Charlala DrawRoom - Picture/Sentence Match

Just recently, I learned about Charlala, a "conversational language platform" according to the website. I have not investigated much on the website outside of the DrawRoom function, but I really like what I see. Unfortunately, the DrawRoom function is still in Beta testing, so there are a number of drawbacks and limitations, but gosh, it really does have a lot of potential. The creator of Charlala is a world language teacher, and the DrawRoom has so many CI possibilities!

In this post, I am going to focus on the Game Mode of DrawRoom and how to use it as a post-reading activity. 

The example in the above video demonstrates the Game Mode using individual vocabulary words, but I used it with 9 sentences from a reading - I think that 7-9 sentences are a good amount (see drawbacks for why).

Observations

1. Students really got into this activity! It was fun trying to interpret others' drawings and match them with the correct sentence.
2. Because I was only focusing on 9 sentences, a number of students drew the same sentences so that allowed for lots of repetitions of pictures shown.
3. Students REALLY wanted their pictures to be displayed and guessed. That kept many students engaged. 
4. A number of my sentences involved close reading, so students had to choose carefully.
5. I stressed to students that they include ALL drawable aspects of their sentence, since many sentences were similar but certain aspects in the sentence made them distinct.

Drawbacks (NOTE - the Draw Room function is still in Beta testing)

1. Although students can draw their pictures on their smartphones, it works much better with a tablet. A number of students found the smartphone screen to be too small.
2. Due to the formatting of the sentence choices, there is not enough screen space on a smartphone for more than 9 sentences, and if sentences are too long, they can be difficult to see.
3. The leaderboard only shows 4 names. For a class of 30, students do not know where they have placed overall.
4. There is no way for you as the teacher to preview the pictures prior to posting them, so if a student draws an inappropriate picture, you cannot delete it nor will you know until it is projected. I also had some students misdraw the sentence, i.e., what a student drew was incorrect. Unfortunately, I did not know until the picture was projected.
5. Students enter in their names, so students can enter in "naughty nicknames" - much like Kahoot before, you as the teacher cannot delete any names until they are submitted. I would like to be able to enter in students' names prior to playing the game (I know that this is a student privacy information situation though).