Asynchronous learning platforms have given teachers the opportunity to upload and exploit a great deal of interactive tasks they have either created themselves or found on the internet. Greek public school teachers have been encouraged to use either E-class or E-me, in order to provide asynchronous education to their learners. Although all of us, ESL teachers, upload a number of tasks almost on a daily basis for all of the learners of one or even two schools, we actually fail to have easy access to significant statistics of each task, such as how many learners have seen it and who has actually completed it – especially in E-class.
Although there is a variety of web tools at our disposal, only few of them can actually help to this end in their free of charge versions. We have the opportunity to create quizzes and online horse-riding games, memory cards and hangman tasks, crossword puzzles and wheels of fortune, but how do we know how many and which learners have actually dealt with anything we have uploaded in E-class? The two web tools I have been using because they are free, allow me to check homework providing instant feedback and are highly appealing to my learners for their ease to use and variety of activities are LiveWorksheets and LearningApps. If you are looking for fun ways to integrate and check spelling and vocabulary development in asynchronous learning, these are the tools that you will probably select once you familiarize yourselves with them!
Liveworksheets is an exquisite web tool that allows us to transform any pdf file into an interactive worksheet. Once we upload the pdf file, there are very short and clear instructions on how to create a number of activities here and all we have to do is share the link with our learners. If you use E-class, like me, you can upload the links there, give clear instructions to your learners on what to do after they click on “Finish” and receive the corrected version of their worksheet in your app inbox. What is more, your learners get the graded version of their work as soon as they send it to you, so you do not need extra time for feedback, unless you feel you need to further guide your learner!
Although LearningApps is the second tool I am going to present, it comes first in my heart and preference, as it is very easy to use and it can be embedded in eclass in a way that allows us to check our learners’ progress within the eclass, without switching platforms! I am very grateful to the colleagues I met in B2 level ICT training in spring 2020, as they shared with us their justifiable enthusiasm for the potentials of this tool, and Ms. Despoina Mavrovounioti, Education Coordinator for English Language Teachers in Sterea Ellada, for giving me the opportunity to present how I have been using it to my colleagues in December 2020.
The actual presentation of this day can also be accessed here, but there is also a video I have recently made to help anyone interested in embedding LearningApps activities in eclass in a way that allows us to check our learners’ participation! The video is in Greek and it includes step-by-step instructions. Should you need further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me for more details!
Here is a small sample of activities that I have created in either LiveWorksheets or LearningApps and embedded in eclass for spelling and vocabulary development:
4th Grade – Unit 6 – Animal Sounds
4th Grade – Unit 5 – Lesson 2 – British Customs
Magic Book 2 – Unit 3 – Lesson 2
6th Grade – Unit 4 – Part of the airplane
5th Grade – A Day in my Life – Useful Guidelines
5th Grade – Unit 2 – Adverbs of Frequency