Preparing for exams - twist and flip to succeed.

This presentation was given by Christina Chorianopoulou and I was interested to see it as I often teach exam students.

She started off by canvassing people's experiences of teaching exam classes. The ideas varied from reteaching and practice to alternative teaching by not using exam materials but by boosting students language skills. We were given a quote from Erin Gruwell that we should teach the students not  the exam.Christina likes to use what the students bring into the classroom.

She often uses students surveys, short video presentations and comic strips all of which, but especially the last 2, can be created by students. She showed us some really good presentations introducing students which had been made by students. Again people in the chatbox suggested Voki and build your wild self  as other tools which can and have been used.

Next we talked about which exams people take, the majority of people are told by the school which exams they have to take. Christina said that students should be involved in the decision making process and therefore need to know what is involved in the exam. This boosts their confidence and thus improves their motivation.

And by creating and using relevant content we can create which will cater to their interest and hopefully help them to become stronger students.

She shared a slide presentation with us that we can use too the-book-beyond

Next she started talking about twisting and flipping, changing the formats of tasks to keep students engaged. She took a students written work and then turned it into a comprehension exercise for other students. The other students made the comprehension questions!

She said that mobile apps are always used in her classes, dictionaries, games and polls to name just a few and rounded off by talking about collaborative learning. The benefits of collaborative learning are peer input, peer assessment and sharing of good practices.

This was another practical session with some useful ideas that we can take into the class and use ourselves. I got quite a lot out of this one as well as seeing some new tools. Thank you Christina.

Looking at the slide presentation I also discovered coggle which I had never come across before. This is a simple word mapping website which can be used to create vocabulary maps.

This is a very quick coggle that I made about this webinar! NB Click to enlarge.