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 Natasha Engering-Ward    Home        Learn More        Standards        Inspiration        About the Author

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Instructional Materials & How-Tos
How to introduce technology and music successfully into your classroom

Using tech tools in the classroom

1. Familiarize yourself with available language apps and get comfortable with how to use them. Suggested apps include Quizlet, Quizlzz, Kahoot together with programs such as Adobe Spark and google forms.

2. Start small. Just use one app to start with and experiment with it. Gauge your classroom and see how the students feel about it.

3. Plan well ahead. Once you are familiar with the app and how you can use it, design your lesson plan incorporating using the app for just a small period of time to start with so that you can get your bearings.

4. Have an alternate plan just in case the technology doesn't work out. Talk to your Tech support team and make them aware that you are going to be trying out a new app, so that they can support you and be on hand to help.

5. Get your students to download the app ahead of time (maybe the class before) so that they are not trying to download it all at once as this may clog up your network.

Using Music in the Classroom

Quizlet Video:
This is a video I made describing how you might go about using Quizlet with step-by-step instructions. Click on the link below to watch this 3 minute video.

Music can be used in many ways in the classroom. What is important is that students should listen to the song as many times as possible, as this aids with pronunciation of words, which is often one of the hardest things to do when learning a foreign language.
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1. Initially you could play music in the target language before class starts, so that when students arrive they hear the music and then as a teacher you would become familiar with the genres of music that your students like. The students would also be absorbing language while listening to the songs.

2. You could find a song in the target language and develop activities around that song, such as finding certain vocabulary words, creating a crossword/ word search, having students practice and sing the song to the class, or just gap fill the words as they are listening to it.

3. Students could choose a song of their own in a pair, then identify key vocabulary words that they are unfamiliar with. They could list these words in a google doc and find innovative ways of presenting to the class. My students made an Adobe Spark presentation and put each new word in a sentence so that students could see how those new words worked with others. Students could present them in other ways though.

4. Students could become familiar with a song and then work on putting a karaoke video together of its music. They could then perform the song to the class by using their own karaoke video. Another option could be getting the students to present their karaoke video to the class, along with the original youtube video and then have groups practice each other's songs so that they learn even more new vocabulary, and then have a karaoke session within your class.

Here is the video of Edith Piaff song La Vie en Rose, which my students chose:

Here is the Adobe Spark presentation that students made incorporating vocabulary from the video on left:

This is the original video of the song Dernière Danse by Indila

This is the Karaoke video that students made of that song to present and sing to and then with the class:

Surveys:
If you wish to survey your students as to their preferences with regard to instruction, perhaps asking how they feel about using music or tech tools in the classroom, you could use a google form, or Survey Monkey. When surveying my students as part of my capstone project I decided to use Survey Monkey and I wrote a series of 10 questions so my students could give me feedback from the course. This was really important to me, and has helped me grow as an educator. Below please see sample questions taken from my survey using Survey Monkey. If you wish to see the results of my survey, please refer to the section on assessment.

LESSONS

REFERENCES

ASSESSMENT