By now you’re (hopefully) reasonably comfortable with whatever online tool you are using to conduct your classes online, whether that’s Skype, Teams, Meet or Zoom. You’ve worked out how to do the most basic things, like sharing your screen or sending students to breakout rooms.

However, what about all those creative ideas you used to use in the classroom? How can you use these in the online class?

First, let’s remind ourselves of some differences when we go online. In the classroom we often are surrounded by useful tools for activities, which could be anything from the normal classroom furniture to coloured pencils, scissors and glue.  We can easily demonstrate to students what to do, and it’s quite simple to see when a student is struggling. So with these caveats in mind … let’s get started.

Be Prepared!

Before embarking on any task, think carefully about whether your students will have access to the tools needed. I use ‘tools’ very widely here to refer to any equipment from paper and pencils up to smartphones. If your students are likely not to have these to hand, you need a solution to hand, or even abandon the idea – it wouldn’t be very inclusive to an activity that needs a smartphone if you know some of your students won’t have one.

I always start my lessons by showing students a list of things they will need for the lesson. Some days it’s simply their book and a pen or pencil to complete tasks, but others it may be paper, scissors, glue, a phone, etc. By showing this at the beginning students can get prepared and it will cause less wasted time later. It also gives those students who turn up early (or at least on time!) something positive to do.

If you think that students will require something that they may not have at home, such as glue, tell them the lesson before so there is time to buy it (presuming you think their parents will be able to)

Homemade Mini-Whiteboards

One favourite activity of my students in class was using mini-whiteboards. This typically involved students in groups writing the answers to a question on the board and holding it up. First team to show the correct answer would get a point.

Now it’s unlikely that students will have such boards at home, but likely they do have paper. So instead of writing answers on a board, they can write on a piece of paper and hold it up to the camera. If you do this in a situation where every question has a different answer, this could be a lot of paper, so I’ve adjusted this and used it for true/false questions, or multiple choice. An example would be reading simple comprehension statements and students hold up the ‘T’ or ‘F’ card depending on of it’s true or false. Why do this? Well, it’s instant (even quicker than writing in a chat box), and all students will take part, unlike a chat box where many students will stop answering when they see the others have done it. If you have good eyes you see who is consistently getting answers right and wrong, and students enjoy that the are moving, even if only in a small way.

Miming

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure this would work online, some students are quite shy in front of the camera, even prefer to have it off. However, I was wrong, my class was extremely eager to perform when given the chance. In my case students were asked to mime certain verb and adverb combinations, walk slowly, eat noisily, etc., and they loved it. Yours will too, I’m sure.

There are so many things they could mime in addition to what I did, the name of their favourite book or film, an adjective, things they imagine doing on holiday, and so on.

Crafts

This one needs care as it needs to well chosen so that it can be followed well. I did an exercise inspired by the blog from the British Museum which involves some origami. This was a case where it was very important to be well-prepared and also to prepare the students.

The first step was to be sure I do the origami myself, which is not something I’m a natural at. It’s then important to take it very slowly so that all students can follow your instructions and see exactly what to do. It’s harder to see what you’re doing for the students, and harder for you to see if they are struggling, so be prepared to show a step several times. Despite some struggles, I’d call this a success. No doubt you can adapt your own craft skills to good effect.

By the way, as neither I nor they had origami paper, the first step was asking them to cut some normal paper into the correct dimensions – don’t forget there are often simple solutions to such problems!

Performance!

Having seen how much my class liked miming, I decided to go one further and try a performance. We had learned about Shakespeare and about some his plays using the excellent Learn English Kids materials so it was decided we should put on our production!

There are obvious disadvantages to overcome when putting on a show online. Everyone is in their home rather than together in the classroom and there is no chance to produce costumes and sets. What to then?

The solution we had was that each student had a character with some lines, but they also had to produce a picture which was ‘the costume’ of another character. Macbeth’s symbol was a dagger, for example, so every time student A spoke the lines of Macbeth, student B would hold the dagger picture they had made as Macbeth’s symbol to the camera. To make it more fun, we also had sound effects that the students had to make, like knocking on their tables when a door is knocked in the story, screaming when someone is killed or tapping their fingers to represent the sound of something walking up stairs.

Collaborative Writing

In class students often students work on a task together, such as agreeing the lines of a dialogue. This is still possible online. There are different ways of doing this. Some of you may be lucky and have such collaborative tools in-built to the teaching platform you are using. But don’t despair if you don’t! Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online, and other similar products from other companies, allow students to work on the same document online at the same time. With younger children, who probably don’t have accounts on these platforms, it will be a lot easier to set up the documents in advance yourself. I always create the documents on my computer in Word and then use the OneDrive share function to create links for my students to use.

If you do this there are two ways of getting students to work together. For example, you could make one document but ask different students to work on different pages, e.g. group 1 works on page 1, group 2 on page 2, etc (you can also colour code the pages for clarity). Alternatively, and though it’s more work to set up it is less likely to cause arguments, is to make separate documents for each student or group of students. While it’s best if students can share screen, even if they can’t, if they all use the same link they will see what each other is doing.

This is great for brainstorming story ideas, or even writing the story itself, as well as dialogues, or even just writing example sentences for a new language point.

I hope that’s given you something to get started. If you have your own ideas, or have tried and the ideas and want to give feedback, please use the comment section.