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.
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.
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! 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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
Step into the flavorful world of French culinary heritage with our captivating culture unit designed for French 3 and beyond. Developed by an experienced educator who prioritizes cultural immersion in language learning, this product offers an enriching exploration of France’s gastronomic traditions. Whether teaching in-person or remotely, our comprehensive materials cater to both environments, ensuring flexibility and accessibility for educators and students alike.
Delve into the nuances of French dining etiquette and culinary history with meticulously crafted PowerPoints, “A Table” and “Patrimoine culinaire,” featuring engaging visuals and informative content spread across 46 slides. Expand vocabulary acquisition with our tier 2 word list, carefully curated to enhance reading comprehension and fluency. Engage in immersive learning experiences with five captivating readings accompanied by comprehension questions, along with thought-provoking inquiries tailored for six culinary and etiquette-focused videos. Additionally, ignite students’ creativity and linguistic prowess with two composition assignments designed to foster critical thinking and cultural appreciation. Plus, gain exclusive access to our virtual classroom at Innovation, where students can further immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of French culture. Elevate your French language curriculum and ignite a passion for cultural exploration with our dynamic and comprehensive French culinary heritage unit.
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!
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.
