pause and have a discussion about these things. These extended length primary sources offer much more to the learning process that the short 200-word snippets we find in textbooks and on state tests (think document-based essays and constructed-response tasks).
The Essay Prompt Assignment may be a Hard Sell to Teachers
I have not been very successful in promoting this method to many others. Very few of the essay versions sell at our TeachersPayTeachers store. I think I understand why. It takes time and consistency to teach reliability factors to students. Grading a hundred short essays every unit of study is a daunting proposition in light of everything else we have to do. More than one transfer student remarked that my social studies courses had a lot of writing. None regretted it. More than one said they learned to write in my class.
But I get it! So, I am developing an automated multiple-choice version of these assignments. Mind you, reader, I feel that doing this as a composition is a better practice, but I can also see how doing a multiple-choice version of this task can be very instructive. I invite you to download this free resource to try it out.
First of all, if you want to have your students write the essay version of this assignment, each prompt includes the same organizer to guide their writing.
I have carefully documented where I got the source using an easy-to-understand source citation system that I borrowed from genealogists. This citation is presented first and should prompt the student to consider factors affecting reliability.
The multiple-choice version is auto-corrected. You get a passcode that students use to access the online task at the Innovation website. Learn more about our passcodes from this short video:
The questions are categorized under “Observations” whose categories are intended audience, historical context, source summary, and reliability factors. The resource includes a text version of the questions in case you don’t feel the online auto-corrected version is best.
If you’ve purchased one of our products on TeachersPayTeachers, you may have received passcodes for online activities. These passcodes allow your students to access and complete exercises on our website, where their scores will be displayed. But there’s more you can do with these passcodes, especially if you’re a subscriber to our Innovation platform. Here’s how you can maximize their potential.
Distribute to Students: Give the passcode to your students. They will enter it on the TestDrive page of the Innovation website to access the exercise. The system will display their scores upon completion.
Import into Your Dashboard:
Log into Your Dashboard: Navigate to the upper right-hand corner of the Innovation website.
Enter the Passcode: Paste the code into the provided field. Ensure you’ve copied it correctly.
Import the Activity: Click “Import,” select the class for the activity, and confirm. The system will notify you of a successful import.
Organize Your Activities: The new activity will appear at the top of your list. You can rearrange it by using the “Actions” > “Reorder” button and drag and drop it as needed.
Benefits of Importing Activities
Enhanced Monitoring: By importing activities into your Innovation account, you can track student progress more effectively. You’ll see who completed what, when, and how long they spent on each task.
Customization Options:
Edit Questions: Tailor the questions to better suit your teaching style or add cue points for enhanced engagement.
Add Resources: Upload PDFs, audio files, or other materials to create a richer learning experience.
Create New Questions: Use our question bank to generate new activities. The imported questions are saved in your database, categorized for easy access.
Creating Tests and Tutors
Instant Tests: Use the question bank to quickly assemble multiple-choice tests. Select the desired questions, and voilà – you have a ready-to-go test.
Tutoring Features: Set up practice sessions so students can rehearse before tackling the main exercise. This helps reinforce learning and builds confidence.
By subscribing to our Innovation platform, you gain these powerful tools to enhance your teaching experience. Import your activities, monitor student engagement, and customize content to meet your needs. We hope you’ll join us and unlock the full potential of your teaching resources.
Upon retiring from full-time public school teaching in 2023, I took part-time working teaching French remotely. Teaching via video conferencing turns out to be a terrific method and a very satisfying work!
Being also a web developer for a platform designed for remote teaching and in-class 1:1 designs, I was inspired by this work to begin developing a set of applications specifically for teaching world languages remotely.
I always loved improv and when teaching social studies or French in my career, my students and I enjoyed role play as a learning tool that was fun and meaningful. My practice was to incorporate many exercises to develop conversational proficiency using improv or semi-improvised “scaffold” dialogues.
The improv app at Innovation is now well developed. This app is available to subscribers only right now from the Language Console of the dashboard.
The teacher shares the screen in a remote teaching situation (or in-person, displays the screen in class). The first thing is to select the proficiency level. I use the CEFR descriptors.
A notice appears in red in the center advising students not to use AI while participating. This was sometimes an issue for me with some remote students, who quickly consulted Google translate instead of improvising their own contributions to our conversation. Teachers can remove this notice by clicking in.
Once the difficulty level is chosen, the teacher can select from the available conversation themes. These correspond to typical topics taught in world language classes that employ thematic units as the method. The reader will notice in the graphic that a scorecard appears on the right. The scoring method is that used in speaking tasks on New York State world language assessments and instructions are available at the click of a button.
Once the teacher has selected the theme, a set of possible dialogues appears.
Upon selecting the prompt, the conversation can begin. As the dialogue proceeds, the teacher can track the attempts and utterances in the scorecard on the right. They can award 2 points for utterances which are comprehensible, appropriate, and make no surprising errors for level. the can award 1 point for utterances that are not quite right for that student’s expected proficiency. The app automatically calculates the grade.
Now what I like to do is to use the large textarea in the center to provide useful words or phrases that the student asked for or needed during the dialogue.
List the expressions with their meaning separated by an equal sign. Here’s why: the Innovation flashcards app has been integrated so that we can study the phrases! Scroll down just a wee bit and you will find a small button called “Cards”. This will extract those phrases and arrange them into flash cards for study!
My practice is then to give students a copy of that list via email or in their lesson notes. They can themselves use Innovation’s Quick Flashcards app to generate their own drills for later.
The development of the improv app at Innovation has been a particularly exciting work. By incorporating elements of improvisation and conversation scaffolding, I’ve aimed to make language learning both engaging and effective for students in remote teaching contexts as well as for in-person learning. The app’s integration with other features such as proficiency level selection, themed dialogues, and real-time scoring ensures a comprehensive learning experience.
After a long hiatus while teaching social studies, I began a return to teaching French in 2018. I am a bit of a digital pack rat and was glad to find most of the teaching resources for French that I had developed in the 1990s still on an old hard drive. One of these is a unit for teaching a graphic novel called Astérix chez les bretons.
I found in that trove of activities a reading comprehension task that I had forgotten about: the ordered list or chronology. After reading the text and doing the usual vocabulary and comprehension kinds of tasks, I presented students a set of sentences where the events were out of order. On the worksheet, they were to number them in correct order according to the text. This was a great way to reinforce not only the events in the story, but more importantly the vocabulary and reading skills I was working to support.
I am currently teaching French online and one of my classes has chosen this graphic novel for a unit of study. Since I am teaching remotely, I want digital 21st century learning spaces instead of PDF worksheets. And so out of necessity was born this new app at Innovation, the ordered list.
The ordered list is simple: students either drag and drop or use the buttons to arrange the text boxes in order. They can check their progress as they go and submit a score when done. I can see how this would have been very useful when I was teaching history!
This needed to be easy for the teacher to create. It’s a snap: the teacher merely pastes in the ordered list and clicks a button to generate the activity.
As added features, one can attach a PDF document, an audio file, and/or embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. The student could be prompted to order the text boxes based on these sources.
The usual 21st century learning spaces features are integrated. Teachers will see in the audit when their students access the task and how long they spend on it. The proctor monitors access to the page and student attention. It’s easy to view the scores of grades are taken and to apply standardized scoring or any of the other Innovation features and functions.
Try it for yourself! Use this passcode to access a chronology task for the American Revolution at the Innovation TestDrive: 397Q-NMXL-A15625Z-9-JON
Using translation with beginner language students is fraught with controversy. When I was in elementary school, the contemporary teaching methods for modern languages were phasing out from “grammar-translation” toward more communicative approaches. Translation came to be seen as antiquated, impractical, unnatural.
It cannot be denied that some criticism of translation, especially for beginners, is valid. I cannot help reflect on some brilliant students I have had over the years who, by French III, had become held back by their insistence on mentally translating everything before they wrote or spoke. Their focus on the rules, the words, the syntax, the burden of feeling like they must not err, all conspired to leave them tongue-tied and frozen whenever they were called upon to improvise speech or writing.
Nonetheless, I find in my experience that there is a place for translation in novice language lessons. Students should learn the ways that the target language differs from their own so that they gradually learn to avoid applying the syntactical patterns of their own language. The also need to be able to discern morphological differences in the target language that may be slight to their eyes but which meaning can vary significantly. Finally, it is a good way for novices to learn the longer, whole functional phrases that are a part of the earliest stages of learning before grammar has been taught to let them synthesize their own utterances.
Barriers to Using Translation to Teach Novices
Limited vocabulary is the first barrier to using translation to teach novices. In the textbooks at the start of the 20th century, each chapter had a very controlled vocabulary that was repeated in reading and translation exercises. Many of us no longer teach that way. I teach through theme units. The unit has a lot of vocabulary but the higher order language work is not limited to that as a controlled vocabulary list. Narratives and authentic texts, even listening practices, while selected with difficulty in mind, do in fact include words and structures the student may not yet have been taught. The advantages of this approach are well known and it is common practice now. Among other things, the student learns the very functional skill of deriving meaning from context, selectively ignoring incomprehensible utterances in favor of the meaningful, and perhaps learning new words from context.
The second barrier to teaching with translation is, naturally, grammar. Good grammar exercises that use translation have to be very controlled to account for irregulars and inconsistencies that most language boast of. At the very early stages, novices has so little grammar under their belt that translation may not prove worthwhile. Or, the cognitive load of balancing all the rules will render the exercise useless for its purpose.
Here is What I Needed
I needed an app that would auto-correct and let students try again when they made errors. I needed limited vocabulary and limited grammatical competence to be largely irrelevant. I needed an interactive activity where students manage the syntax and recognize correct forms. I call the new app “scramblation”. It is a drag-and-drop interface where students assemble an utterance in the target language from a prompt that is either in text form or audio clip.
Translation plays a pivotal role in the process of studying a foreign language, serving as a valuable tool for language learners to bridge the gap between their native tongue and the target language. It offers learners a nuanced understanding of linguistic structures, idiomatic expressions, and cultural nuances, thereby facilitating a more profound comprehension of the language’s intricacies. Translating texts from the target language to one’s native language and vice versa enhances vocabulary acquisition, grammar proficiency, and overall language competence. It enables learners to decipher the meaning behind words and phrases, fostering a deeper connection to the cultural context embedded within the language. Moreover, translation exercises encourage critical thinking and analytical skills, as learners must carefully consider the nuances of each word and construct coherent and contextually accurate sentences.
A New App
Instructors can generate a new scramblation from the playlist of their course in Innovation. They enter a prompt, the correct answer, and some extra words. I link to use the extra words to enter un-conjugated verbs or words an English speaker might put in that would not go in the target language.
The prompt can be an audio clip (in which case the text prompt is hidden) and can include an image.
Students can see the task in their playlist and access to a scramblation can be made possible from a link in the lesson plan app or an external link that instructors can send to students.
The app itself is simple: first, students should remove any extra words by clicking the small red “x” in the word’s box. Next, the student drags and drops the words into the right order. They save their answer, check it, and the algorithmic AI will tell them how close they are.
Like all of the apps at Innovation, the scramblation has a proctor activated that tracks student activity on the page, including when they leave the page and how long they were working.
The importance of interactive web applications in the realm of remote teaching cannot be overstated. Interactive web applications emerge as powerful catalysts for student engagement, collaboration, and personalized learning experiences. The ability to seamlessly integrate multimedia content, real-time communication, and interactive assessments not only enhances the effectiveness of teaching but also empowers educators to adapt their pedagogical approaches to the diverse needs of their students.
The key drawback to early efforts at distance learning was being kind of trapped behind that camera like a goldfish in a bowl. You could make all the signs and signals you wanted, but the world on the other side of the glass was beyond your ability to control.
Teaching remotely is not highly effective when it consists of essentially just holding up things to the camera for the student to experience. Activate the Zoom – Skype – Meet – Teams session, share your PDF, give verbal instructions… this is a weak instructional practice mainly because it is largely passive for the student.
If the teacher were in a real classroom, tutoring the student at an honest-to-goodness table, the learning materials could be manipulated in real life in ways that support the process. They can fold the paper to hide the answer, they can shuffle the flash cards, they can write and cross out and scribble and erase. The manipulation of the learning materials is important.
The apps at Innovation are designed to promote the kind of virtual interactivity that heightens the effectiveness of teaching remotely. To be a great learning experience, the remote session needs to be virtually interactive in the same effective way that in-person lessons are. This is a big part of what we mean by the “21st century learning space”.
Flashcards
Let’s take up the example of teaching vocabulary using flashcards. In real life, I would want to use a process whereby I selectively show the student a new word, rehearse the pronunciation in some meaningful way, then cue up the words to rehearse the meanings.
Using the passive approach, I could share a PDF through the video conference software and “go over” the list with the student.
Using the flashcard app at Innovation, I can interact so much more effectively. To begin, I can select the target vocabulary word to display.
I prompt the student to repeat the pronunciation, then click to reveal the meaning.
Once we are through the list, I can repeat the process, only this time I can save out those items the student forgot.
Now we are only drilling those items. We can talk about mnemonic devices, use the words in sentences, or just repeat and rehearse. Once the student has the words down pat for recognition, I click Reverse Cue-Response to prompt from English cue.
Integrated Flashcard App
The improvised conversation app and the scaffold dialogue app both have integrated flashcards. During an improvised conversation task, the student may need to ask me how to say some words as we run through the conversation the first time. I list them for them in the textarea below the prompt.
So long as I pair the new phrases with an equal sign and a meaning, the app can generate a flashcard system right underneath after our conversation.
We can rehearse now the new words and phrases before we perform the dialogue once again.
Interactivity is Key
Being able to interact virtually over remote teaching sessions in ways that are as effective as in-person is absolutely necessary to achieve a satisfying learning experience that maximizes our effective use of time. The flashcard app at Innovation facilitates this process of simple cue-response training that is so foundational in teaching language. It allows me to go beyond just sharing my screen to “go over” a PDF!
Innovation has developed some very effective applications for teaching world languages remotely or in a classroom with a student 1:1 laptop configuration. I have been teaching French remotely for a few months now and have had the opportunity to really take these apps out for a rigorous test drive and to make some great tweaks under the hood!
Teaching composition in a world language is always challenging to organize and execute. In my experience, the best lesson series in supporting the development of strong composition skills consists in the following:
Students should have limited access to outside resources in composing their work. It’s too tempting, especially now, to use an AI translator.
Students should learn to avoid translating in their head from English to the target language. Instead, they should learn to “say what they can say, not what they want to say.”
Assessment should provide a clear and understandable measure of the value of the work product and a clear path to remediation for next time.
I started teaching in 1991 (I am now retired). Back then as a French teacher, the method for assessing student compositions involved marking off each clause, identifying each error, and checking whether the clause was comprehensible (to a native speaker accustomed to dealing with foreigners), appropriate (such that it built on the theme coherently; it “fit”) and had good form (no more than 1 error in grammar / conventions). This was abandoned in the later 1990’s for a rubric that was more consistent with other New York State Regents examinations of the time.
I think the only thing I like about the rubric assessment was that it considered the variety of vocabulary used. Otherwise, the rubric did not really satisfy what I wanted in an assessment for composition work and this rubric was far more subjective than I was comfortable with.
Teaching remotely, I wanted an app that met my criteria for supporting composition skills in the target language.
The first challenge was to limit the use of outside references. For this, I coded a sort of algorithmic surveillance AI that I called “proctor”. Proctor consists of a series of JavaScript functions that record when a student has resized a window, pasted text, “left” the page, or restarted the task. These actions are saved and reported to me when I assess the students’ work.
In the remote teaching situation that I enjoy at present, students do their compositions unsupervised for homework. The proctor allows me to curtail student access to other tabs because it announces in red text on the page whenever any of these “suspicious” actions occur. Although students may indeed use their phone separately on the side to confer, I can also check later in our debriefing by asking whether they know the leaning of one phrase or another.
The composition app for world languages allows me to present students a word bank. The word bank can be an antidote to mental translating because students can be taught to weave together meaning from words they have rather than get caught up on words they don’t.
The assessment process in the composition app works as follows. The instructor:
marks off the clauses for evaluation.
highlights each error.
assesses each clause for comprehensibility, appropriateness, and form.
assesses the whole composition for vocabulary “richness” (10% of the score).
This process lends itself well to debriefing because the errors can be studied directly and are readily observed.
Training wheels are temporary assistive devices for young people learning new things. They are a modification to the program that is usually temporary; a scaffolding that brings students upward in the zone of proximal development. The composition app has space for a word bank to support composition from known lexical items.
Guardrails are there to protect us from error, safety features along the road at dangerous points to avoid a pitfall. The composition app includes an algorithmic AI to monitor student activity and discourage assistance that would not be appropriate.
21st century learning spaces lend themselves to debriefing: they are designed such that the anonymous presentation of teacher-selected student work is easily generated for debriefing. The composition app is readily shared with the student and the assessment page is clear and easy to understand. When I debrief these, I paste the student composition into another screen and go over the relevant errors.
21st century learning spaces are a Swiss army knife. Such collections of applications serve many functions from the same core. The composition app saves the composition prompt in a database whose elements can be re-used.
21st century learning spaces are those where the teacher rules the roost and student privacy protection is a high priority. Locus of data control is with the teacher. The teacher can view the composition as it’s being composed and has ownership over the final product.
Since September, I have had the distinct pleasure of working part-time for a company based in California that offers remote middle and high school credit-bearing courses in world languages. LanguageBird is perfect fit for a retired public school teacher and I am very contented working for them (not a paid promotion).
The pandemic placed we public school teachers in the position of teaching remotely, some for the first time. A lot of that went poorly in some places, but in other places it went pretty well. My work teaching remotely now has given me the chance to re-explore online teaching practice and the kinds of 21st century learning spaces that meet the needs of that situation.
Besides my work for LanguageBird, I also am enjoying teaching a remote French class for the public school district from which I retired last June. This is very different from LanguageBird in many ways and teaching in both contexts has provided a wealth of interesting experiences that I feel are instructive. In this series of posts, I would like to share my experiences and conclusions as well as the apps I am developing to support remote teaching.
In the public school remote teaching context, we had set it up as a daily synchronous class. This was informed by our pandemic experience that asynchronous courses are a bad idea for most adolescents. It is a small class of five, two for French III and three for college French, credited from a local community college who approved my application to work as adjunct for them in a high school. Each school day during period 2, I fire up a Google Meet and students log in. They are supervised by a language teacher (Spanish).
We (administration and I) were concerned that remote teaching made it difficult to maintain the kind of teacher-student rapport that was so necessary for learning. I suggested that I work in-person for a half day at the end of each marking period (ten weeks) to teach a class and meet with students individually so they can present their projects and practice French conversation. (The district is a 45-mile commute for me one-way, so going in-person for one daily class was not practical.)
At LanguageBird, we only teach one-on-one lessons. I find this extremely useful, so from start I modified my public school lesson plans such that I would only teach whole-group for the first 15 minutes and then each student would have an individual “tutorial” with me for the balance of the time. This turned out to be a fantastic idea and I am guessing the students like it too.
During the pandemic in my district, we had two days to launch into teaching by video-conference (Here is a post on my experience teaching during the pandemic). My current students, many of whom were then in my sixth grade social studies class back in 2020, had a mostly negative experience learning online in general. I felt strongly motivated to demonstrate from the start of the school year that this remote learning experience would not be like that. The first upgrade I made to what I was doing in 2020 was to focus on individual lessons over group lessons.
I think of positive rapport as being a trusting sense of mutual goodwill between an instructor and a pupil. Building a positive rapport with students is extremely important. I had the sense that this was possible only to a very limited degree in remote learning. However, I now stand corrected. In remote instruction over video-conferencing, it is necessary to favor one-on-one teaching situations.
Fostering positive rapport extends not to just being present to interact one-on-one. It is also built on online software applications that foster efficient and readily accessible learning interactions for delivery, practice, evaluation, and debriefing.
Next post: teaching composition to world language students remotely.
