Using the school website to offer some extra digital material for my students has been on my mind since last year when I participated in Andriani Rigoutsou’s project on Flipped Classroom.I was also influenced by Vivi Hamilou and her excellent work in her blog and by a recent seminar we had with Mrs Kotadaki about dyslexia.
I have been thinking that it would be nice if I could provide my students with additional practice on the various vocabulary and grammatical patterns presented in the coursebooks.I also thought it would be nice to combine it with padlet platform in order to publish certain project work that my students create.
So I have started adding material for each class in the school website, where students and parents have easy access to.
The material is available for my students for revision or further practice at home .It is designed in accordance to their coursebooks and is constantly updated by me as we move on from one unit to the other.
However , it turned out to be very useful for classroom use too. Whenever we have some free time in class we can always use the material to practice in class.After all it’s all gathered in one place!
This extra material is drawn from various websites .Below you can see some of them.
I have also used quizlet, to create flashcards and quizzes easily. Quizlet has been particularly appealing to students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities as it combines images with sound.
I still have a long way to go as I’m planning to create material for each unit and each level separately. It’s a longterm project but from the feedback I got from the “experts”, my students that is, I believe it’s worth trying.
Here are the links to the website of my school and the links to the different grades:
To be continued…
Using padlet last year for applying Flipped Classroom Lessons in 6th grade, gave me a lot of ideas about how I can use this tool in many other ways too. So this year , since my timetable doesn’t allow me to use our computer lab, I’ve decided to use padlet in order to :
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provide my students with digital material on each unit (that we won’t have the chance or time to watch in our computer lab)
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familiarize them with the use of padlet so as to prepare them for some flipped lessons later on
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make study , revision and practice more appealing to them
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save precious time for practicing in class
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communicate with them through messages on my padlet wall
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give them time and space to work at their own pace
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make them active learners
My first attempt was to prepare and upload material for Unit 2 – Going shopping-6th bgrade and my goal is to give them extra material for each unit. Most of the material is taken from photodendro. However you can upload any material (ppt presentations for grammar, links to on line games, videos etc)that serves the linguistic and communicative purposes of each unit.
My dear colleague Vivi Hamilou has recently used padlet to publish her students’writing homework,which is an excellent idea. She has also used the website of her school to upload extra material. There’s a great amount of digital material to enrich our coursebooks but not enough time to do it at school, so technology may be the answer.
I hope it all goes well! I’ll be back with my students’ impressions and comments as well as material for the next units.
