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By Natascha Chtena November 22, 2015 5 Comments   .blog-spacer { display: none; } @media (max-width: 420px) { .blog-spacer { display: block; height:1px; clear:both; } }   googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display("dfp-ad-story_level_pages"); }); Natascha Chtena is a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. You can follow her on Twitter @nataschachtena.       One of the challenges I face teaching a daily language class is finding novel and creative ways to maintain student interest throughout my lessons. One of my favorite teaching “tricks” is using music to motivate learning, improve concentration, create a sense of community and help my students absorb material.   Music is a wonderful tool to integrate into your teaching repertoire, especially if you are a foreign language teacher. It has a

The key is to not be too ambitious (unless of course you are teaching a language AND culture class) and to set realistic goals: one song one major point! I usually keep it to seven minutes max, which includes a song, a very short “lecture” and some time for student questions at the end.

One “choice” assignment I regularly offer students is letting them engage in a texting conversation in Spanish and send me the screenshots. This assignment seems more like fun than like work. Plus, students are able to use the language in an authentic, realistic way.

Connect students with another class and set up a virtual pen pal program. (Bonus points if you can arrange this with a class in a country in which the target language is spoken.)

f we make activities genuine, our students will be much more inclined to participate, acquiring new knowledge in the process.

There are a lot of teachers out there who, like me, are not tech savvy, so Canva is the perfect fit for us because it takes all of the guesswork out of designing a highly engaging, aesthetically pleasing visual!  

make a decision

7. Virtual study session — Add your top 10 most important things to remember for a quiz or test as snaps in your Snapchat story. Students can watch your story and it becomes an instant study session.

8. Movies — Tell a story 10 seconds at a time. Add short video clips to a story with each video as a scene in the “movie”. If students follow you, this could be a great, fun way for students to engage in content. They could craft their own Snapchat movies incorporating what they learn in your class. Teachers can create fun content that students will want to watch. Schools and school districts can do the same to tell about a sporting event or other community event.

MovieTalk works because it links meaning between the language used by the teacher to the images on the screen. In other words, it makes the linguistic input comprehensible to the student. “Comprehensible” of course, is a bit of a gray term—meaning that something is reasonably able to be understood by the audience—and it is up to the teacher to employ skills such as teaching to the eyes and using comprehension checks to guarantee that the comprehensible language is actually comprehended.

Sometimes, I select MovieTalks because of their topic: the content relates to something that we are studying or discussing in class. Other times, I select MovieTalks because of the vocabulary: I know that I can talk about the video using the same words that I am working with in class with my students. And still other times, I select MovieTalks because they are just so dang fun and easy and I plop them into the middle of a unit for no reason at all!

Format Flexibility! There are 8 different Padlet formats: Wall, Canvas, Stream, Grid, Shelf, Backchannel, Map & Timeline. Screenshot from padlet.com

Remake – Want to reuse a Padlet in multiple classes or across multiple years?

Your students will not need an account to access your Padlets or post/comment on your Padlets.  They would, however, need an account in order to make their own.

We’ve been hearing that a lot. Increasingly, teachers in our audience are reporting that a handful of their students—shy kids, hyperactive kids, highly creative kids—are suddenly doing better with remote learning than they were doing in the physical classroom. “It’s been awesome to see some of my kids finally find their niche in education,” said Holli Ross, a first-year high school teacher in northern California, echoing the sentiments of dozens of teachers we’ve heard from. That’s not to say it’s the norm. Many students are struggling to adapt to remote learning: Digital access and connectivity remain a pervasive equity issue; stay-at-home orders have magnified existing problems in familial dynamics; and, universally, teachers and students grapple with how to replicate the engagement and discourse from an in-person classroom.