Beatriz Píriz Rico

Spanish MLA

Dundee City Council

Highlights of my British Council

Language Assistantship 2016-17

(1) M-Learning and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): Kahoot!

Trying to do something different, I dared to use Kahoot!

for the first time with S3. It is a free online resource that

allows teachers to create sets of questions and

students join with their own phones. They need them to

select the correct answer from the 4 given. It has been

very useful to introduce new vocabulary as well as to

revise.

Pupils’ reactions when being told to take their mobile

phones to learn were memorable. One kid said It is

the first time we use our mobile phones in class!!

Even ‘reluctant’ learners got engaged in the game, see

this picture – hands to head because he didn’t get the

correct answer!

Once we finished, students asked to play

again. My other school beats the record:

we played the same set of 10 questions up

to 3 times!

“Kahoot! enhances motivation and

engages students in an exciting

competition. They see their names on the

board, for them it’s like being on a show,

and there’s a lot of interactivity. It’s also

good for teachers – we can see pupils’

achievement and engagement”.

Miss Molina, French and Spanish teacher

To find out more about Kahoot! follow this link - https://getkahoot.com/

Aims • Promote oral skills by recording videos speaking in the

L2

• Enhance self-confidence

• Have access to what is known as “World English”

The initial idea

• Videos would be uploaded to a shared blog so that a school in Spain could see us, and vice versa. It would be like having a blog pal!

See the project here: https://exchangeschoolprogram.wordpress.com/

(2)

Challenges

• Explicit parents’ permission for this project was needed as videos had to be uploaded to YouTube and then to the blog. Some Scottish students did not bring in those forms. As a result, their videos could not be uploaded on the blog were sent privately to the Spanish teacher.

Positives

• While some pupils were very shy in front of the camera, others quite enjoyed the experience of recording and watching themselves later on. It was interesting for the Scottish students to see Spanish students speaking in English – they were surprised by their fluency!

How to improve

• More interactivity might be achieved if students did “video messaging” – they ask questions and receive answers from the students in the partner school abroad.