Chinese class flipgrid

High School Chinese Adapts to Remote Learning

Andy Kelley has quickly adopted new interactive tools to keep his students proficient at speaking and writing Chinese.
“It has been a challenge to do the call and response practice that we often do during our language classes,” he admits. Kelley moved his synchronous class sessions to Google Meet, presenting his screen as a digital whiteboard as he would do on campus.

For asynchronous work, Andy adopted the use of Flipgrid, a tool from Microsoft specifically aimed at helping classroom discussions with a grid layout of short student-submitted video responses inside each discussion. During one session, Kelley supplied a transit map and asked a question about how to travel between two stations, with a link back to the original synchronous session that discussed asking for directions. Students then submitted their responses which were viewable by the other students.

Whereas the other high school level World Language classes use the traditional Latin alphabet, Chinese class uses the complex, logosyllabic characters that number in the thousands. Students, therefore, must remain proficient in their writing. To overcome this challenge in remote learning, Andy turned to a tool called Skritter. 

“It walks them through, stroke by stroke, and gives feedback on how they are doing with the writing,” he explains. “It is a way to practice handwriting characters on a computer—something we would miss out on since we are not doing paper learning right now.”

“It has also been a challenge to do the pair work and small group work that is a big part of my Chinese classes,” he adds. To overcome this challenge, he went big. “I was able to do small group presentations with my AP classes,” he explains. “That meant me being in three Google Hangouts all at once. I was in the background as students took turns presenting their screens and talking through their presentations. Each ‘pod’ was also recorded so we could go back and watch it later.”
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