Last Friday, we began training another cohort of our most popular short course, our online How to Teach Young Learners Course. Candidates described the session as – in order of number of mentions – fun, playful, informative, and motivating. You can see the full word cloud at the bottom of this post.
Breaking the ice
What made the session stand out for the trainees was the inclusion of teaching tools and techniques we normally associate with face-to-face classes: standing in a circle, holding onto yarn, and even throwing beach balls around to each other. We do these to break the ice and get to know the students, and for them to remember and practise each other’s names, and generally, to feel comfortable in the classroom. After all, on this particular course, we spend five weeks together, which can feel both short and long at the same time!
Benefits of doing this online
Another benefit of such an activity, especially if you are meeting the group for the first, and the course is online, is that it helps them to practise all the tools they will have to use during the session: Google Slides, taking screenshots, pasting images, being able to move things on slides, etc. Think of it as real, practical training of online tools. The more you practise in advance, the fewer issues students and trainees will encounter and experience later on. It is also a great way to signal that this will be a very interactive experience and they will be required to participate actively, and create the learning environment together. It also keeps people active and awake on a Friday afternoon.
So how do you set up such an activity?
Step 1. Ask students to take a screenshot of their Zoom pictures and post on Google Slides and arrange in a circle. You can use any other platform that gives students the right to edit and paste. You can also take screenshots of the students yourself and paste yourself.
It will look something like this:
Step 2. Find a png picture of a beach ball or an image of what you would like to pass around and paste on Google Slides. Png images are great, especially if you use ones that are commercially available and free to use, and have a transparent background, like the one below. Using transparent images will help to keep everyone visible.
Step 3. I like to have three rounds: 1) students say their own name, then grab the ball (remember to give edit rights to everyone) and give to someone else, 2) students then say their own name and the person they are “throwing” the ball to, and 3) students only say the names of the recipients of the ball. Encourage students to try to remember names and not cheat by reading the names off the Zoom window (especially tempting if they have multiple screens.
Step 4. If you are feeling particularly adventurous, you can use Zoom annotations and track the students and connect them with lines, which will become a spider web by the end. Then re-trace your steps and “roll up” the yarn to clean up the screen and delete line drawing one at a time by using “undo” on Zoom.
My reflections on the beach ball activity
The pros are that it is a fun way to break the ice and to signal the active nature of the course as students will have to be active from the very beginning of the class and the course. It also helps them to practise the online tools that you can gradually introduce during the course. The con is that, much like any training, it takes time for everyone to figure out the tech issues and keyboard shortcuts for screenshots (Windows Key + SHIFT + S on PC, and/or SHIFT + Command + 3 on a Mac). However, I believe the benefits greatly outweigh the sacrifice of some time to start the course.
A teaching tip
There are few tools, methods or techniques that are only present and/or viable in solely face-to-face, or exclusively viable in online settings. During the Young Learners course, we will be looking at ways to adapt even a running dictation into an online environment. What you need to think of is the essence of the task: here, doing something actively to move and pass something around, and to practise names. Once you identify the main ideas and the essentials, it is much easier to have a think of how these tools and ideas would work online.
Overall comments
This is a much recommended fan-favourite to start a course and one I recommend that everyone tries. Let us know in an email if you have any questions or suggestions and what your experience has been with this tool!
What participants actually said about the first session of the Young Learners course:
This post was contributed by David Juhasz, Director of Teacher Training, and Managing Director of International House Budapest. He is currently teaching the How Teach Young Learners Online course. You can find out more about the course by clicking here: https://teacher-training.hu/trainings/young-learners/
