Session 12 (Dec 2) - Flipped Classroom and Designing e-learning lessons

Tonight, it was our honour to have Miss Zoe Chan to be our guest in the lesson. Paul and Zoe shared with us how they conducted 3 flipped lessons in a P4 English class. Although there were only 3 lessons, they needed to prepare lots of materials including lesson plans, videos, quizlet tasks, etc. Nevertheless, I think they presented a good example for us to think about how productive and interesting English lessons can be. And I am sure the students were really engaged in the 3 lessons.

I was inspired by Zoe's English class blog that I also created one for my P4 class in November. Although there are not many posts in the blog, the students were interested in it and wrote down the link of the blog when I showed the blog to them during the lesson. If you are interested in my class blog, just go to www.ktpsp41617.blogspot.hk. Now, I mainly use it to keep learning materials (e.g. Quizlet task for vocabulary learning, recording for dictation revision and some grammar explanations) of a chapter. Later, I may ask them to share their work by giving comment to a post.

At the second part of the lesson, we were introduced Nearpod which is a useful tool for giving presentations. Actually, I have been using it in English lessons in the past two months. I should say it is an interactive powerpoint without the animation function. In Nearpod, students can vote, do a quiz and use 'Draw it' function to do different kinds of tasks. I normally ask students to use this function to fill in the blanks so that students can still write something on a tablet instead of typing the words. The Nearpod presentation below is the one I will use later in lessons.



(If you are asked to enter a valid code in order to join the lesson, just try to use the link below:)
https://share.nearpod.com/vsph/2uOP1JH7Ty

Some useful tips for making Nearpod lesson:
Instead of add slides when creating a lesson, there is another way that I think more time can be saved. Hong Kong teachers are very busy and we usually use and edit the materials provided by the publisher, if not making a completely new one ourselves. PPT is a convenient way to conduct grammar teaching. In fact, we can simply edit the PPT slides from the textbook and use them to make a Nearpod lesson.

1. Edit the PPT from the publisher.
2. Save the PPT as individual JPEG files, i.e. one JPEG for one slide (This should be the final version that you want to present to your students.)
3. When creating a new Nearpod lesson, drag all the JPEG files into space as shown below.

4. When asked, create separate slides, not a slide show.

5. This is what should appear. Just add slides for different activities. Done! (Remember, if you want to make any changes, you need to edit the slide in the original PPT. Then save that particular slide as a JPEG and upload it again.)