Skip to main content

YouTube Channel

Hi fellow tutors!
Welcome to my blog.  During these strange and unusual times I thought it might be helpful to share with you what I have been doing with my students.  Online learning is very new to me, I have dabbled with VLEs (virtual learning environments) previously but now it's full online engagement all the way.

 I'm a practical practitioner so want to make this as useful and hands on as possible.  Here's what I have been doing so far.

 I created a YouTube channel to house all of the mini video lessons I had made.  Through time with students in classes I know that YouTube is accessed by a good 99% of them.  Not being a particularly public person and also to ensure good safe guarding I created a private channel.  This means that only my students can access videos I send out to them via shared links.  The students are able to like (or dislike!) videos and write comments should they wish. 

 What I really like about my channel is the analytics.  It gives you, as the administrator, a break down of how many views your videos receive along with date data.  Even though I may not be hearing from some students I can see that videos are being watched.  Some students may have low or zero ICT skills and not yet (I have plans for this!) know how to reply to the messages they are receiving from me but it gives me comfort to log into my channel as see that the videos are being watched.  I have made phone calls to those students who I have not heard from at all and a large number of them said that they had been watching the videos and really liked to see or hear from me.  This boosted morale quite a bit!  It can be very challenging producing resources and attempting to deliver online and hearing nothing back.  Do remember your students may be home schooling, be the full time child care, lost their job and have financial worries or stress or even be mentally  feeling the effects of lockdown.  There are a whole host of reasons why you may not have heard from them, but that does not mean things aren't happening behind the scenes!

 It was quite a tricky process setting the channel up but I managed by Googling things I was "challenged" with and now it's as easy as pie to share links of videos via email or text.  You can also make playlists (which I'm using as folders for levels at the moment) in order to organise your videos.  

 Going forward I can envisage a course with a set of sessions all housed within YouTube playlists which I would hopefully be able to make and upload before September - that of course depends on a variety of factors and needs.  Have a go at creating your own channel and see what you think!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking out on Zoom!

  Some ideas for using break out rooms in Zoom- * Reading- send links to reading texts through the chat function. Groups can whole class read together, ask for volunteer readers or nominate readers for paragraphs/chunks of text. If students can’t navigate to the reading texts simply display it on screen for all to view. Use breakout rooms for pair reading practise.  *Maximising the use of English- use breakout rooms after activities for pairs to check their answers together before feeding back to the whole group.  *Collaboration - use break out rooms for students to work together on creating questions/checking answers/constructing sentences or short texts/formulating opinions and ideas.  *Tutorials- use break out rooms for one to one meetings whilst the whole group are busily working on a task.  *Voting-use the new Zoom function to create labelled rooms and ask students to vote by choosing a room! *Differentiation-pair students together by skill sets/levels/abil...
Post a Comment
Read more

Virtual Field Trip!

   It was an absolute pleasure to be part of the Teachmeet at the NATECLA conference over the weekend to talk about the Virtual Field Trip that I made for my Entry 2 and 3 students.  This is how I made it! First, create your own Bitmoji Avatar on your mobile phone/device.  Unfortunately this cannot be done on a PC or laptop, you will need to download the Bitmoji app and build a mini you from there.  Then search for Bitmoji extension within Google and add it to your Chrome browser. Now to make your trip! I used Google slides.  Click background and search for the place/area you'd like to take your students.  Once you have that in place you may want to put in additional items such as signs etc.  Here's one of many tutorials available on YouTube to instruct you! I inserted various links to websites and YouTube videos throughout my trip using the insert , link  function.  I also added a link to a Padlet for students to answers ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Sense of Community

A couple of weeks into lockdown I thought it might be a good idea to have a weekly newspaper which we could send out to students electronically.  The fantastic team that I work with made this happen for us. Each week we gather news related items, simplify the language which we collate in the weekly ESOL newspaper.  We use Google Docs which can then be sent out via a link through any medium such as text message etc (if you want to try this make sure you go to the advanced settings and make link accessible to all ).  Within the articles for the paper we embed links to videos and other entertaining things.  The tutors edit the newspaper but we encourage our students to write things to add into it too.  So far we've had book reviews and recipes, complete with photos.  It's been lovely and I hope also creates a sense of community and connection between students. We have created newspapers for the entry levels so far.  Sometimes I set a couple of compreh...
Post a Comment
Read more