Use a Portfolio in your Next Job Interview

Lowell Sanborn

Preparing for job interviews can be stressful. The regret felt after leaving a poor performance haunts. By preparing a portfolio prior to your next interview, you can review your most valuable milestones and present organized support for your claims.

One of the most harrowing situations in career changes occurs when a candidate sits across from an interviewer or a panel of interviewers armed with nothing more than charisma. Right up there with greetings that read “To whom it may concern” this rings hollow and forces undue pressure on a delicate dance of eye contact. Not to say all successful applicants need overwhelm with documentation, but some support is easy and helpful to bring with you.

A few things to consider before your next interview:

• A good resume is a table of contents of sorts for your portfolio. Prove it!

• Every position requires organization

• Similarly to looking put together, presenting a put together portfolio checks boxes

• Interviewers are hoping to trust successful applicants

• Eye contact is tiring

• Speaking about your skills is subject to scrutiny

If these considerations are valid, you gain to benefit from preparing documents in advance. A collection of your work and that packet of documents you will need to actually land the position will show interviewers your skills. Showing interviewers your skills brings the focus of all involved to work and not directly into each others souls. This sharing of notes is more indicative of an actual situation that would occur at work. Something you would like to do…

LinkedIn Answers: Worth your time to read?

Steve Alexander-Larkin

Is LinkedIn a good source of professional development for teachers? Recently, I started receiving emails from LinkedIn called Expert Answers. I’ve been ignoring them for a while but maybe it’s time I didn’t? What can we learn from the crowd at LinkedIn?

Background: Using AI and the LinkedIn Community (probably questions copied from group posts) LinkedIn produces a short blurb called Collaborative Articles with a question and tips for teachers to resolve the question. I got emails about two questions:

How do you avoid burnout as a reflective teacher?

How can you teach English language learners more effectively?

Under the question, in the left sidebar is a short introduction to the question and a series of tips that teachers can use. These tips were probably taken by AI from our group posts, but there remains the possibility the tips came from other websites. There is no attribution to the source of the tips, so their validity can be seen as questionable. On the right side there are responses to the tips from LinkedIn members. At the bottom is a section for further ideas contributed by members. At the very bottom of the page is a section of related articles on the general topic (in our case, teaching), and the usual assortment of learnable skills in buttons. The layout seems focused on readability with a slight touch of style. But is this feature worth your time? Is the AI giving you decent advice? What about the responders- are they of any help? Let’s break down two of their attempts here.

 How do you avoid burnout as a reflective teacher?

In the posting here, the AI breaks down the advice into 5 sections: Define your purpose, Set realistic expectations, Seek feedback and support, Use a variety of tools and methods, and Schedule and prioritize your time. The AI produces a blurb of about a paragraph on the advice listed in the section topic, and members respond to the blurb on the right. I found the advice from the AI to be fairly boilerplate and broad. In the tools section, it wrote “Reflection can be done in many ways, using different tools and methods, such as journals, portfolios, surveys, rubrics, checklists, or video recordings to document and analyze your teaching.” Well, yes, that is true, but collecting that info and analyzing it can be very time-consuming. A pity that the app didn’t mention any specific tools/templates that would be useful in reflective teaching. The respondents to the LinkedIn article didn’t mention any specific tools either, so I can’t quite fault the app for it. It would have been nice to have an example; a “see if this survey would be helpful for you” approach. 

An example of a good AI blurb was in the Define your purpose section. The AI poses some good questions like “How do you want to grow and improve?” that should be answerable by all teachers. Can it be answered by all teachers? That’s a difficult question because teaching in ESL isn’t a climbable pyramid. You can become a head teacher, but you can’t run the department. You can win the top teacher of the year award for your institution but that doesn’t mean you’ll get a raise. The “Practice self-care” was also a good section, but the best advice came from fellow teachers responding to the blurb.

Fundamentally speaking, the blurbs the AI presented were only slightly helpful while the advice from teachers felt more helpful. Keep in mind that not all the respondents were ESL teachers and some of their advice is based on their experience in regular teaching. Overall, I found the article to be slightly helpful.

How can you teach English language learners more effectively?

I found this article to be far more useful and clearer than the first article. The AI produced better examples with much clearer objectives. For example, in the section “Create a supportive environment” it mentions the use of scaffolding, a common yet often overlooked teaching tactic. The other blurbs mention a few things but don’t provide a solid example, but it’s not like we can’t go to Google and type in “graphic organizers for ESL note-taking” to find something on our own. The responses were also a bit more helpful, since the vast majority of respondents are teachers and even a few are ESL teachers. Conan Magruder had a good insight on the topic of cooperative learning and scaffolding, especially how cooperative learning doesn’t help all students. Samrat B also had a good tip on using effective feedback with adult learners.

I think this article shows how AI-generated content can start conversation and be of use. At the very least, it can point you to responses that are far more detailed and specific than the blurbs.

Final verdict

The LinkedIn emails can be helpful if you’re searching for ideas on a problem in your teaching experience, though you’ll find the blurbs to be less helpful than the responses. I found it to be more helpful for teachers with much less experience than me, as well as those with more flexible learning environments and teach their students more than once a week. If you are a LinkedIn member and get these in your mailbox, I suggest you check the title and delete if you don’t think it will be helpful.

Internet Memes in the Classroom

Andrew Aguiar

Presented by Prof. Aguiar

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTXlfeoISOM&ab_channel=WoosongTESOL 

There were many presentations at the Daejeon CC symposium and I decided to take a look at probably the most unique of the listing (as of this writing), Internet Memes in the Classroom. For the not internet-savvy, memes are snippets of communication that frequently use an image plus a short statement to make a point about a topic of interest. Prof. Aguiar covers the dual meanings of the word ‘meme’ but that’s not why we are here. We are here to figure out how to use memes in the classroom. 

In order to bring memes into the classroom, you need to know what tools your students will need to make them. At the very basic, no-tech level, he mentions that you can use printed pictures or parts of a newspaper and allow the students to write or draw on them. For classrooms with access to the internet, he mentions two popular websites, Know your meme and ImgFlip. Around 8:35 in the presentation, he discusses how to use them and how to avoid issues with them, namely NSFW content. Know your meme is a good place for the teacher to start to look up explanations of a particular meme. This will be helpful when deciding on which meme for students to analyze or copy. ImgFlip is easier to work with, has templates, and has an NSFW filter, but be forewarned that it won’t eliminate all edgy content. To be on the safe side, find the memes you want to use at home or wherever you make your lesson plans, store them offline, and show only those you think are appropriate for class. He also mentions that ImgFlip has a section of popular memes that you can use to get ideas or see what is proving popular in the internet stream of consciousness.

He came up with four approaches to using memes in the classroom. You will have to choose the approach that works best for your student audience. Obviously, some approaches will work better for your class than others. 

15:00 Using template to model language

In this approach, you find a meme that follows an easy to understand pattern, explain the pattern to the students, and they make their own memes with the image and pattern you gave them. He mentions this could work for children’s classes or grammar-focused classes. If you’re willing to use ImgFlip with students then they can create the memes themselves without printouts. 

21:00 Using templates to make critiques

In this approach you take something that’s going on in the students’ world and have them make a corresponding meme to express their feelings towards the event you are discussing in class. It’s good for a lesson on critiques. If you are using an online classroom program (Google Classroom) or LMS-style system like Blackboard, he suggests setting up a section where students can share and critique each other’s memes.

25:10 Visual literacy and critical thinking

His idea is to talk about the meme chosen in particular and why it elicits the feelings it does in people. 

You would choose a meme and ask students to analyse it, spotting the hidden biases and messages it is trying to convey. 

29:00 Research based approaches and translingual projects

His final approach involves students finding their own memes and explaining them to the class

Student explanations are to cover the meme origin, meaning, and how to use (comedy, political discussion, witty retort, etc)

Students are to make their own memes from their choices and share with the class

He had a secondary project that would also work well with Adult learners. For this class, students would have to translate and explain memes from their L1 into English, or vice versa. Finally they would have to make their own meme in English or an L1 meme using the English meme pattern. 

The idea in general is for students to use their language skills to make their own memes. 

To end his presentation, he recommended that teachers find new and innovative ways to use memes in the classroom that work best for their situation. After all, memes are a source of inspiration (remember the hanging cat office poster of the 80s?) and perhaps they can inspire our students to use English in more creative ways than filling out worksheets.

Using Technology to Make Listening More Interactive

Using Technology to Make Listening More Interactive

Nicole Shiosaki

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybfa4w-j57A&ab_channel=WoosongTESOL 

There are four strands of English that educators focus on: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Of course, I haven’t forgotten kinesthetics either but in college classrooms, lecturers do not play a lot of Simon Sez. Well, my classroom does with the sports and PE majors, but that’s another story. One particular strand that students have trouble with is listening. 

In a recent presentation, Prof. Nicole Shiosaki took a look at one of the reasons why listening activities have fallen behind the curve and how to improve them in our classrooms. Part of the issue that she encountered with the students was the required listening tests. These tests were almost universally disliked by the students. She heard from them that the listening dialogues were boring (1:15) and the tests were too complicated (1:20). Considering these issues, she wanted to help students perform much better in the class and came up with some new approaches to listening that we get to learn about today.

One of the better approaches to covering listening is to not separate it out as a focal strand in the first place. To do this, teach all of the strands of English together in the same lesson. This approach favors using listening and speaking together, as in a conversation in one example. A teacher can teach a subject of interest (basic science, culture, etc) and deploy listening sources that relate to the subject. My example; in a sports lesson, students listen to a portion of a  baseball inning and note the number of times the word ‘base’ is said. Then the teacher asks them where the hitter hit the ball to, or other ideas to check comprehension. In her research and implementation, she found that students were better motivated and interested in the class with this approach. Furthermore, she stated that teachers liked the multiple strand approach since it was far less time-consuming to make lessons than those of a single strand. Finally, she mentioned that the multiple strand approach can be adapted for student-centered teaching. 

One of the newer trends in teaching involves CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). Listening, particularly listening comprehension can greatly benefit from CALL due to the decentralized model of technology. For example, students can perform CALL listening activities at home for homework or practice. Teachers should note that CALL is more of a broad term. It applies to anything from Educational-focused software, Ted Talks to personal assistance software. She cited several other research papers that praised CALL materials, which especially noted increased motivation and fun activities. One of the reasons behind increased motivation was that students with devices (cell phones, tablets, etc) could get the same listening file the teacher has and play it for themselves at a speed/repetition that they were comfortable with. I wish I had thought of that for my middle school listening activities. My classroom only had the one functional speaker and students could not use their cell phones during instructional time. I was able to replay fast speaking listening files to assist listening comprehension, but I frequently found that students did not want to slow the pacing of the class for repeated listening files. Of course, this frequently led overconfident students to get follow-up questions wrong. In any event, Prof. Shiosaki cites Bingham and Larson’s 2006 work on the need for activities to contain consistency and repetition. Students need to practice skills learned in previous lessons and I interpret that to mean teachers should find listening files and activities that contain elements students will be reasonably familiar with. Also of importance is that CALL activities can be made homework activities very easily. With online classes the norm for the foreseeable future, students can receive listening files and play them at their own pace and complete assignments without much teacher control/guidance. 

One activity she mentioned for a classroom involves “Cut-up comprehension questions”. This is a “Jigsaw” style of listening where students each have a separate section of the listening file and have to piece the entire listening together by talking to their partners. At 7:39 she explains the procedure involving the original file, the file cut into smaller pieces, and a worksheet. Students have to listen to their modified file, answer the comprehension questions in the worksheet section they just listened to, then talk to the other students to get the answers to the other parts of the worksheet because their file doesn’t cover that part of the original listening file. 8:08 describes how to set up the class and whether headphones are necessary. 

Variant 2 is called Order the section (10:25). In this activity, students receive misnumbered audio segments of the original file and have to re-order them properly. It is not too complicated- they have to be split into groups and they have to write a summary of the listening file then read it out loud to the class. At the end of the activity, the teacher will play the original file so students check if they got the order correctly. 

Variant 3 is called Eavesdropping (13:00). To start, the teacher cuts out one speaker entirely by using an editing program’s cutout feature or replacing the speaker’s speech with a sound effect or a blank. In order to do this activity, students need to understand the schema of the listening so they know how to replace the missing parts. Students will write down the missing parts of the conversation. Another group of students has the second part of the conversation file but with the first speaker edited/cut out. They also must guess what the conversation’s missing lines will be and write those lines down. Next, students listen to each other’s lines to see how correct they are. Finally, the original file is played to show students what they got right and the teacher can ask why they made the writing choices they did.

To set up the files for this activity, she used the famous program Audacity, a free audio recording and editing program for Windows, OSX, and Linux. Audacity is not available for Android or App store (at this time), but there are similar programs in the various app stores out there. A download link is in the video at 15:55 and you can see a demonstration of how to make the jigsaw clips from that point in the video.

Another activity Prof. Shiosaki came up with was student-generated comparisons (20:12). In this activity, students with teacher guidance write a script or roleplay that’s related to the lesson. Then record themselves speaking outside of the classroom. These audio or video clips are uploaded to a secure site of some sort (she mentioned Flipgrid), where students listen to the activity and then answer questions on a teacher-generated worksheet. She states that teacher guidance is essential to this activity so students produce content that can be compared or contrasted. She mentioned that one of the benefits was students being able to listen to their own voices. 

The final activity followed the same concept we discussed above. Called Student-generated directions, at 24:25 in the video, the steps are about the same, but a kinesthetic aspect is added. Students write a script in which they give directions to a place (on-campus or otherwise). Other students use the directions to go to the place that the students told them to in the listening file. Finally, students upload a response video showing the location they went to based on the instructions they received. One key thing she mentioned in the instructions is that students have to set a defined start point, and not mention the exact endpoint- only how to get there from the start point.

At 27:00, she explains how Filipgrid works and the need to get student permission to share videos outside of the classroom due to privacy laws. Your region might have different laws so it is wise to consult with your educational institution (provided they are reliable) before attempting. Flipgrid can be connected to Google Classroom if this is your preferred LMS, which makes assigning grades and sharing links a bit easier. If you’re curious about Flipgrid, she included a few examples of lessons on the platform at 30:00. At the end of the video, she noted that the students she taught really enjoyed using Flipgrid. 

In conclusion, I’d like to note that these lessons work well for the online-only classroom. Some like the jigsaw lesson work best in the offline classroom where students can contact each other directly and quickly without interrupting the main classroom. These lessons have certainly given me ideas on how to improve my listening lessons. I’d like to hear from other teachers how they have developed and improved their listening activities, so feel free to leave a comment down below. Together, let’s make our listening activities less of a chore and more exciting! 

Feeling stressed? Can you see the ‘Burnout’ sign flashing in the distance? Do you feel like you’re not really a teacher or a professor? If you are, then you’re in luck because I will explain how to fight both issues, thanks to the guidance of Prof. Sydney Lee. She submitted a video titled “Imposter Syndrome and Teacher Burn-Out amongst Foreign English Instructors in South Korea. If you are not an ELT in South Korea, still continue to read along as you might find much of the advice to be helpful.

To gather data on the subject, Prof. Lee posted a 28-question SurveyMonkey survey on 18 Facebook groups that ESL teachers in Korea frequent. The survey results found that while most teachers are happy with their jobs, the vast majority of those surveyed experience serious difficulties like depression, burnout, and imposter syndrome, along with feeling underappreciated or exposed to toxic work environments. Let’s dig into the numbers.

55% had Imposter Syndrome

60% happy with their job

64% suffer from burnout

58% don’t feel appreciated by employer

43% have moderate stress at work

27% believe these feelings affect their teaching

43% believe these feelings affect their teaching only sometimes.

In her discussion, Prof. Lee noted 5 things about the teaching that we should be aware of.

• Our work as an EFL educator IS important, so feel appreciated for the work we do.

• You can love your job even if you feel burned out or like an imposter.

• Imposter Syndrome and Burnout are real issues. 

• Develop Emotional Intelligence to help pinpoint our feelings and their triggers to help work through them. We can even work on our relationships with people and form support systems. 

• Trying to change the culture or system or your coworkers will not work. It is pointless to feel that you can 

• Be happy with yourself. 

So what can a teacher feeling this way do to get out of the depressive spiral? Prof Lee. recommends a self-care focused approach.

Self-Care Education & Awareness Motivation 

Improve your sleeping and eating habits Develop coping skills Get involved outside work 

Book time for yourself to meditate Talk with friends outside work Take a class in something interesting 

Develop an exercise plan Keep a reflection journal/ seek professional therapy Plan a budget/money management 

Put boundaries between yourself and work Professional development (in ESL or outside the field) Start a new project 

Fundamentally, we have to avoid what noted philosopher Blade said in his first movie about “ice skating uphill” and focus on the things we can change. And we can always change ourselves.

What are some issues that you think lead to burnout? What are some ways that you have learned to overcome or fight depression? Feel free to leave a comment in our form below. We will post comments as they come in.

Don't expect students to show their work. Create bite-sized lesson plans that highlight objectives. Facilitate while performing in the target register. Cut back on teacher-talk and let learners achieve activity outcomes with implicit guidelines.

Maximizing engagement for students can be difficult. Tedious procedures force students to follow rigid guidelines. While helpful, these can force students to produce the bare minimum required to complete activity objectives while avoiding the larger language goals of the assignment. On the other hand, providing too little instruction can force wildly abstract interpretations of the given task and may lead students to focus prominently on a non-essential point of emphasis. In a pandemic environment, the abrupt shift to utilizing online resources seems to have confused procedures employed to contribute in the classroom. While most educators may now be comfortable with their online, digitally enhanced, paperless, and hybrid practices, some lingering procedural opacity seems to have carried over. 

Translation tools are here to stay in the second language classroom for better or worse. The ability of students working from home to translate using their own tools has made students more comfortable than ever with instructions and lexical items. Most of the turn-taking issues and general communicative incompatibility of the online classroom has reduced student's willingness to face ambiguous tasks. While things have gotten easier for teachers to assess in some ways using LMS and other tools, it has created a bureaucratic approach to the expectations of completed activities. Students have always tended to strive to fill-in blanks offered in a worksheet they may be more likely after their time in the dark days of online classes to complete tasks with minimal effort and investment. To the chagrin of teachers working under the assumption that students will always work in good faith, assignments graded as complete/incomplete has offered students a shortcut to that teachers should not overlook nor shy away from.  

Overt instruction is not always helpful

While educators may want to provide overt instruction, it may be more beneficial to have students focus on outcomes generated with their own interpretation. This requires a re-thinking of the way we design our lesson plans. More focus needs to be placed on cultivating a register that enables learners to approach target objectives using their own strategies while still completing the appropriate steps to "show their work" in a sense.  Meta-language filled introductions with detailed rationale are unnecessary and counter-productive. Presenting the intended outcome is more efficiently prescriptive as a sample than clearly written instructions. The opening and prompt should ideally embody the speed and approachability of the task. When deemed efficient, video can be used to allow students to deconstruct and or reconstruct a more ambitious activity. 

A lesson plan that focuses on participation and register

The attached lesson plan template and sample provides an example that focuses the educator on the actual text (verbal and written) employed to introduce and exemplify objectives. By focusing on the most direct way to instruct, educators can maximize the time spent on task. Attached is a minimalist template with space to consider the approach of tasks and the necessary scaffolding needed to pull it off. 

*note- lesson plans are useful for planning and succinctly sharing ideas. Lesson plans here are a convenient vessel for the intended considerations advocated. Lesson plans have a time and place. This is not intended to advocate for or against lesson plan design or criteria as much as it is a convenient visual representation.

In the template

Objectives

Here the educator should focus on the end result intended in the activity. Examples could include: 'use target vocabulary', 'consider necessary language', 'provide examples', display procedure. 

Scaffolding

In this section, the educator inputs the actual text or verbal instructions required to get the students started. Emphasis should be placed on the end result desired. Avoid using lists. Provide a sample if considered abstract, but avoid giving step-by-step instruction. Students should be allowed to engage in L1 or L2 and obtain the results desired in their own way. This column includes necessary considerations needed to perform quickly and intuitively.  Items to consider include: 

Prompt- what you will say to initiate the activity

Room arrangement- necessary classroom organization

Resources- any required materials needed to identify the mode of engagement

*note- I include a link to a worksheet providing specific examples for the reader, although the textbook used in class offers the same material with the same areas (or lack thereof) for students to mark their contributions.

Engagement

The point of participation should be clear based on prior knowledge or a scaffolded sample. The students should be able to produce desired results without being shown how to get there. Most students in digitally literate areas should be aware of programs, resources, and required procedures. Educators working online and in paperless classrooms particularly should be weary of introducing new media to support outcomes. Too often new programs become an exploration into the alternative possibilities and steer students away from the goals of the activity.

Specifically, when considering engagement educators should focus on their presence in the classroom and their role as facilitators. Engagement should contain 3 strata: Student, teacher, and resources. 

Student

Initiation should be inherent to the activity. Students should not need prompting to wrap their heads around how the assignment is to be carried out. The students should be able to understand the point of participation expected (ex. fill in the blanks, write paragraphs, speak to partners, present). A limited number of actions should be identified in the first few classes and scaffolded appropriately for students in order to quickly move past the phase of negotiating roles. 

Teacher

The teacher's role should be apparent from the scaffolding. The teacher's location, role, and availability should be contained in any samples given and should be inherent to the assigned activity.

Non-verbal Cues

A unique concept to lesson planning may be non-verbal ambient cues. One way that educators can cut back on teacher talk time and focus the register or tone of the class is to utilize music to start and end activity segments. Interestingly the tempo and increased noise in the classroom may help give the classroom environment the intended rhythm of the assigned task. More research-based evidence of this is coming soon! Also, gestures should be considered essential. Since the dark days of the early pandemic, students have seemingly become less aware of the urgent need to contribute in second language classrooms. The sense of urgency may be reinstalled with gesture inviting active participation. Approachable tasks like offering an opinion may be more easily navigated if less time is given to consider an answer. Pressing the pairs to contribute to the class as a whole works to reinforce the efficacy of the activity, the need to listen to prompts, clarify if needed, and generally follow along and formalize thoughts necessary to be productive members of the class.

Presenting the information in bite-sized increments has become more vital to reaching outcomes successfully than giving explicit procedural directions. Students will likely remain on task if the goal is attainable and procedures are implicitly efficient and well-known. Working your way to larger and more abstract language goals may hinge on this cascading success more since the beginning of the pandemic. Create attainable goals quickly to maximize the percentage of class time spent on task and increase motivation through a sense of achievement. Thinking of activities in this way should help educators focus their assignments and coursework on producing outcomes and will hopefully enable more time spent on task.

Sample Point of Participation Lesson plan 

In 2021, AsiaTEFL held their annual conference in Goyang. Fortunately, I was able to secure a ticket and go to the sparsely attended conference. 

I was fortunate to have one of my topics of interest addressed by the speakers. Namely, the use of games in the classroom. Two of the talks focused on the new edutainment platform Kahoot. If you’re not aware of this new platform, I will take a moment to explain. At its heart, Kahoot lets users create quizzes and share those quizzes in a classroom guided form or a self-study method. In the guided form, the teacher shows the questions to the students and student join the quiz on a mobile device or computing platform. They answer the questions on that platform within the time frame, the correct answer for the question is displayed, and the teacher moves onto the next question at their leisure (or in my case, after complaining when students choose the blatantly wrong answer). In the self-study method, teachers can set the quiz on a schedule and pass the game entry code to their students. The students will complete the quiz on their own time within the deadline you set.

I use Kahoot fairly frequently in my classes as a way of spicing up the grammar and other quizzes that dot our class textbook Fast Track 1. When I saw the conference guidebook, I saw two presentations that immediate caught my interest since they related to Kahoot. Student perceptions of Kahoot as Online quiz tools for teaching and learning process in Intensive English by Nasrullah N. and Elsa Rosalina and In Kahoots_ Studying a Gamification App that Brings Students Together by Dr. Reynolds & B. Taylor. What can we learn from their research on this gaming platform’s classroom effectiveness?

Looking at the data from Nasrullah & Rosalina’s presentation, we find that many students liked using Kahoot. Many of the 39 university students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I find Kahoot exciting, interesting, fun and motivating.” Given how colorful, musical, time-limiting, and the leaderboard aspect of the quizzes, I can’t say I disagree. Heck, I find it much more exciting to give the quiz as it makes me feel like a game-show host. In their main discussion they found their results supported by Keengwe et. Al (Wieking, 2016) that students categorized either as conventional, risky or very high achievers all have successful learning experiences because of technology. It’s good that students are viewing the quiz tool positively and that they feel it is helping them in the class. But is it helping them learn? That is the subject of the next video.

Dr. Reynolds and Taylor noted that research on the efficacy of mobile technology showcased serious shortcomings and they wanted to see if the app would help with vocabulary acquisition. After a brief demonstration of the app, they looked at how it helped their students at Woosong retain vocabulary. 115 first-year college students at Woosong participated in the survey along with 8 teachers in the online class for 1st year English conversation. All students in the study took a pre-test and post-test using the vocabulary words covered in the study. Unfortunately, the experimental group only showed a slight improvement in their retention in the vocabulary, which isn’t statistically significant. However the control group lost retention significantly. They didn’t find statistically significant improvement according to the data under the Wilcoxon Signed-ranks test. Students neither performed better or worse than traditional methods. They also found that their students enjoyed the Kahoot quizzes, which matches what the previous study I talked about found.

Taylor noted that while it was easy to think of using Kahoot the same way as a powerpoint, but it wasn’t always the same way when teaching online. Specifically there were issues when students only had access to one device and thus it is a bit tricky to swap between Zoom app and Kahoot app/website during the game. Every second counts in a Kahoot game as that is how points are distributed. If you and another player both choose the correct answer, both you and that player get points. HOWEVER, the student who chooses the answer FASTER gets more points than the slower student. Essentially a student fortunate enough to have two devices would have the advantage because they would see the question and the answer choices at the same time whereas the student using the phone for class would have to switch apps to choose the answers. Using the self-study quiz could improve some of this problem.

Going forward, both research groups found student motivation increased and enjoyed the quizzes. Students look forward to the quiz games and maybe even improved student attendance. It all depends on how you use it. Can you use it as a graded replacement of quizzes? Dr. Reynolds and Taylor say that it might be tricky because there will be glitches/signal drop and the distracting nature of the app might affect how they interpret the scores on the quiz. The students might not take the quizzes seriously but in the poll the students seem to take it seriously in their survey.

Taylor’s idea was to have the students taking the quizzes earlier in the semester so bugs can be ironed out faster and they have more time to get used to the format. Don’t forget to have a backup plan in case the Internet goes down. Setup tip: 10 to 15 questions, 30 seconds per question, starting the class with the quiz, and making it part of the routine. Also, reduce the size/length of the questions, make questions relevant to covered material, and use photos to help students choose answers faster. Fundamentally, it makes the class more interesting but don’t count on it to guarantee retention.