Those of us who are teaching remotely are starved for interactive apps that let us engage our students beyond screen sharing! Innovation is constantly adding apps and modifications to meet those needs.
Live Sessions
“Live sessions” are interactive sessions that student “join” through the Innovation platform.
Multiple-choice, short answer, and media activity types can all be transformed into live sessions! Just select Live Session from the Create dropdown by your activity in the course playlist. Click Live Link and copy the URL. Send to students in, for example, the Zoom or Teams chat.
Once they join, the teacher host can present one question at a time and await student responses.
Once students respond, teacher is notified and can debrief by displaying responses anonymously.
During the media live session, the teacher presents a slideshow and periodically opens the system for responses, poses a question, and awaits replies.
Activity Monitoring
During composition writing, grammar activities, short answer, and Etude tasks, the teacher can activate the Monitor app. This is found in the Task dropdown for the activity in the playlist. As students work on the task, instructors can view their progress with a minimal time delay. Read more here.
Teachers can hide the student names and the correct answers so they can share the screen with students as they work.
Innovation prides itself on the flexibility to plug in to any learning management system and to be easily integrated in video-conference remote lessons.
From the course playlist, you can send students a link to an activity by clicking the link icon on the right . Paste the link into the video conferencing chat window.
Send students a link to the assessment debriefing (the student’s assessment and correct answers to the task) using the icon below that.
From within the Live Sessions, the same functionality exists.
How to promote academic integrity in remote learning and in-person classrooms with 1:1 laptops
My interest in devising 21st century learning spaces really took off during the pandemic. The school district I was working in at the time had already moved to get all students in middle and high school Chromebooks and all classrooms had interactive projectors (“Smartboards” at the time). I had the advantage of having two perspectives on this, one as a former IT guy (I was district technology coordinator in a few schools in addition to my full-time teaching role and I was a certified network admin) and one perspective as a teacher. I knew we were just co-opting office productivity software for classroom use and it just was not cutting the mustard. Most notably, in our move to digital learning spaces, we lost some of the guardrails we used to maintain academic integrity.
What I mean by digital learning space, a term I use interchangeably with “21st century learning space”, is a software application hosted on the internet in which students conduct their studies and teachers conduct their lessons. My phrase “maintain academic integrity”, well, that mostly just means it was harder to keep kids from cheating.
This situation has come a long way since that time. Schools use a number of content filters, tracking apps, and screen monitoring software that is quite effective. But there are still gaps and I would put Innovation forward as a remedy to fill some of those gaps. Innovation plugs pretty easily into any LMS via convenient links.
Security Tier 1
The apps at Innovation fall into several functional tiers. Tier 1 entails just recording and reporting student activity on the apps. The Proctor is installed to monitor student activity as they interact with the digital learning space. It logs the following student actions:
started task
left the page
returned to the page
pasted in text
resized window
saved work
Tier 1 security on the short answer has some added records, such as notification when student deletes all of their response and the size of newly saved work compared to the answer it replaced. This was devised in response to a student who used to delete all his work and then claim he needed a retake because the system did not save. 🙄
In addition, the short answer task does not allow some other actions such as right click, spell-check, grammerly, activating dev tools, and the like.
Tier 1 security is applied by default on the Etude, short answer, grammar, world language composition, and media proctor. The media proctor records:
video started
video paused
left page
returned to page
duration engaged with video
At the tier 1 security level, the idea is to record detailed information about student engagement and to provide two things: 1) messaging to students showing what is being recorded and 2) reports for instructors who may or may not wish to take action on what the proctor saw. Just telling students that their actions were suspicious (like pasting in text) can serve to deter some mischief.
Tier 1 security is enhanced by the new Monitor app. This allows teachers to view student work progress on a task in real time (well, there’s a 10 second delay after student saves, but it’s still pretty quick). Monitor is available for short answer, grammar, world language composition, and Etudes. The Monitor displays all students who have saved work to the task. Select a student, and their work is shown. The proctor summary shows how many times students are doing each of the proscribed actions.
The multiple-choice app by default has security tier 2.
Security Tier 2
Tier 2 security is enabled by the teacher on the Master page for a task. the master page is accessed from the course playlist under the Task dropdown. Select “Modify test” from the controls at the top, and check the “High Security” checkbox.
When high security is enabled, the short answer task will close and submit responses if the student gives focus to any other page. The student will be locked out until they are formally re-admitted. Re-admit students from the course playlist using the Task dropdown in the controls on the right of the task.
In addition, short answer and multiple-choice tasks can be locked to certain single-use key codes. Once locked, teachers need to provide each student a different code from the list that was generated in order to allow access to the test. This limits attempts to take the test in situations where students have limited chances.
Further, teachers who need this level of security are encouraged to set time limits on the tasks. This will discourage cheating because it often takes time to look things up. In cases where some students get more time on task, you can set exceptions from the testing modification controls in Utilities. Go to Virtual Classroom and Testing Accommodations.
Tier 2 security can be enhanced by having a proctor with students to prevent accessing other devices. In addition, some schools have screen monitoring software like GoGuardian that can assist in monitoring. Perhaps this would be called “tier 3”?
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’sflashcard 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.
Innovation has always developed in response to authentic, practical instructional needs of students and teachers. In retirement, I am enjoying teaching part-time remotely and this continues to inspire new apps and coding enhancement.
You know, Reader, if you take a good look at what you are using to teach in digital spaces, you may observe like I did that a lot of it is software originally designed for office workers. Word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software and the like: these were made for adults doing largely self-directed work in office work. We are so accustomed to these apps that we hardly realize that they don’t ever quite exactly fit for us in the classroom; that we are always creating modifications and work-arounds to make them work. And we get by…
One of my classes this year is an AP French class down in Texas. My objective was to teach them a new grammar point. During our in-class practice, I needed to be able to monitor their work while they were doing it.
Reader, you may already be familiar with Innovation’s grammar learning app. Students learning world languages benefit from practice transforming and generating utterances from prompts. The app meets this need by providing a digital learning space that is interactive. An algorithmic AI lets students know how close they are to the answer, for example, and the instructor can transform the content into a “live session” in which students participate in real time much like the famous Kahoot! game.
Innovation’s grammar app.
Adolescents can sometimes be distractible. In an in-person classroom, I have reasonable observational capacity to notice and redirect distracted students. In remote teaching, this requires some additional effort. What if I could see the student’s’ progress in real time as they worked?
Screenshot of a “live session”, an interactive space where the teacher can pose prompts and students respond in real time interactivity.
People learning new things can sometimes make mistakes. In an in-person classroom, I can wander the room and peer over students’ shoulders. I can try to catch mistakes as they make them and offer correction in a more immediate way. It’s a shame to have to wait a day or two before addressing writing errors. Immediate feedback is more effective so that the other practice examples go well and inculcate the correct syntax. What if I could peer over everybody’s virtual shoulders while they practiced their new writing skill?
The monitor app is now installed at Innovation’s short answer and world language composition tasks. It allows the instructor to view all of the students currently with any saved work on the task. Click the student name, and the instructor can see their work in real time (well, there’s a ten second lag for technical reasons). This work is refreshed every ten seconds. In the short answer monitor, the number after each name tells how many responses they have saved.
In situations where the teacher may wish to share the screen with the class, they can hide the student names and, for the short answer tasks, hide the correct answers.
The monitor, set up for a short answer task, showing students anonymously when needed.
The way I like to use this is as follows: I use two monitors. Monitor 2 is shared with students. I can set the names to “Anonymous” and share the monitor. I select students at random from time to time to check their progress. I may focus on someone who is behind. I may focus on someone I know needs more support (I can see the names before setting anonymous). In monitor 1, on the Zoom or Teams call, I can use the chat to message students corrections, suggestions, redirections if they appear off task, and so forth.
the monitor app, hiding the correct answers in short answer tasks when needed.
To activate the monitor, scroll to the activity in your dashboard course playlist. You’ll find “Monitor Class” in the task dropdown. Monitor is installed for short answer and composition tasks at present. While you are wandering around the site, why not visit our newly opening shops? You can purchase my own activities, PowerPoints, and DBQs for social studies.
When it comes to grading, scores are often reported on a simple 0-100 scale. But, in many cases, it’s better to adjust those scores to make sure they truly reflect how well a student has mastered the material. This adjustment process is often referred to as normalization, and one common way to do this is through a method called z-score standardization.
What is Z-Score Standardization?
Imagine a group of students who took the same test. Some students might have performed really well, while others might have struggled. If we simply average all the scores and compare them to a fixed passing threshold (like 70%), it wouldn’t be fair to those students who performed well beyond the average. Z-score standardization is a way of adjusting scores so that they fit a more accurate and fair scale.
How it works:
Z-Score Calculation: The z-score tells us how far a student’s score is from the average score, measured in terms of standard deviations (which is a fancy way of saying how spread out the scores are). A positive z-score means the student did better than average, and a negative z-score means the student did worse than average.
The formula for calculating a z-score is:
Adjusting Scores: Once we calculate each student’s z-score, we can adjust their scores to match a more standard scale. This is done by applying the z-score to the mean (average) and standard deviation of the group’s scores. The new score is calculated as:
This formula uses the student’s z-score to adjust the score based on how far it is from the group’s average.
Why Do This?
Fairer Grading: By adjusting for how scores are distributed (e.g., a test with a very easy or very hard question), the scores become fairer, especially when comparing students across different groups or assessments.
Removing Bias: Sometimes, individual test questions are biased or poorly written, affecting how students perform. Z-score standardization helps eliminate that bias by focusing on the overall performance of the group.
Outlier Handling: The method also takes into account “outliers” (e.g., one or two students who either do extremely well or very poorly). These outliers can skew results, so they’re filtered out to make the adjusted scores more reliable.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
Let’s say a student scores a 90 on a test, but the average score for the class is 75, with a standard deviation of 10. To calculate the z-score for the student, we use the formula:
This means the student’s score is 1.5 standard deviations above the class average.
Next, we use the z-score to adjust the student’s score. If we want to bring the class to a higher standard (let’s say the target mean is 80), we use the formula for adjusting the score:
So, the student’s adjusted score is now 95, reflecting their performance in relation to the class and the new target.
Z-score standardization is often mistaken for “curving” scores, but they are fundamentally different. Curving typically involves adjusting all scores on a test so that the highest score becomes a perfect score, or the average score is raised to a certain target (like 70%). This method can unfairly benefit some students and disadvantage others. In contrast, z-score standardization adjusts individual scores based on how far they are from the class average, ensuring that each student’s performance is evaluated relative to the entire group, not a fixed threshold. By considering the spread of scores (standard deviation) and handling outliers, z-score standardization provides a more accurate reflection of a student’s performance, removing the arbitrary nature of curving and offering a fairer and more statistically sound approach to grading.
Innovation makes it incredibly easy for teachers to adjust and standardize assessment scores with our powerful, user-friendly tool. By using z-score standardization, our app helps teachers fairly align scores to a standard scale, taking into account the unique distribution of each class’s performance. With automatic outlier detection and score adjustments, teachers no longer need to worry about arbitrary curving or biased grading. It’s an efficient, data-driven solution that ensures every student’s performance is evaluated accurately and equitably, all with minimal effort on the teacher’s part.
When I was in ninth grade, we had a large world language (then “foreign” language) department at my high school. My homeroom classmate had an older teacher for French I and I had her daughter for my teacher. For some reason, I recall a conversation about a dictation exercise, the dictée, that the older teacher (who was from France) regularly did. My teacher didn’t do dictées. My homeroom classmate was not too keen on them. That was the first time I heard of the dictée.
I couldn’t tell you why I remember that little homeroom conversation. But I never did have a dictée in any French class right up through my BA degree in French Language and Literature. The dictée had become old fashioned. Its emphasis on correct grammar and spelling were shoved aside as too rigid in the “notional-functional” approach that was growing in the early ’80s and which came to replace grammar-translation.
The dictée returned to my attention last fall when I read an article in FranceInfo about a dictée contest. In fact, such “concours” are pretty common now and the dictée, that classic French pedagogical tool, has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity.
Scroll ahead some months and I find myself teaching a student in French V for an online school. The student is brilliant and already fluent in French, so I am challenged to devise lessons for him when my usual stock of lessons fall within his mastery or when the grammatical studies in the syllabus provided by the school are things he easily tests out of. I asked him what he thought he needed to work on instead, and he said spelling. The dictée sprung to mind as a spelling activity.
Concurrently, I am teaching an AP French course through another company. It’s a small class of eight very bright students who are a pleasure to teach. Unfortunately, they have gotten into the habit of relying heavily on AI to generate their work. Even in improvised, spontaneous chat assignments, some of them repeatedly leave the page (the Innovation synchronous chat app tracks this) to no doubt consult the AI as to what to say. The work many of them submit is polished and perfect beyond their years. Language learning involves detecting common errors and refining the language. But if the students never reveal their errors or lack of knowledge, I cannot easily correct. It feels like an arms race to continually devise activities that are resistant to AI assistance. The dictée sprung to mind as a virtual classroom task that would be difficult to get AI help on.
Since I began teaching French (1990!), I have used composition assignments to look for errors to work on with students. These are assignments modeled on the New York State proficiency test and Regents exams of the era. They measure each clause by comprehensibility, appropriateness, and form. Students have a free error allowance (one for French III and up). These assignments were done in class under supervision with no references (although for classes needing extra support I could allow a certain number of questions). When I began teaching online, I wanted to use this assignment as I had. I coded a World Language App here at Innovationthat provides a digital space for students with a proctor and an easy scoring page for teachers. A large percentage of my students use AI extensively to generate these even though I ask them not to. They present polished work that I know they could not have written themselves. One student I had actually created a few errors on purpose to cover the AI consultation. They were random and not the kind of natural “errors” that naturally occur. I don’t make a big deal. I rarely even let on that I know. Some students use AI less as the course goes on when they learn to feel comfortable. I contented myself with turning the perfect compositions into an exercise: I could ask students about what they wrote, the tense they chose, or just offer grammatical descriptions of the work. It was interesting watching them explain the presence of complex structures that they had not been taught yet! 🙂
The Dictée gives me important information about student proficiency and direction for lessons
I tried out a dictée with three students this week, French II, III, and V. I used the Innovation short answer digital learning space in two ways: I did one lesson “live” during our session and one was a recording I made for homework. I was pleased with the results. I learned a lot more about my students’ language abilities than from the weekly composition assignment.
My purpose is to discover student errors so we can correct them and polish them. The errors fall into two categories, lexical (spelling) and grammatical (conjugation and agreement, etc.). But I also learned that the dictée can reveal something about students’ vocabulary knowledge too. Words they do not know they are likely to skip or render phonetically. My guess is that native speakers would do a better job rendering unknown words spelled correctly because they are more familiar with the writing-phonology system of French.
I was happy enough with the results to modify the composition app to allow attaching an audio clip and a model answer. I worked with ChatGTP myself a little to code a function that would quickly assess the students’ spelling. This app is easy to use during synchronous sessions: I merely generate a link from the course playlist, the student saves their dictation, and then on submission I can display on a shared screen to debrief. I can also assign these for homework.
The student’s digital space for submitting dictée.The scoring page where teachers can highlight errors with different colors for lexical errors and grammatical errors.
Valuable Information about Student Skill Levels
Since it is difficult and unlikely that students will have the time and opportunity to check this with an AI, I get valuable and authentic data about student skill levels. Namely, their lexical spelling, grammatical knowledge, and a good picture of their vocabulary. Research has shown that dictation can indirectly reflect a student’s vocabulary knowledge, since a richer vocabulary base enables more accurate transcription of spoken language. Currently, in remote teaching contexts it is difficult to get this information. Students at all levels are becoming adept at AI queries. They polish and submit work that defeats the purpose of assigning it!
The debriefing on the task is as important as getting the information about student skill levels. Reviewing the corrections and creating custom exercises to train students out of the errors or teach them the grammar structures and vocabulary they need: these are necessary to fully profit by the task.
The senior teacher in my high school, all those years ago, who maintained the tradition of the dictée would smile now, I suspect, to find that some of us are returning to that ancient practice. Keep an eye on the Innovation app that assesses dictés! I plan to refine it as I use the activity more and more.
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
