App Smashing a study guide

This post is a simple app smashing I created for my students today using two great apps:

COMICS HEAD + THINGLINK

I usually try to make the revision guides I provide to my students more visually appealing. Apart from a paper revision sheet, today I'm going to offer them a VISUAL STUDY GUIDE to help them study the topics we've covered so far.

1. First, I created a comic strip with the COMICS HEAD app (IOS) with the images you can see.

2. Then, I linked resources which I had curated using the THINGLINK app (IOS).

And this is the result:

If you hover over the image, some clickable links will appear.

 Let's see if they are going to find it useful.

A day later, a colleague of mine inspired by my interactive study guide, created her own for her teenage students. With Bethânia's permission, this is her app smashing creation:

Enriching Study Guides with Thinglink

How can I make Study Guides more visually appealing?

Many times I feel my students don't really know how to organize themselves to study. I often hear them say they only studied by reading the lessons in the book.

These are different ways I've tried to help students get ready for their English exams:

1. A Study Guide with links to resources shared in our EDMODO GROUP

2. I've created a wordcloud with topics and used THINGLINK to add online resources.

3. I've used the app VISUALIZE to create a visual poster and added links by using THINGLINK

Revising for tests with Thinglink

I love tools which are a surprise to me. Thinglink is one of these tools. When I first saw it, I imagined just a few ways to use it in class. However, the more time goes by, teachers have been doing amazing things with the tool.

An example is the one brought below created by Daniela Tomatis, an EFL teacher in Italy who I admire a lot, and her students.

Her blog: http://themachinegoeson.blogspot.com.br/

They've created a REVISION BOARD adding links to audio recordings, videos and online exercises to a drawing.

I asked Daniela a bit more about it:

She says,

"The drawing was made by a very creative girl, Clara (Daniela Becchio's daughter) !
We gave her some instructions, basically that we wanted something like a bookcase.
Then, we linked the different parts of the picture to a digital source.

We wanted to give students:

- a complete digital version of the curriculum.
- a possibility to revise for the exam autonomously ( that's why we provided both the written and the oral version of the stories, for example)
- suggestions on how to practice grammar and vocabulary.- examples of student-created content ( "my grammar book""personal coursebook")
- a possibility to check their material, in case they missed some lessons during the school year.

Our aim was also to help them with pronunciation, to support parents and also to facilitate success for dyslexic students."

Revision Carousel

This week, I planned to revise content students have recently seen by organizing a revision lesson as a CAROUSSEL.

First of all, I selected 3 activities :

1. Students would complete a grammar revision sheet and then use the answer key to correct it.
2. Students would play a  game called "Four-in-a-row" from the book "Grammar games and activities"  where students have to  know the infinitive/past/past participle of verbs.
3. Students would choose from one of the topics provided in their own course book and write a dialogue discussing it using language to agree and disagree. Then, they would use my cell phone (Audioboo app) to record their dialogues. 

The 12 students were divided into 3 groups of four and I had them seating in different corners of the room. Students would have 20 mins to work with each activity. As a timer, I used the site ONLINE VIDEO CLOCK  where you set an alarm by selecting a video clip from youtube. Before the caroussel activity started I explained what students would do at each station and by the end of the class all of them would have covered the 3 activities. 

Impressions? 

I liked the way I was free to move from one group to another and help when I was needed. Students were totally involved in doing the tasks. Moving from the different stations kept a dynamic pace to the lesson. An important point is to organize activities which take a similar time to cover and also have an extra activity up your sleeve for fast-finishers (in our case, I had conversation cards ). Next class, I intend to play their recordings from audioboo and ask them what they thought about it.

One of the recordings created in class by students: