Category: tips & ideas

Colour prompts

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Have you ever thought of using colour prompts for anything in teaching? You can do a great deal with them, just read on to find out how.

You can create a colour palette using any word with Picular. Think of whales, photosynthesis, or gravity. You get a bunch of colours along with their HEX code, so you can recreate them using any design tool if you wish to do so. For example, here’s the colour palette for ‘teacher’.

You don’t have to spend time on creating a nice image like the one above; you can just use the website. And here come the ideas on how to use this in teaching.

1 Introduce a topic. Can’t think of a new way to introduce a topic? Ask the students to say what colours come to their mind upon hearing the concept/topic in question. They can even use actual stationery to express their ideas. Then you can show them the Picular-generated colours and compare. It’s just one more step to guide them to the concept/topic in question.

2 Delve deeper into a topic. Do you have students who need an extension or lateral thinking ideas? Have them think about the colours that come to their mind. If you generate colours using the prompt ‘frog’ for example, can they find a frog of that colour from all over the world and place them on a map? Can they draw any conclusions?

3 Improve design and aesthetics. Thinking in terms of colours can open up a whole new world. For example, I never thought of colours associated with ‘teacher’ before I found this website, but it made me think. Similarly, you can use the website or simply your own imagination to generate colours then use them to create a colour palette for a website or a character you want to create, and so on.

4 Use it to generate ideas. If you’ve run out of ideas, you can always call in the colour-generator. Enter the word, then try to come up with links to or explanations of the reasons why those colours popped up.

5 Discussion. Whether you have a “boring” topic or a controversial one, colours can spice them up or tame them. Additionally, they can lead to discussions on how and why.

Do you like the above ideas? Do you have a better one? Have you tried any of these or similar ones? Either way, share with us in the comments section.

How to make use of Wakelet’s function of copiability?

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What does it mean that you can copy a collection? It means that you give permission to others to make a copy of the collection with all the items and (almost all) the settings in the collection. The only setting that is different in the copied collection is the privacy.

How can you make a collection copiable? Click on the gear sign in the top left corner, then scroll down. Click on ‘Allow copy collection’ to turn the function on.

How can you copy a collection? If a collection is copiable, you can copy it by clicking on the three dots in the top then hitting ‘Copy.’

Three ideas on how to make use of this function

  1. Create templates for others (or yourself). Make your life easier by not having to create the same collection from scratch over and over again. Choose from the many templates in the Wakelet Templates profile or browse my template collection here.
  2. Student worksheets. Create an interactive worksheet for students by making the collection copiable. The students copy the collection and manipulate the items in it following your instructions. See three examples with step-by-step explanations here.
  3. Following the same logic as with the “student worksheets” above, you can create materials for colleagues. They can choose the items they want to keep or add new ones depending on the aim. For example, they can copy a collection and adapt it to their needs whether it’s a substitute teacher making some changes in the collection or a regular teacher updating notes.

Do you have any questions or other fantastic ideas? Share with us in the comments section.

Students interviewing people reloaded

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One relatively popular activity for students to improve their speaking skills (especially if they are foreign language learners), their questioning and interviewing techniques is to ask them to interview real or imaginary people. Here’s a new take on this: interview long-dead people or people and creatures who never existed with the help of AI. Watch the video below then read how it was created.

Here’s the step by step guide to how to create this:

  1. Pick a famous figure you want to interview. Think over the interview questions and also the answers the interviewee will give. Do research and make sure the answers could come from that person.
  2. Upload the picture into Tokkingheads and record the answers separately. Download each video.
  3. Use Canva or your go-to design tool to add the background and the frame along with the video answer. Download as mp4.
  4. Use Flipgrid or your go-to video maker to put together the interview. Record yourself and the questions. Insert the downloaded Tokkingheads/Canva video answers in between the questions. Add credits and download/share the video.

Extra tip 1: Maybe you noticed that when I asked the questions, Mona Lisa was making faces. You can create this effect on Tokkingheads. Just have a look around and discover the possibilities.

Extra tip 2: You can interview imaginary creatures as well as non-living things such as a cell or an atom. In that case the video will be less spectacular in lieu of a moving mouth. However, you can use a cartoon if you wish and there you go: animation is in again!

And how can we meaningfully use such an activity? Here are some ideas: to practise speaking, to practise asking questions, to explore different perspectives, to showcase the results of research (for example into Leonardo’s world), to organise debates between two characters – How do you imagine a discussion between Leonardo and Mona Lisa? – and so on.

Note of caution: This technique allows for creating instructional videos such as the one above but also for serious breaches and even for spreading misinformation. Teach your students how to be responsible digital citizens and also how to attribute their sources.

Any thoughts or ideas on this? Share with us in the comments section.

Can an activity be “good” or “bad”?

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Beginner teachers often ask me this question: “Is this activity good?” And I never know how to answer because in itself no activity is “good” (effective) or “bad” (ineffective). It depends on various things: how the activity is designed, how it is presented, how it is scaffolded, and, most importantly, for what purpose it is used.

Purpose: One of the most important things to understand about teaching is that nothing should be there without a purpose. We extract aims from curricular standards, we design objectives to guide our lessons and overall we should have a rationale for teaching any content. Following this logic, each activity in a lesson serves a purpose: to reach the objectives of the lesson and to reach the overarching aims of the unit/academic year/teaching. In other words the activities build on each other and form a coherent whole we call lesson, and they lead the students towards an outcome (aka learning).

Design: The design of the activity concerns the actual set-up and elements in the activity. For example, a jigsaw activity is generally considered to be a great technique to improve thinking and collaborative skills. However, with bad design these noble aims can be made moot. I’ve seen “jigsaw” activities where students didn’t do any research or thinking but read out the information cards they were given, then instead of discussion, they looked at each other with an impassioned face. There was no thinking, no collaboration, no learning. It was hard to watch. So, when designing the activity, think of the information/prompts given to the students, whether it’s a short text, questions to think about or a website to explore. For example: Is the text too long? Is the text comprehensible? Is the text interesting enough? Do the questions raise interesting points? Do the questions allow for thinking or simply ask the students to regurgitate previously learnt (?) ideas? Are the websites safe to explore? Do the students have to find websites and potentially waste a lot of time or are there curated websites for exploration? Are there guiding questions for the text/website? Do the students know what to do? Can they go off tangent? How to prevent the students from going off tangent? And so on.

Presentation/implementation: The presentation mainly focuses on what happens in class when the students are given the task. Are the instructions clear enough? Do the students know what to do and who to work with? Are the students given all the necessary materials? Do the students have access to everything they need (including websites and background information)? Did the teacher check for prior knowledge so that the students can actually do what they are asked to do?

Scaffolding and differentiation: It is very important to offer varying levels of scaffolding to students while they are working on the task. This might include extra help, extra feedback, more information at the outset, more time, specific classmates as team members, certain roles and so on. The considerations here are endless and mainly depend on the current cohort of students. Also consider differentiation during task design: Do you need to differentiate the level of complexity, the outcome, the process or something else?

As you can see, it’s almost impossible to say if an activity is effective or not, even in theory. There are a lot of considerations for each and every activity, and also how they work in a sequence of activities (aka lesson). Also, an activity might work today or with one group of students but not tomorrow or with another group of students. Always keep in mind your audience and your aims for teaching (learning intentions).

Do you agree with the four points above? Is there anything else that should be considered when evaluating an activity? Share with us in the comments section.

Making students see connections

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One huge challenge in education is how to make students see connections and link ideas and concepts. This is a challenge because of the sheer amount of content teachers are expected to teach, which often leads to isolated chunks of knowledge. While it has been pointed out that squeezing as much content as possible into an academic year is not beneficial or sensible (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005), it is still demanding to teach how to link concepts, build on ideas or draw parallels. Here are some arts and culture experiment projects from Google, which build on linking seemingly unrelated ideas. Use these projects to inspire and challenge students to create connections they never knew existed.

1. X degrees of separation What is it? You pick two art works and AI will show you the connection between the two. The picture below illustrates this: from Munch’s Scream to Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with small monkey. How to use it? Pick two art works and ask students for similarities between the two. Using the similarities, students can create links between the two – real or imaginary. Students can do some research to check their hypothesis, while the teacher can guide them to keep them on track. While this Google arts experiment project is useful in that it will visualise this process, other non-art-related objects and concepts can be picked for practice. The aim is not really to find “real” connections, but rather to practise to see differently and come up with ideas that are worth investigating.

2. Living archive with Wayne McGregor What is it? Thousands of movements and poses have been digitised. Select a series of poses and AI will create a flow of movements as a little dance routine. You can even download the dance routine as a gif. How to use it? Students study movement and poses to discover that they are not random but build on each other to create a smooth flow. How can you get from one pose to another one through a series of movements? Challenge students to create interesting routines that please the eyes and make the body move in a flow.

3. Thousand stories What is it? Explore thousands of stories starting from a single image. How to use it? Use pictures as a starting point for divergent ideas. What’s the link between any given picture and the ideas and concepts they inspire? Challenge students to come up with new links their peers haven’t thought of. Explore and compare these ideas to create an intricate net of connected ideas. Have students roam through these concepts discovering connections they have never thought of.

Do you have other great ideas about how to make students see connections and create links? Do you know of other great resources? Share them with us in the comments section.

Metaphors in teaching

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Metaphors are widely used when explaining something as they almost visually capture the essentials of a concept and make it easier to grasp the main idea or how something works. When we say being a teacher is like being a gardener or a conductor, a completely different picture comes to our mind, but at the same time we can “see” what the speaker meant. If being a teacher is like being a gardener, it means we plant the seeds, we tend to our plants and flowers, we wait and look after the garden, and after much care and time and effort and energy, we end up with a beautiful, colourful and varied garden – much like our students are: having very different skills and valuable in their own rights. Thus, metaphors are powerful, but not without their limitations. Play on their strengths with the following great ideas.

  1. A study in… by McTighe and Silver (2020, pp. 19-21) asks students to imagine the topic, text or content at hand as a broader concept and justify why they think so by completing the sentence frame: “I see (topic/text) as a study in (concept). Some examples: I see the water cycle as a study in renewal because… or I see assessment as a study in gardening because… This way, students extract meaning and think more deeply about the topic or text.
  2. Abstract to concrete comparison. A somewhat simplified version of the above is to ask students to compare a concrete object to an abstract noun. The teacher (or the class) picks the abstract noun, for example “teaching”, “community”, or “photosynthesis”, the students pick a small object from a box of miscellaneous objects (eraser, a piece of string, a name card, pencil sharpener, pen, Lego figurine, etc.) and compare the abstract noun to the concrete object, then swap objects and find a new partner. Some examples: This eraser is like teaching because it can help correct mistakes or This Lego figurine is like community because it’s one member but represents the whole. (I learnt this idea from John Kongsvik.)
  3. Idioms. Especially with EAL/EFL/ESL students, idioms pose a special problem as they are not transparent (=their meaning cannot always be worked out by looking at the parts). Use metaphors to untangle meaning or to introduce a topic or vocabulary. Some examples: Time is money, life is a journey, a project is a race. What ideas come to mind when you hear these metaphors? What idioms belong with each category? What do the idioms say about the collective nouns (time, life, project)?

Do you have any other ideas of how to use metaphors in a meaningful way? Share with us in the comments section.

In lieu of an LMS proper

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You don’t have access to a proper LMS? You want to publish material in a course format easily accessible to anyone but you don’t want to use your school’s platform? You want to publish self-paced teaching material? Try Wakelet! Here is how.

Set up a Wakelet space for your courses and teaching material. When you make the space public, you can organise the collections under headings, so each heading will be a course. When you’ve designed your material, chop it up into digestible chunks. Each chunk will go into a separate collection.

  1. Use a Flipgrid video to introduce the content of the lesson in each collection and to share the objectives.
  2. Use any video making tool to create the explanation/demo part of your lesson. With Flipgrid, you can directly integrate the video into your collection, or, if you have an other fav video making tool, upload it onto Youtube, and it will play very nicely inside the collection too.
  3. Add pleasing visual explanations and student discovery experiences through Genially. With Genially you can build in interactive elements and any content you can think of: images, videos, etc. This stage, where students take it on their own to discover parts of the material, is best done if it’s motivating and moreish. If students rush through this stage without giving much thought to content and their own role in learning, the course will be a lot less effective. So plan this stage carefully so that students can make most of the learning.
  4. Add collaborative Wakelet collections within the collection where students can work together or simply add the work they’ve created. See more Wakelet collaboration ideas here.
  5. Add Flipgrid discussion boards where students can reflect on their learning (if you moderate this discussion, the other students cannot watch it), or they present what they’ve learnt, ask questions, give feedback and so much more.
  6. Add quick tests to help students check what they’ve learnt and for you to assess their understanding. Depending on the tool you’re using you might or might not see how the students have fared – so plan carefully. I like Genially to add quick multiple choice tests where the students can check how much they’ve understood. I love Wordwall as well, as it has varied games to keep students engaged. And of course, you can use a self-paced Kahoot or any of your (students’) favourite games.
  7. Finally, add another Wakelet collection in which you list the references, add recommended readings or any other resources of interest. Use the column view for this so that students can easily start browsing in the category that’s most relevant to them.

Tip #1: You can insert instructions and micro-teaching at any point if you create a gif. Search for ideas in this Genially.

Tip #2: If you have a series of lessons (that is, a series of collections), at the end of each collection, insert the next collection for the smoothest transition between the sessions.

That’s it! Simple and fun! Do you have any other ideas with which the experience could be enhanced? Share it with us in the comments section!

Interview activities using AI

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These activities don’t replace teaching students interview techniques or basic communication skills. However, they add a fun element so that students become more engaged and hopefully learn more. Apart from content and communication, they will learn empathy and digital citizenship skills as well.

  1. Interview a long dead historical figure. Students write the script, and animate the historical figure with AI (for example Tokkingheads). They record their bits as the interviewer. They edit the interview for example in Flipgrid so that they can easily show their work to the world.
  2. Animate your drawing/photo and make it speak. Students can use their own drawings or photos and make them talk in a fun way with Blabberize. As a teacher use this opportunity to practice job interviews, descriptions, creating a hook, starting a youtube video and so much more. If you click on the Blabberize link, you can watch a llama talk. Animating the animal is quick – so the students can concentrate on content.
  3. Animate a famous painting to practice perspectives and empathy. With either Tokkingheads or Blabberize, you can animate a painting as well. Students can make the painting talk and tell everyone about how they felt when they were being painted, the circumstances in which the painting was made, or how boring Mona Lisa finds the tourists around her. This technique will help students take a different perspective and empathize with others. As a bonus, take a painting with multiple figures, and groups of students animate different figures from the painting to have a debate.

You can use these activities in various subjects: students can interview Pythagoras about his theorem or draw a cell and make it speak. Students can have two famous historical figures talk to each other or improve their speaking skills in the foreign language classroom. Don’t forget though to teach respectful and responsible behaviour. AI can be used in a demeaning way and we don’t want to bring up bullies in our classroom. This is, therefore, the perfect opportunity to teach elements of digital citizenship.

🔧 Resources. Browse this collection for more AI resources, or this blog post for more ideas.

What ideas do you have? Have you tried any of these activities in this format? Share with us in the comments section.

What am I reading?

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I recently posted about why I consider reading an important part of professional development. I’m always baffled by people saying they don’t like reading and I think I cannot accept this from a teacher. At the same time, I understand time constraints as well as the sometimes impenetrable language/concepts presented in academic journals. Therefore, I’ve started a collection with articles and blog posts that are easily accessible both in terms of their availability online and their language. In most cases they shouldn’t take longer than 10 minutes to read. This is by no means an exhaustive list of must-read articles, neither is it a representative cross-section of basic concepts and theories in teaching. Rather, it is intended to raise interest in certain topics, show that notions and concepts are not one-sided, and raise curiosity to dig deeper. The collection reflects my personal interests.

What can you do with this collection? You can pick an article that tickles your fancy, you can share articles with colleagues, you can start your own reading lists, you can start a reading circle, you can search for articles that fit in with your current interests for self-development, you can suggest further articles to share, and so on.

Do you have any questions or suggestions? Leave a comment below.

Curating skills with Wakelet

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Imagine an activity which helps students with selecting information, categorising information and justifying their choices, all in a fun way. Sounds good? Here’s the activity:

  1. Select varied sources on the concept you’re teaching. Make sure you include short texts, videos, images, websites and so on to make it more interesting and tickle various senses. Also make sure the collection doesn’t lend itself to obvious categories, but depending on the subject (topic) and the current level of curation skills of the students, you might want to start out with more straightforward categories. Differentiating learning might also ask for more obvious categories at first.
  2. Add all of your resources to a Wakelet collection in a random order, and select the moodboard layout to do this. Make the collection copiable.
  3. The students will copy the collection, rename it and change the layout to columns; they can also change the header image. They will study the resources and decide on categories. They will reorganise the whole collection into categories.
  4. As extension, you can ask them to add at least one more item to each column, or a short explanation of why the items in the column belong together.
  5. The students form pairs or small teams, study each other’s collections and compare and contrast the categories and items in them. They explain/justify their own choices and appreciate the merits of their classmates’ collections along with giving feedback.

And how can you use this activity in different ways? The less obvious the categories are, the more space is left for the students to think, the more different their new collections will be, and the more new ideas and connections they might make. The example in the video above, for example, shows a fairly explicit task: the strata of the rainforest are exemplified. Here are some more ideas on how to make use of this activity:

1. As revision, drop the main ideas, concepts, images, videos, etc. into a moodboard collection. Students create a “teaching board” where they showcase their new learning, adding new ideas, summaries, explanatory videos (of their making). You might leave out key elements so that the students need to provide those and place them in their logical place. The aim is to make sure the students understand the concepts and they can build on them.

2. English/literacy/writing. Add short pieces of texts, images, and gifs into the initial collection. Ask the students to write a story, using the bits and pieces. They don’t have to use up all the elements (but you can set a minimum number) and they can use the media view as an alternative to the column view.

3. You can use this activity as a hook by setting up a riddle at the beginning of the unit. Have the students try to work out the connection between elements or concepts by having them try to rearrange the key pieces. You can add further hints (and/or distractors) in a new collection, from which they can copy the bookmarks they need. The hints can be added right at the beginning of the unit, or you can use this activity along the unit and the students can work on it until they finally have all the pieces of information.

Do you have more ideas or any questions? Leave a comment below.

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