Here is another one of my go-to movie talks which I tend to use quite regularly over the years, because I like the plot and because I can manipulate the animated short to fit the vocabulary which I need for a particular reading. Words which can be targeted in this movie talk are young man, old woman, dog, drives a car, city/town, approaches, goes/comes to, sells, life, miserable, better than, citizens/people, wears clothes, transforms/changes, and airplane.
I think that this is made by the same animators as Snack Attack, because the young men in both animated shorts look strikingly similar! I did not catch that, but students have certainly pointed that out to me.
This is one of my all-time, go-to movie talks. I really like the story, and because I have done this movie talk so many times, I can manipulate it to preview whatever vocabulary words which I need. I just have to remember which levels have seen this Movie Talk and when! It is a great animated short for level 1 for basic words like boy, girl, take, flower, make, see, love, wants, has, happy, sad, and angry, but I have also used it in upper levels for very specialized words such as attack, punch, seek out, chase, pretend, princess/queen, leader, kingdom, dragon, roar, and cruel.
I feel like I have totally come late to the party on this web app tool, but near the end of last semester, I was introduced to the website Blooket. Around November 2020, the German teacher at my school shared it with my department, and Rachel Ash (one of my Latin colleagues) then created a novella chapter review for our Latin 2 team. My students really enjoyed the different activities which we played, so it is now one of my digital web app tools which I use for review.
Blooket has so many different games and activities which you can assign students to play either as a whole group or as individual work. The best part is that you only have to create one set of questions, and then you can choose which activities you want to do with those questions.
I will usually do 2-3 different activities in a classroom lesson.
Racing
Usually, I will first start out with Racing, which is simply students answering questions, and if they answer correctly, they can move forward one space in the race course. The more quickly one answers questions correctly, the faster one will move across the screen. However, as you answer questions, you gain chances for random rewards, which can move players up a space, players can choose to move leaders back a space, and players can shield themselves from attacks. I like doing this activity first, because it exposes students to the questions in a quick 4-5 minute game. This will prepare them for the longer game which we will play next (I learned this from Rachel too).
Gold Quest
This is a really fun game to play for about 7-9 minutes! I tell students that they will either love this game or absolutely hate it, because it is all based on chance and just because one may know all of the answers, it does not mean that person will necessarily win.
The premise is very simple: players will answer a question and if they answer correctly, they can choose from one of three treasure chests. Each of the treasure chests has a different reward or "punishment," e.g., 100 gold pieces, lose 10% of your gold, triple your gold, take 25% of another player's gold, swap gold with another player, etc. Because this is based on chance, no one has an advantage over another in terms of being able to win. It all depends on which treasure chests the players choose.
There was a holiday version of Gold Quest released for December, and that was a lot of fun to play!
Observations
I will usually make about 35-45 questions, which means that students are getting LOTS of repetitions of questions during an activity.
I have found that students enjoy playing Blooket more than GimKit. I think because it does not necessarily cater to the students who know how to "game" GimKit to get to a million points within a minute, so it seems more fair. Also depending on the game, everyone has a fair shot at winning due to the chance factor.
I always play along with students. Just because I know all of the answers (and questions!) does not mean that I will win the game. On the contrary, I usually am the one who ends up doing all of the heavy lifting, only to have my points taken away from me by other players.
Some of the games have rewards such as blurring everyone else's screen so that they cannot read what is on it, putting trees all over the screen, minimzing screens, turning the screen upside down, icing players' moves for 10 seconds. It is a lot of fun!
During this hybrid teaching situation, Blooket has been a godsend!
Although it is "free," there is a limit to how many "blooks" you can create with a free account. For a price, you can upgrade to an unlimited amount of blooks and exclusive features. I suppose you could rewrite existing blooks to make new ones?
A lot of these activities can be assigned as individual homework - great for asynchronous learning days!
Much like GimKit, I will do Blooket every 5-6 weeks in order to preserve the novelty.
Have you used any of the other Blooket activities in your classes such as Cafe or Battle Royale? Let me know how your students liked them.
Just recently, I tried out the new Draw That game on GimKit. In this current hybrid teaching situation of trying to balance in-person and digital students and of me remaining 100% seated behind my desk in front of a screen, so many face-to-face activities which were mainstays of my CI-driven classroom have been pushed aside for another day. Even GimKit has gotten a bit stale with students, so this new drawing game could not have come at a better time!
Essentially, this game is a digital version of Pictionary, where a student draws a picture and in real time, it appears on everyone else's device screens. Meanwhile, the rest of the players guess the word by typing it in their devices
Observations
Students loved this game! Being able to see the picture being drawn in real time is what made the activity so attractive and engaging for students.
The only drawback I found with this was that it requires correct spelling of vocabulary words. For an inflected language like Latin, what form of the word should I pick? For nouns, just the nominative or should I pick a more common form with which students are more familiar from the readings? For verbs, should I pick the infinitive form or a particular form (tense, person) which they know better? For example, one of the words which students was guessing was urbs, but a lot of students were guessing urbe instead, since the readings tended to have the phrase in urbe more than urbs.
Students found that when using a phone or tablet, autocorrect would change the spelling of the Latin word to an English word. I will play along with students, and when I typed in the word misit, autocorrect changed it to moist.
Because students knew that they could be called on next to draw, they had to pay attention and to be part of the game at all times!
Now from a CI perspective, I prefer the Charlala Draw Room because I can have students illustrate full sentences instead of individual words and then they can choose which sentence they believe the picture is depicting.
After we played it last week, a number of my Zoom students (who are normally very quiet) wrote in chat, "That was so much fun! Can we play it again?" As much as I love hearing that, my pat answer whenever I hear that is, "Yep...in 5-6 weeks (in order to preserve the novelty)."
Here is another fun movie talk which I had done 4-5 years ago and had completely forgotten about but just recently found it in my Google Drive. It is called Car Park (this animated short was made in the UK, so a "car park" is what Americans call a "parking lot" - I had to explain that to students. I remember when I said that the movie talk was called "Car Park," a student innocently asked, "Is that like a dog park?"). The animated short is relatively brief but gets in a lot of repetitions. Target words for this movie talk are man, dog, barks/makes a loud noise, car, looks for, finds, through the window, frightens/scares, is frightened/is scared, hides, his (reflexive use of the possessive pronoun).
Here is a fun Movie Talk which I had done many years ago, but I completely forgot about it. Just recently my colleague John Foulk reminded me about it. It is called Ormie the Pig (is he a character somewhere?) and his attempts to steal cookies from a cookie jar on top of a refrigerator. Again, the best movie talks are those with a lot of repetition in it in terms of action, and there is a lot of that here in this animated short. This is a good Movie Talk for words such as cookies, refrigerator, want, steal/take, in order to, on top of.
As it is now a year since I have begun some form of digital teaching, at this point, I feel like I am scraping the barrel for new, novel ways for students to review stories in an online setting. I have been dog paddling for a year with digital teaching, doing everything I can just to keep my head above water, and I am weary. I know that my students are weary too of this weird hybrid teaching situation. Because of this, I am trying to limit the web app tools which we are using in class so that there is familiarity for students in using them and that they do not have to learn a new tool on their own. I feel like I have been milking Google Forms to an extreme, trying to find different ways of using them for assignments and for students to demonstrate comprehension/mastery of material.
My colleague John Foulk came up with a new way for students to review a reading: False Story Sentences. It is actually very simple and is a good way for them to demonstrate understanding and comprehension of a reading. If you are like me, one of the things which I hate about this hybrid teaching is that I really have NO CLUE if students are actually comprehending anything which we are doing. While they may be completing assignments, that does not tell me much per se, other than they completed the assignment. This use of false statements at least forces them to indicate meaning and understanding to me.
Directions
Take 10 sentences from a reading, and change just one word in that sentence. Do not change more than one.
Put those sentences in a Google Form, and put the answer setting as "Paragraph"
Give students a copy of the reading. They will use this to find the correct sentence.
Tell students that they are to figure out what is false in that sentence and then to write what is incorrect and what the sentence should say instead. Why in English? Because this is a comprehension activity. While students could tell me what the correct Latin word should be, e.g., the sentence should say "iratissimus" and not "laetissimus," that does not tell me whether students understood what they were actually reading. Considering that they have the actual reading as a resource, writing down the actual Latin word is nothing more than a copying exercise.
Observations
This definitely was a novel way for students to demonstrate comprehension while truly showing me what students understood and did not understand from the reading.
Since I was able to print up students responses on a spreadsheet, it made grading very easy, because everything was in a grid. I was able to compare student answers against each other and to see where there were common student errors.
This was a new way for me to use Google Forms - euge!!
