Quizlet Live! ODM!

At ACTFL, I saw the brilliant, kind, generous, GENIUS Kristy Placido present many of her favorite “techy” approaches to delivering highly compelling, comprehensible input to her students. I have heard of people using Quizlet Live! and I’ve even SEEN it in classes… Never have I ever understood it though and for that reason I’ve never tried it with my own kiddos…. Kristy is a wise woman (duh! I mean, she’s an AUTHOR!) and she must’ve known there were people like ME in the room so she made us actually PLAY it… GAHHH!!!!

It STILL took me two months to actually try it in my classroom. Since my kids were familiar with Quizlet already, I wanted to explain to them that this was a TEAM game and competitive. I also think it is VERY important to point out that ONLY ONE PERSON  on the team will see the correct answer on their screen. Otherwise students are just clicking for the sake of clicking. Here is how I explained it to one class:

What you need to know: You create a regular quizlet set… (before you ask, no my kids don’t have emails, you don’t need an email to “play” a quizlet study set). When you’re in the Quizlet study set, you click “Live” which is all the way to the right of the main screen which looks like this:

Then, if you’re like me and don’t pay for a subscription, your screen will look like this and you click “Create Game” here:

A screen similar to this then shows up. Kids are instructed to go to www.quizlet.live where they’ll be prompted to enter a code then their name. I make it VERY clear to my students they must use their name (unless they have a nickname in Spanish class already). Then BOOM, once everyone is in, you can start the game and students are grouped into teams for you! (I only gave them 10 seconds MAX to notice what team they were on before hitting “start game” so they were thrown into reading!)

If you’re doing something with translation, a sentence will pop up on EVERYONE’s screen and only one player on each team will see the correct translation for that sentence. They should click that quickly so they next sentence pops up. This is the point I felt was very important to make clear for my kids so they didn’t assume that they all had the correct translation somewhere.

The times I’ve seen Quizlet played before, teams were allowed to sit together. This has obvious advantages. I really wanted them to sit separate so that there was more accountability for EVERYONE reading. The best part about this was that once we started playing, I saw this BRILLIANT opportunity to introduce the phrase “lo tengo” “no lo tengo” (I have it, I don’t have it). I quickly wrote it up on the board as just an “FYI” this is how you say it in Spanish, and the next round AT LEAST 70% of the class was using it! Yes, of course the next week we did Señor Wooly’s “No lo tengo” and YES, it was an epic hit… talk about making language “sticky”!!! YAYYYY!!!

So yes, I love that these kids are super into it and getting compelling comprehensible input. The other thing that I love is the classroom community and culture it is continuing to grow. The teams are randomly selected. We can change them as frequently or infrequently as I want but once again, that culture and expectation that EVERYONE will participate and “play” or interact with EVERYONE else in our class every day is reinforced. I love love love it.

***Updated on 2/9/19 here is a video of my class with kids sitting “together” in their teams…. it helped with the noise level on a day when they were doing a test next door.

So, if you HAVEN’T tried Quizlet Live! yet, DO IT…. like in your next class! just DO it! 🙂

This week has been a rough one y’all. I have been at home ALL the week on strict orders from my doctor and midwives. I’ve had the flu and an upper respiratory infection. My dear dear friend Mary Overton came to my rescue on Monday and helped me pull together some lesson plans because planning for a sub when you’re sick is #theWORST! She is my hero… If you don’t follow her blog… you should… she is such a treasure and so so so giving… Being pregnant and sick is NO joke, but today, after 4 weeks of feeling ehh, bleh, AWFUL, or meeerrrp, I feel pretty good! I feel like I am finally over the hump! I can’t wait to get back to my kids next week! Four more weeks with them (hopefully) and I want to make every minute count!

Until next time,

HAPPY TEACHING!

Love,

La Maestra Loca