Google Classroom

“all righty let's see if this is working okay Sandra can you hear me hi Sandra can you hear me can you hear me oh you can't hear me hey I'm gonna let you in on a secret I can hear her but I'm not gonna let her know that no work for me look familiar in this video I'm gonna be showing my favorite resources for teaching listening reading speaking of writing to your English learners as well as my favorite platforms that you can teach these activities on and then just some tips and tricks that will help boost your video quality so that your students will be engaged in the lessons that you teach the first resources I want to share with you today is called ESL video and it is a wonderful platform for teaching grammar in the context of a video so let's dive in and let me show you how it works what I like about ESL video is that it is a free platform that contains a wide variety of videos that range all the way from the beginning level of English language proficiency all the way to advanced and within each video there is a short clip that is focusing on a specific tense whether it be the past tense or the past progressive and future tense and so forth and you start off by assigning a specific code to your class to log in so that when they answer the questions that mediately follow the video the score they're able to see but then it gets sent to you so that you know which are the areas of weaknesses they have to work on a wonderful resource to get your students to listen to the weight the pattern or speech and how it should be read and fluency is story online oh my goodness this is an awesome website if you've never seen it before and let me show you what it looks like story online is a free and rich resource that contains dozens and dozens of books on many different levels and the books are read by famous authors and accompanied with each book our specific activity guys and there's one for teachers to give you an idea of what type of assignments that you can assign for your students and if you're wondering where students can enter their specific answers to the questions I have a resource for you so you may be wondering where do students store all of their answers to the questions or to the activities that you give them well I'm gonna show you two of my favorite resources one of which is I'm gonna post a video and the link in the description below but this resources is awesome because you can actually store all of the activities on there in padlet and you can just watch a tutorial as I've done this video before and it can give you an idea of how you can use it but the second resource that I highly recommend is Google classroom what I like about Google classroom is that it is a free web service developed by Google for schools and it aims to simplify creating distributing and grading assignments in a paperless way and the primary purpose of Google classroom is to streamline the process of sharing files between teachers and students I'm also going to link in the description below a tutorial for your benefit so that you can learn how to integrate Google classroom in your online English teaching for more reading and writing practice I recommend ELC study zone ELC study zone is for students for English language learners and the teachers what they do is they create English language lessons and practice exercises this site is also assigned or designed for adult English language learners but in all honesty as I look through all of the assignments they're really for all learners and the beauty of is that it has detailed study guides and short lessons followed up by an activity that they can practice the skill and each lesson is comprised of a grammar reading and listening vocabulary and puzzles which is wonderful because they get to end up completing the assignment with something fun and interactive and great resource which is call ello it contains dozens and dozens and dozens I mean probably over 2500 ESL video and audio lessons scenes and step I'm telling you you can spend an entire day just discovering all that this website has if you would like to provide in a free platform in which your students can be able to ask you questions you can answer some quick questions on the fly I recommend you teach and it's basically a chatroom and what's nice is that you can stream out and just let it be just your students and by giving them a specific code and they can enter in and you can have an interactive session with your your students another great resource for getting lesson plans is call share my lesson and what I love about this website is that it contains lessons for all grades in different subject areas and you can actually filter it out specifically for English language learners and it gives you a star rating on the right-hand side so you can see what other people thought about these lessons and you yourself can also upload and share lesson plans that you've created but they have everything ranging from oral recounting reading and analyzing also Dolch noun words noun cards the story of the hour higher-level thinking questions anything you can think of from vocabulary from reading from writing and the powerful thing about this website is that you can tailor it specifically to the language proficiency level of your students as well as whatever standards so if you're depending on where you are around in the world or where you are in the United States you can tell her specifically to the standards that you are teaching so if you're wondering what type of resources and how can you teach multiple students at one time there are many platforms the first one I'm going to share with you is called zoom and the power of this one is that you can meet with up to 1,000 video participants and you can have 49 videos on school you know you can feel confident that you're meeting securely with your students it also has the ability to have recording and transcripts and it just gives you the opportunity to actually teach a short lesson which I recommend to make it short and then allows your students to know exactly what they're supposed to be doing that day for the lessons that you're teaching as I mentioned before my one of my favorite platforms for gathering students together when it's more than let's say 25 students is zoom meeting but you can also use Google Hangouts which is part of the G suite family its productivity plan of first-class conferencing service it's developed specifically for business needs but you can always alter it specifically for the use of students and what's nice is that you can use data from other applications like if you're using Google classroom and a big plus is that it doesn't come with a month monthly cost that other providers might charge but other free videoconferencing software zoom meeting Skype free conference Google Hangouts and Cisco WebEx meetings which I will all list in the description below so before you think you have to go out and buy the latest technology and spend lots of money stop you do not have to you can simply use the webcam on your computer you can even use your phone and if it makes it easier you can also record next to a window where there's sunlight to bring in that natural light but make sure that you practice a couple of times before you actually start a class because you want to make sure that students are seeing you in the best light so that they can see you and also but just try practicing with the internal mic that already comes with your phone and your computer I also recommend to make sure that you play around with the levelling of your computer so you want to make sure that you get the best angle possible most eye to eye so that you're making eye contact directly with your students so I know that I am only touching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to wonderful resources that you can use for teaching your students as well as free platforms so if there's a resource or a platform that I haven't mentioned that you use in your costumes please join in on the conversation in the comments section below by sharing what you utilize in your school thank you so much for watching and tune in next week for more tips strategies and resources for the English language learners your classroom”