The DIESOL podcast
Brent Warner
Developing Innovation in English as a Second or Other Language.
Ixchell Reyes
Episode 75 Flippity tools in ESOL
Brent Warner
Welcome to DIESOL! This is episode 75 We are your hosts. I’m Brent Warner.
Ixchell Reyes
And I’m Ixchell Reyes… episode 75!
Brent Warner
I know it feels kind of landmark, right?
Ixchell Reyes
I know. So 25 Well, we need 25 more.
Brent Warner
On the assumption that 100 is another landmark
Ixchell Reyes
That we still have listeners by 100.
Brent Warner
Yeah, we’ll have we’ll have a if we can get three listeners by the time we get 100. (laughter) We’ve been doing alright.
Ixchell Reyes
People are still December. Yeah,
Brent Warner
people are still listening to the show. So yeah, happy December. You saw last time you said you were gonna go to New York. How’d that go?
Ixchell Reyes
I did not go to New York. So there you go. Instead, I Yep. Went to Rhode Island explored it. It was interesting. I love visiting historical places. And there are so many plantations there are I mean, the the name itself was Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. It has a longest name and all of the states. And also it has the shortest state model. You know, their state motto is
Brent Warner
C’mere!.
Ixchell Reyes
Hope!
Brent Warner
Oh, Hope! Good. Oh.
Ixchell Reyes
So that’s cool. And then. Yeah, so HP Lovecraft is buried there and…
Brent Warner
Why do I feel like Rhode Island has to have all of these like special little trivia facts about it?
Ixchell Reyes
Guess what, the first thing I did was? I drove up to the real house from the Conjuring that that inspired the conjuring series.
Brent Warner
Oh, yeah. You’re doing stuff that I would have done like HP Lovecraft, horror. Yeah. It’s like
Ixchell Reyes
from the 1600s. Yeah, it was awesome. And it was cold. And it was like the perfect place. Like if, if you needed to go find a dead body. I’d probably be there because there’s a lot of trees and like,
Brent Warner
do you think any phantasms like latched on to you and followed you back home to Texas?
Ixchell Reyes
I did make some spirit friends. (laughter)
Brent Warner
I’ll let you save that story for another day, I suppose. Yeah.
Ixchell Reyes
How was your Thanksgiving?
Brent Warner
It was all right. It was kind of quiet. So yeah, we we spent a little time with my dad. And yeah, overall, you know, it’s one of those times where you’re like, oh, yeah, these these four day weekends are pretty sweet.
Ixchell Reyes
And I, this is a I didn’t – last year, I didn’t spend it with my family because I was overseas. And this year, I also I didn’t want the rush of having to juggle different family events, and I just needed time.
Brent Warner
Yeah, it happens. So we all need a little bit more time. And here’s we’re settling into December and the end of the year, can relax a little bit. Hopefully today’s episode helps get you back a little bit of time, if it helps out. So let’s jump over. Alright, so Ixchell, today, I kind of proposed that we might talk a little bit about not a new tool for a lot of tech teachers, but one that doesn’t get talked about a lot in our field, I don’t think which is Flippity. At Flippity.net. So, yeah,
Ixchell Reyes
I was gonna say like I… so Flippity.net we used during the pandemic, and I was surprised at how many people would look it over, because it’s just a very simple page when you get there. And then you brought it up today. And we went in there to explore more and a lot of there. They’ve added more tools. And they’ve simplified, I think it probably gained a little bit of a new audience with the pandemic. So I think it was it’s a great topic to to explore a little more. Yeah. And you of course you of course you always know about these tools,
Brent Warner
sometimes recently, but yes, I did this one actually. When we had Jon Corippo on the show, we talked I think a little bit about this and and then I had written a blog post that was called The Power emoji power paragraph, a couple of power emoji power paragraph a couple of years ago. So I think before we get into what that is just kind of, for people who don’t know what Flippity is essentially, it is a A website where you can go and get Google Sheets. So then the Google Sheets can be converted into these kind of basic games or activities or other things. So the I think the easiest way for us to think about it for for, you know, TESOL teachers is, let’s start with the conversation around vocabulary. So if you have like vocabulary lists or something like that, you plug them into a spreadsheet, and then it can turn it into all sorts of different games, right? You can, we’ll go through a list of all the different things briefly. And then we’ll kind of jump into a few of them in depth, but I just want to kind of give a sense of it’s like, oh, I don’t have access to a bingo game, or, you know, I have to go sign up and do all this stuff to make a Jeopardy game work. And what it does is it really simplifies that entire process, because it will automatically pull in from a spreadsheet. So if you’ve just got the right things in the cells that you want, then you don’t have to deal with all the formatting and clicking things one at a time and doing all that type of information. So so that’s kind of what Flippity is. Ixchell, what do you like it.
Ixchell Reyes
I like it for the fact that you don’t need to have an LMS or any kind of account, I mean, sure, you’re if you’re going to create a template, you you’ll use a Google account, because it’s going to be using Google Sheets. But if we needed something quick and dirty, you could just head to the page and and enter your information or whatever data you’re looking at, and then it’ll, it’ll just convert it into that activity. And recently, one of my colleagues was looking for a Jeopardy template. And she didn’t want to have to build one on PowerPoint. And so this again, this would just automatically get rid of that, because the code is already there. And you just have to enter your information. Yeah, I also like that there within the tools, there are some that can be used as gap fillers. So if you’ve got those 10 minutes at the end of class, that you need to do some kind of quick and formal assessment, or you want to, at the beginning, do some kind of warm up, you could use some of these in combination with others, they’re all on one page, you could even have students, if you have student leaders, for group leaders, depending on how your setup is, I know that not all all onto one devices. So if you, you could have a class leader who’s going in and typing something in for everybody to see. So it’s it’s a lot, it’s very student friendly, and teacher friendly, too. Because I know that when sometimes when I tried to explain, Well, you could build this on, on sheets or on Excel, if you’re using you know, the Microsoft suite, people get scared of all of the coding and the different functions. And so this is just, it’s there, it’s easy, it’s it’s pretty quick setup.
Brent Warner
Yeah, I’d even say that if you’re the type of person who’s kind of afraid of spreadsheets, or like, I don’t know, all that math in the formulas, this is actually a pretty good way to kind of dip your toes into it a little bit. Because really all you’re doing is, you know, typing letters into a cell or, you know, possibly making a link to an image or something like that. But it’s it’s very low barrier to entry. Obviously, when you look at a spreadsheet, it’s like, okay, all these, all these overwhelming can be overwhelming. Yeah, and you start looking at it, but but I think the way that they set it up, and they give you these template, spreadsheets, if you wanted to follow along with what they’re doing, and just kind of make your own version. I will say that it is a much lower barrier to entry for teachers who think that they’re not techie. But it’s actually fairly straightforward. And really well organized once you get into those fundamental spreadsheets. And I
Ixchell Reyes
think, Brent, I think it’s worth mentioning that if we have listeners overseas, where you may be somewhere where you don’t have access to, to a lot of into an LMS or anything like that. This is again, this is a great place to start if you want to have a little bit of even gamification to what you’re doing in the class. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean that it stops there. Because I think you’ve you can probably talk about how to how to customize or where else we can go with these.
Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. So we’ll we’ll get into some of that, as we talk through some, just a couple of quick hints before we really talk about some of these specific tools. Number one, I do I do recommend that you might look at these tools on on the website on Flippity dotnet. And go oh, well, I don’t really see how that works, right. So I’m not I’m not going to use that at first glance. And so sometimes, it’s worth going into the spreadsheet itself. And you can see how customizable it is. Right? And so we’ll talk about this a little bit with some of these. But for example, for example, if you’re doing the timeline tool, right, you it’s kind of set up to do it by year, but you could set it up with all sorts of have different things that you’re, you know, that you’re going to have your students play around with. So they might do things that are not necessarily a timeline, but something sequential, right. So you could be playing around with like cardinal numbers and sequential ordering and say things like first, second, third, instead of 1995, or whatever yours you’re doing. So I just want to point out that you can manipulate the spreadsheet, which would manipulate the game itself, right. And then the second part, some of these are actually easy enough where students can go fill in a Google form, and then you on the back end, could just copy and paste what they put in into their Google form, which turns into a spreadsheet. And you can align that with the Flippity. Spreadsheet, right? So so you could actually have students create a lot of the content for whatever activity you’re doing, by having them fill out a Google form. And then you just plug that right into your interactive activity. So that then it’s all based on student built content instead of maybe yours. So there’s a few ways to play around with this. Lots of things to get into, but Ixchell, before we even start, we just need to go through a quick list of all of the tools, very brief as very briefly as we can.
Ixchell Reyes
Because there’s 28 of them.
Brent Warner
That’s a lot. Yeah, it’s a lot to explore. So let’s, let’s just quickly go back and forth. Okay, so first up is flashcards. That’s what it means.
Ixchell Reyes
Then we have flex cards. Yeah,
Brent Warner
we have a quiz show. So that’s kind of a Jeopardy equivalent,
Ixchell Reyes
a random name picker, self explanatory.
Brent Warner
And a randomizer, which we’ll talk about more in depth. So that’s like gives lots of different, you know, spinning wheels at the same time, or that that will pick out resources.
Ixchell Reyes
Virtual breakout, which I’ll explain later,
Brent Warner
you can do a you can build a board game right into it.
Ixchell Reyes
There’s something fascinating called manipulatives.
Brent Warner
And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. They’re kind of your standard. So if you’re building with some lower level students, possibly you can do a matching game so you can put in those pictures and you know, flip cards like like that.
Ixchell Reyes
There’s a Kinect though game, which is Kinect for type template.
Brent Warner
There’s also a bingo game. So very straightforward.
Ixchell Reyes
Timeline, which Brent mentioned a little bit.
Brent Warner
There’s also a badge tracker. So if you wanted to make customized badges for your class, without going into a whole badging system, you could do that.
Ixchell Reyes
And for keeping track of of different things, you have a leaderboard.
Brent Warner
You also have a typing test. So depending on the on the digital skills you’re working on that might be useful.
Ixchell Reyes
spelling words.
Brent Warner
Got a couple of traditional ones. So we’ve got a word search, and a crossword puzzle, and word scrambles. So that’s the ones that are it’s just gives you the letters and you have to rearrange them into the name of the right word.
Ixchell Reyes
And then you have the better named snowman game, which I think is a updated version of hangman the traditional and outdated hang.
Brent Warner
Yeah, there’s one called Word master. That’s kind of like a wordle type of game.
Ixchell Reyes
There’s a progress indicator.
Brent Warner
There’s also a traditional word cloud option.
Ixchell Reyes
There’s fun with fonts. Yeah. Different types of fonts. Hopefully not Comic Sans.
Brent Warner
No, no, what it does that one, we’re not going to talk about it very much. But you know, it’ll put in it’ll put in whatever you type in like a block font, or like, like kids toys, blocks or images that kind of become the fonts. There’s also a Mad Libs activity,
Ixchell Reyes
a tournament bracket, a certificate quiz, and a self assessment.
Brent Warner
All right, so we cannot talk about all of these, Ixchell, I feel a little bad because we might skip over some of these just kind of in breaking them down. But we are going to encourage everyone to go in and look and of course, if you’re already using some of these, come leave us some comments on the show notes about how you might use them. If you want to share an add a little bit of information, we would love to see because we’re going to talk about you know, you know, maybe eight or eight or 10 or something of these as we go on, but I don’t think we’re gonna really get into the full depth that all of these could value from. So Ixchell, let’s get a couple in here. You want to start?
Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, I think flex cards I think flex cards is the one that I didn’t have before during the pandemic and if they did, I skipped over it because flex cards is I guess they’re like they’re like flashcards but there are 10 You describe them as a 10 sided flashcard.
Brent Warner
That’s right on the website. Oh,
Ixchell Reyes
I skipped over that. So each flashcard has a topic. And then you can have subtopics or other areas that are covered. So let’s say you were doing landmarks you could have, then the next side of the flashcard would be people born there. And then you could have like, I don’t know, things that are grown there. You could also have former names of the place. And so again, 10 different facts or areas to to explore. So flex cards. are they’re not as linear as what PowerPoint would be, or, or Oh, my gosh, I’m blanking out on the Google Suite. Google’s How can I slides? Slides? Slides? Oh, my gosh, slides. Yeah. So it’s like, it’s pretty cool.
Brent Warner
It is cool. Because basically, the 10 sided flashcards so you can kind of imagine, almost like you have a bunch of, you know, three by five flashcards taped together almost in a circle. And you’re just kind of twisting it to look at a different thing for each one, right. But then when you move to the next card, you can have those same categories. So it’s kind of like columns and rows, but it’s pulling all of these things. And same thing, too, is like you can put in videos, so you could put in YouTube videos in here. So if you’re doing those landmarks, you might find like, you know, a first timers guide to the Washington Monument, enter, you know, like something like YouTube, right. And so I think that that would be a really cool and a good way to, it’s almost you could turn it into like a graphic organizer for students. Or you’re doing for this part, right? Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of cool things that you can play with. And then again, putting the impetus of the work back on the students to create and share information, and then you all have a collective big group of of different flashcards that can teach you things. One thing I was thinking about, Ixchell, as you were showing that and talking about it was like character analysis of a novel novel, right? And so you can assign different groups of students, different characters, and then as they’re going through, they’re filling out the information week by week about like, Oh, what are we seeing? You know, what’s their personality? Like, okay, how are they changing after the big event? Okay, maybe draw a picture and upload it? And what does that character maybe look like in your head or something like that, right. So you could do all sorts of interesting things there.
Ixchell Reyes
What have you got?
Brent Warner
So next up mine is I’ll start with the randomizer. Because that was the big blog post that I did a couple of years ago for the power motor power paragraph. So basically, what the randomizer does is you can choose, you can choose the spinning wheel, right, but the randomizer can really let you do these whole columns, and rows of different content. So if you think of a random name picker, as you think of the spinning wheel, right, where it just picks one choice, this will have different categories. And so you could have, you know, like a, the one that they have on their demo version is like they have a who column or what Column A when column and aware column. And then you can have a bunch of different content inside of those. So when they spin the wheel, and I kind of think of this for those of you who are in, in the states, if you’re thinking of, you know, like, what does that game while I’m at the categories, oh, the price is right, the price is right, when you Oh, yes, giant wheel to choose their number. So it’s kind of like those with like, four of them right next to each other, and then it’s like, okay, then all four of those will be combined to turn into something, right. So what you can do is you can put in emoji as your choices there, right. And so then when the, when a student comes up and spins, then they’re gonna get, you know, four different emojis in a row or five different emojis in a row or something like that. And they’ll be able to that you could do like the storytelling thing, right? So they have to make a story out of those four that have showed up. Like I said, there are no prompts, right? Yeah, yeah, you could do all sorts of interesting prompts. And you could kind of say, like, Okay, some of them, they don’t, you can also mix and match, right? So it doesn’t all have to be emoji, you could do like, hey, some of these are going to be like concepts, and then some of these are going to be, you know, concrete ideas, and you’re going to show us how you’re going to mix these ideas together, etc. So there’s lots of ways to possibly play around with it, right? You might say like, you might have tried to build a sentence and then have students figure out like, hey, what might be missing in the sentence or what might be wrong. So you could put it in like, you can have, you know, like, sub Subject, verb object, right? But your maybe your verbs are all in the dictionary form. And you’re asking students to then turn these sentences into a different verb form for the sentence, right? So, simple ways to play or more complex ways, I think there’s a lot of things to play around with with that randomizer.
Ixchell Reyes
Another one that they don’t believe they had before that it’s, I just want to try out right away is a virtual breakout, which is like a, like a digital or virtual breakout room. And they’ve got locks. So there are seven locks. And I think you can customize how many options or maybe but either way, you can customize what’s what questions are asked in order to break the lock open. And I can just imagine this would be so much fun to have with, with small, either pairs or groups where they’re solving a puzzle. And it could be like, Okay, take a look at this video clip from YouTube. Here, here’s a quote who said, that famous goal, and then you, whatever their answer is, they type in the answer, they unlock it, they go on to the next room, sort over the next lock that they have to break. And you can, there’s a lot of ways you can have just a really simple version of this, or you can customize. So if you want students to answer in sequential order and lead up to a bigger, you know, the last question, you can do that, or there’s so much so many things you can do. So I can already, you know, already think of ways for them to just activities, too, that they could do together.
Brent Warner
Yeah, so for sure. And one of the things like, I know that a lot of people were into the breakout things. And then I mean, frankly speaking, I think a lot of people kind of got paywalled out of Breakout EDU, it’s expensive, it costs money, and usually cost teachers their own money. And so this is a thing that you can do, you know, like for free and have your own digital version of it.
Ixchell Reyes
And then I think that as as teachers are playing around with some of these tools, though, you’re doing it on Flippity dotnet, it could easily transfer to something that you’re doing physically with the students later with just paper. So some sometimes you get the idea for like, Oh, hey, I tried it out, virtually, I didn’t have to create all this paper stuff. But now I realize how well it works. And I want a more hands on version of this. So now I can actually so it’s like, you can demo things on with it. And I could see that without having to spend all that money.
Brent Warner
I love that, like that’s this, that’s a great way because you know, you might end up okay, well, then I’m gonna go buy the cardstock. And I’m gonna, are they really gonna want to play this? Yeah, like all that stuff?
Ixchell Reyes
Maybe we really want to Yeah, you really want to get into it. And I feel like oh, my gosh, if you had, after you’ve been, you know, trying it around a few times you, you can say, Oh, I could see that. We could do this as a midterm activity that we always do. And it’s like the lead up to it. And now you can have the demo versions online. And then you have like the one that you have in class. So I could just see myself having a lot of fun with a breakout room or a virtual breakout.
Brent Warner
Oh, yeah, for sure. Okay, so next up, maybe before we take a quick break, I’m gonna do this last one, which is the connector, which is kind of a Kinect for type or Tic Tac Toe type game, right? The reason that I chose this one is because it, you know, obviously just like dropping, dropping tokens into a slot doesn’t really do anything, but the way that this game works is very simple question answer, right. And so you can project it on the screen. And you can have people be on different teams, or whatever it is, you could have, you know, Team A or the, you know, the black tokens and the red tokens or whatever. But, but I like that it’s kind of simple and straightforward. So in the spreadsheet, you just have questions on one in column A and answers and column B. And then it’s going to pull from that. And so what you can do is project this in front of the whole class, it’ll bring up a question, right? Whatever that question is, and then the student has to answer it correctly. But they can they would have chosen, hey, I want this, you know, I want the, the they’re done by columns and rows. So column A and row six, for example, right, all the way down at the bottom, and they’re going to choose one that’s available to them, the question will show up, they’ll have a chance to answer. So really, I mean, very, very straightforward question and answer, you know, repeat and review with the class, but a quick slightly different version of the game where they can play a tic tac toe thing and line themselves up. And so you can play around with all sorts of different little ways to manipulate that you can put an audio into some of these you can put it in you know, videos as you know prompts to get them going with ideas. So there’s a lot of fun things. And of course, you can just have a simple straight text prompt as well
Ixchell Reyes
as see units will go crazy for this kind of competition just for the to earn the chance to possibly block their other the other teams from creating the Kinect for whatever it is, is they will
Brent Warner
Yeah, for sure. And I wonder I have to play with a little bit more, I think you could even go back in and have maybe more than two teams possibly. So different colors, yeah, possibly with different colors. And that would get real hard, real fast. I don’t know if students could actually get themselves to pass each other. But maybe you could do like a different version where you said, Hey, if you if you make a connection on two sides, so it’s kind of off that low style, right? You could say, Hey, if you make a connection, yes,
Ixchell Reyes
you can turn the whole thing. Yeah.
Brent Warner
So that could be a possibility, too. I’m not sure you’d have to play around with it and see if that would work. But
Ixchell Reyes
again, it’s a it’s like a year to try it out online before you build something.
Brent Warner
Oh, yeah, that’s great. There’s a ton of fun little fun things that you can do so. So those might be a few things to play with.
Brent Warner
All right. So as always, we appreciate you guys listening to the show, we know that some people reached out to talk about it, training help, conversations like those. So if you’re interested, if you if you’re interested in having either me or a shoulder, both of us help you develop a some better ways to interact with your students or some training for your teachers. You can reach, reach out and talk to us if you are so inclined. We’re both busy. So we kind of keep that limited. But we do want to help people out who want it so. So reach out, you can find us both. We’re still on the socials. kind of I guess that’s a harder conversation. You can find us on DIESOL.org I
Ixchell Reyes
guess that’s the easiest find us. Yeah,
Brent Warner
we’re findable. If you can find the show, you can find us. So yeah, we’d love to help you out if, if it’s something you’re looking for.
Ixchell Reyes
Alright, another one of the tools that grabbed my attention was a typing test. And in the past, I’ve used typing.org, because it’s so well built, but because all good apps go, they went the way of there’s a paid version. And the free version just has way too many. It’s too complicated. Now for the quick, you know, I want my students to have a quick experience at typing with an English setup. And so often, I don’t want to have to log in every time and have a whole class etc. So typing tests is a very quick way to have warm ups and they can type different paragraphs, there’s different topics they can choose. And again, they don’t need a an account. And I I think you can customize what they what they’re typing. So let’s say if you want to, for example, my students who needed to take the TOEFL needed to be able to type academic words in a fast, they needed to increase their speed. So they but I couldn’t have them typing elementary school type paragraphs, they needed to be able to type higher level. So this is something that I would use for them. So it’s just you know, it’s it’s easy to
Brent Warner
super straightforward. Gets them some typing practice a little bit of digital literacy. I liked that one. I didn’t I kind of this is one of those ones that I kind of blew, you know, blew over. And I was like, yeah, maybe I wouldn’t use it. But actually, now as I jump, jump into the demo version, and look at it, I can, I can see where you would absolutely want to use it.
Ixchell Reyes
And I tend to use these kinds of things as again, as it’s, it’s not really a gap filler for me, it’s more of like, alright, as I’m getting set up in the classroom, or you’re coming in spend 10 minutes, as I’m calling attendance and getting set up doing typing warm ups. Yeah. You know,
Brent Warner
you can also tie this to other ones to each other. Because what it does when you’re writing in there, it says it gives you time remaining. So how long it would take you to do the thing, your typing speed, your accuracy and your adjusted speed. Right. And so right, so I could see maybe someone putting that into something like the leaderboards and kind of then we’re okay, we’re comparing how each other with with accuracy or how fast you’re going or Yeah,
Ixchell Reyes
or yourself really, if you’re if you’re trying to see Yesterday, you were at this today, you’re at this number. And you could see how Okay, today you were tired. So this is how you did on a tired day, which is why you need to take a break before you take your TOEFL exam and take a you know, don’t practice the day before because you know that you get students who think like, if I just do 30 minutes of typing, I’ll improve. No, you actually need to rest. Right, right.
Brent Warner
So I’ll talk about so in connection to that. There’s also one of the ones called the badge tracker, which is kind of like a custom to Custom badging, right. And so there are these really great tools, all these badging tools that are really wonderful badger, etc. But but the problem with them is there’s kind of a big learning curve on those, right. And so what I do like about the badge tracker in here is one, you can make your own badges pretty easily and upload the images to them. But then in the spreadsheet, basically, you end up with like a list of all the students names, and then the the badge categories that they might have earned or not. And then on top of that, you can put a little star next to it. So they can kind of get like, Hey, I got the badge. Or you can kind of upgrade it to like star one, one star with an A star with two stars with three stars. And so that’s like mastery.
Ixchell Reyes
So if you reached your 100 words per minute on typing test, you could have the one badge, but then if you did it twice that week, you could have the one with the one star and then if you did done it consistently, you could have even more says that’s cool,
Brent Warner
right? Right, or, and you can also work at the other way around, too. So I was thinking maybe like, something like attendance, right? Everybody starts off with full badges, right with with three stars or whatever it is. And then you say, Well, hey, every time you’re absent, you lose a star. And so they only see for themselves where they are with,
Ixchell Reyes
with the unitive.
Brent Warner
Yeah, so there’s some ways to play around with that. And then again, like how you’re linking these different ideas together, you can kind of see, okay, part one to this. And then part two. And we haven’t mentioned this, Ixchell, but all of these are pretty quick like to share out. So there’s, there’s always a button on the bottom of the page where you can just get a quick link and share it out or QR or, you know, drop it into your if you have your LMS announcements or if you have a shared chat, you know, back channel chat feature that you’re using, there’s lots of ways to play around with it.
Ixchell Reyes
All right, so the next one, you mentioned the leaderboard. So there’s different the the leaderboard, the batch tracker, and then the one I like is the progress indicator. I know that several LMS is will have something like I know Kahoot and Socrative are Socrative. I forget how they pronounce it. They have leaderboards built in when you’re playing games, but this is something that you could use for and customize for many things. So if you’re one of those schools that asks students to keep track of how many pages they’ve read, that’s a place where you could see, but you can customize it. So it could be like Okay, so this week, we were focused on this vocabulary. Let’s see how we’re doing when we’re doing our review in the morning, how well did we do? And you could do it individually? You could do it by teams, you could even do? How are you feeling today? What are they called the scales, mood charts? How you did throughout the day? How how well, how confident are you, you can use images? So again, a lot of stuff you can customize with it. What else might you do with the the progress indicator?
Brent Warner
Um, yeah,
Ixchell Reyes
I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s just a visual way of of, I guess I would pop it up to see how we’re doing throughout the class and gauge how the class is doing just as a way to indicate whether you need to be more fully focused, or I mean, there’s multiple ways of using it. I just,
Brent Warner
yeah, so you could do things to like, I’m thinking Mark
Ixchell Reyes
tracker that? How many times yeah, homework tracking,
Brent Warner
overall score tracking. So like, let’s say, let’s say for example, you’ve got 25 students, and you’ve got an assignment that’s worth up to four points, right? Then the, then you can say, hey, out of 100 points, where does our whole class fit in with these assignments? Right? And so you could say, oh, we, you know, collectively we’re, it would just be a visual indicator with a bar. Right. But it’s a nice way to kind of capture the attention to so. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of kind of fun ways to, to just kind of, you know, sometimes it’s just a question of mixing up the visuals in the class, right? Or mixing ways that students aren’t, or personally, you know, if you just say, hey, as a class, we, you know, we got we all got, you know, 78 like, is that what you like or not, and they’re like, Okay, whatever, but then when they see that bar, and the little gray space, that’s like, okay, there’s still 22 more that we could have gotten, right. So yeah, so there’s ways to kind of play with that. Okay, cool. So the next one up Ixchell, is for me is the manipulatives one. This one is kind of the fridge magnets, I guess is the easiest way to describe it. I know a lot of teachers who have done these activities on Google Slides, right? So they make a little text box or they make a little box and they do the background color. And then they write their tablet or pad or whatever. And so they kind of prep everything with one word at a time. And then they spread those all out to the side of the day. document and then they’re like, Okay, now let all the students come in and use it right? Well, the cool thing about this one is, you just, all you need to do is cut and paste the list of the words that you want right into, you don’t even have to go into the spreadsheet for this one, they just do it on the back end of Flippity. And so you just cut and paste the list of words. And then it makes a document for you, that students can all log into and start moving those little, you know, words or pictures around. So you can do pictures, you can do videos, if you wanted to, et cetera. And then the other part too, is that you can, they have some background choices. So you can have different columns. So if you had kind of column one, column two, column three, column four, and then a goal or a purpose for each of those columns. So maybe you would say, you know, if you’re doing word forms, for example, you might say, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and then the students would then be responsible for moving the columns into the earth, the words into the right columns, obviously, that’s the very easiest of examples, right? But if you did things like videos, maybe you could say like, Hey, after we watched this video, if we’re talking about themes and books, which theme Do you think that this, this video is helping us to understand? All right, and so then they could move the actual YouTube video, like a little version of it over into the column or the Venn diagram, or however you have it set up?
Ixchell Reyes
Very, very cool. I’m thinking right now, for some of the students who I’m just thinking of, of exercises that some of our textbooks have are the sentence scrambles. And sometimes the students just don’t seem to get it when they’re doing it in the book. But because it’s a manipulative, and also your if it’s, let’s say, if you’re using a smartboard, they’re going to be using tactile skills. What is it horizontally, because they’re not, you know, when you write on the on the on the board, you tend to make more spelling mistakes, because you’re using a different part of your brain. So manipulating things up on a board, like on a on a like with magnets, it would actually maybe activate certain mnemonic, it’s like a mnemonic device for students who might need that. And I’m just thinking of like, students who don’t get it and you’ve used the magnets and they didn’t get it, or you’re using a little board with cards, and they’re sitting at their desk, and they don’t get it. But once they come up to the board, and they’re manipulating things, I don’t know if you can envision that. But that’s what popped into my mind right now
Brent Warner
I get what you’re saying. So like, sometimes a student might end up stressing themselves out over the spelling of the word. And that’s not really the goal of the activity, the goal is for them to figure out how the sentence structure works. And so if you’re providing them with properly spelled words, and their job is to then only focus on the structural elements of that sentence, then they’re not going to be distracted by like, am I spelling it? Right, and all the other things that can kind of, you know, essentially different parts of language learning code switching, right.
Ixchell Reyes
Yeah. So that’s another aspect that I thought was is cool. And you don’t have to build anything. It’s already on the website.
Brent Warner
Yeah, definitely.
Ixchell Reyes
Alright, so the other tool that I really liked was the self assessment. And that’s because, again, I like students to to constantly be thinking of their progress, and see how they’re doing. So this gives you a quick way to add some questions. And it’s a it’s like a multiple choice test, but it’s just, like, even like an exit ticket. I would use the self assessment as an exit ticket. And that’s all it is. Yeah, yeah. You can sample.
Brent Warner
Yeah. And a lot of these, that’s the beauty of a lot of these is that they’re all They’re all so quick and
Ixchell Reyes
simple. Yeah, you don’t have to go into an LMS and open up the their Quiz Builder and type in the box. It’s just one page. You put it there. It’s done. Yeah.
Brent Warner
And then you can just keep it in your drive or whatever to so. Last one that I want to share is the Mad Libs one, which is cool. So Mad Libs. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s kind of cool. So what you can do is you can actually build several different Mad Libs all into one activity. And then students can choose which one they’re going to do. But you write out in a single cell, you just write out whatever the quick story your the paragraph is. And then you leave the blanks inside of there. With the you put it into brackets. I mean, there’s just easy descriptions and all of these are like a half page read to figure out how to use them. But the thing I kind of liked about this one, you can always do the fun Mad Libs, of course with students and right like and just say like we’re working on word forms. We’re working on trying to understand these things. But I was also thinking you can use them in more advanced ways. So for example, if you’re writing kind of a traditional college essay and you’re writing a thesis statement, right? You might leave the the claims of the thesis statement, like what each body paragraph is supposed to be about in blanks, right? So you might say something like, you know, after having read the body paragraphs, you can set it up. And then they could see, like, you know, the dumb example that I always give in classes to keep it easy is McDonald’s is the best restaurant because A, B and C, right? And then A is it’s, it’s cheap. B is it’s convenient. And see, it’s delicious, right? And don’t worry to all of you McDonald’s haters. It’s not a serious, you know, activity. But, but that could be a way for students to start to see, for example, how to do some structural elements in their writing as well. Or you could do like parallelism, right? So you could, you could kind of play around with different ways to use Mad Libs, as ways to explain, you know, writing styles or composition structures, or different things like that as well. So, again, easy to do easy to set up a couple of clicks, and then you’d be done. The biggest time is just thinking of like what that content is, but not some very quick on the turnaround for something for students to work with. Very cool. So that’s quite a lot of things. There’s a lot more to look at. And again, as we mentioned before, we absolutely want you to share, you know, especially your creative uses of some of these, like, we understand the basic uses, and then we kind of want to start playing Okay, well, what are some ways I can think creatively? What are some ways that I can, I can kind of switch this up and make it into a customized thing for my students. So if you have any ideas out there, if you’re using things in here and you want to share, please reach out, leave us a message, especially on the show notes. DIESOL.org/75, and we would love to hear from you.
Ixchell Reyes
All right, it is time for our fun finds. And a colleague of mine, another supervisor. Let me a book called The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. And it’s I believe, it’s the same guy who wrote Who Moved My Cheese. And I think this is an updated version of quick tips on how to manage a team and you know how to give praise when to redirect. And then I think they’re famous for the one minute goals. So it’s an excellent, quick read. Very helpful. A lot of a lot of good advice in there.
Brent Warner
Nice. I should read that for sure. I’m different. Yeah, mine is okay. Mine is Kashi. Have you ever had this cereal?
Ixchell Reyes
Yes, Kashi, yes. healthy, healthy. Yeah, so
Brent Warner
I should probably eat but Kashi is so you know, they’ve got different types of cereals or whatever but the one that I like is this organic cinnamon harvest it’s essentially like a frog a adult flavored frosted mini wheats.
Ixchell Reyes
Oh.
Brent Warner
Less less Cinnamon Toast Crunch because it is. It is the you know, like the shredded wheat little mini square
Ixchell Reyes
Fiber.
Brent Warner
Yeah. But just a light tasting of kind of a little light cinnamon sugary, sweet thing instead of like, with the frosted Mini Wheats, you know, it’s just like a big old glob of sugar on top of the square. Yeah. And so. So yeah, I was walking by the store. I found it one time. And I’m like, Oh, this actually kind of seems like maybe a better choice. It’s organic. So maybe a little bit healthier. So I’ve been getting it for the last couple of weeks. And if you’re if you still have your childhood tastes for frosted, frosted Mini Wheats, but you want something that’s a little bit more grown up. This might be a good choice.
Ixchell Reyes
You’re boring now Brent (Laughter)
Brent Warner
What is a non boring cereal? Like what’s the
Ixchell Reyes
The regular mini wheats!
Brent Warner
Oh, regular frosted mini wheats?
Ixchell Reyes
Just the regular. Yeah. Frosty? That’s it.
Brent Warner
That’s That’s, Kashi is boring?
Ixchell Reyes
Kashi is pricey.
Brent Warner
It is pricey. Yeah. So I was actually looking at I’m like, like, there’s a little bit much so like, I was like, maybe maybe one week I’ll do coffee in the next week. I’ll go and I’ll kind of trade back and forth on the cost involvement there because I definitely agree with you there.
Ixchell Reyes
All right, we are on all the platforms, including Patreon tag us if you’re leaving us a shout out.
Brent Warner
For the show notes and other episodes, please check out DIESOL.org/75 that’s the number 75 And you can of course listen to us at voice ed Canada. We’re this is these are weird days, right Ixchell, for Twitter and?
Ixchell Reyes
These are weird days. Never did I ever imagine that Twitter might break. That’s how it feels recently but we’re still there. Where can you find us?
Brent Warner
So you can find the show at @DIESOLpod D-I-E-S-O-L pod and you can find me at @BrentGWarner. I’m playing more with the mastodon we talked about that briefly last time but I’m also currently at and this is one of the reasons I one of the things I don’t like about Mastodon is like, I haven’t locked down which server I want to be on, you know, and so, anyways, at the moment, I am at m-s-t-d-n. Oh, sorry, @BrentGWarner@mstdn.social. That’s yeah, so that’s it’s a little longer to say than that.
Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, and I’m still on Twitter, and I’m also on Mastodon and everything else but you can find me at @Ixy_Pixy, that’s I x y underscore p i x y if you find me on Twitter, you’ll find me on the link to everything else.
Brent Warner
Yeah there you go.
Ixchell Reyes
In Swedish thank you is Takk, Takk for tuning in to the DIESOL podcast.
Brent Warner
Takk to everybody!
Flippity.net has long been a favorite amongst techie teachers, and has provided a handy way to turn basic information into interactive games and resources for years. For the uninitiated, or for those who haven’t gone back to check it out, Brent & Ixchell look at a number of ways TESOL Teachers can use Flippity in the ESOL Classroom.
Resources Discussed
Power Emoji Power Paragraph Blog Post
Flippity Tools
- Flashcards
- Flex cards
- Quiz show
- Random name picker
- Randomizer
- Virtual Breakout
- Board game
- Manipulatives
- Matching game
- ConnectO game
- Bingo
- Timeline
- Badge tracker
- Leaderboard
- Typing Test
- Spelling Words
- Word Search
- Crossword Puzzle
- Word Scramble
- Snowman
- Wordmaster
- Progress indicator
- Word Cloud
- Fun with fonts
- Mad Libs
- Tournament Bracket
- Certificate Quiz
- Self Assessment
Fun Finds
- Ixchell –The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
- Brent – Kashi – Organic Cinnamon Harvest