Welcome to day twelve of the Appvent calendar. I have honestly been loving sharing all of these fantastic tools these last twelve days. It’s been a great opportunity to catch up with some really valued members of my PLN too. Today’s guest teacher to share an app on the calendar definitely fits that bill in the form of Mr Paul Tullock.
I first met Paul just over 5 years ago at Stephenson Memorial School in North Tyneside. I was working with the North Tyneside Learning Trust (NTLT), supporting them and teachers from schools within the Trust to set up student digital leader groups in their schools. I worked closely in the organisation of these sessions with Laura Dickinson and it has been fantastic seeing how she and Paul, and others from the group such as Dawn Guy, have gained ADE status since then and have all achieved so much since that time. Further to that work, I worked many more times with Paul including one extended visit to support the work of the Trust in Shenzhen with other colleagues from the NTLT.
You can follow Paul on Twitter at @MrTullock.
Paul and I, working at a variety of schools in Shenzhen
I’ve always known Paul to put his learners first, to always be completely professional and laser-focused on creating the best learning opportunities for his pupils. He always shares impactful processes and purposes for using technology too, so it was a no-brainer to ask Paul if he would like to share on this years Appvent calendar. Thanks, Paul!
Hello everyone, I’m Paul Tullock.
Over the past 10 years as a primary school teacher I have tried and experimented with a lots of technology, software and apps to support and engage my learners. Some are tried and not used again. Some have great impact and some become indispensable. One that has become indispensable over the past few years and is used regularly in my classroom is Quizlet.
Quizlet is an app that is great to support students in learning knowledge. It does this in a variety of ways which really help to embed the knowledge. The website and app enable you to create flashcards which contain terms and definitions. These can then be edited to include images to help students remember. The sets of cards are very easy to make and can be created in various languages with a range of levels of definitions already provided to make it super speedy. Once created, the cards can then be read to the students to support their learning and ensure everyone has access to the terms and their definitions.
Quizlet has lots of benefits; from helping with the pronunciation of key terms to helping EAL and SEND learners to ensure they can access the knowledge. These flashcards can then be learned in a variety of ways. This includes an old fashioned reading of both terms and definitions, matching the terms and definitions, writing them from memory, performing a test and playing various games such as ‘gravity’ and a memory speed game.
My absolute favourite feature, however, is Quizlet Live.
This allows the teacher to create a game in class in which the pupils are put into random groups. You need a minimum of four students to run a Quizlet Live session. The first team to finish with all the answers correct are the winners. The students all have the definitions or terms on their iPads (depending on how you set the questions) but only one has the correct answer. This ensures the students collaborate and talk to each other about their understanding and knowledge to make sure they answer correctly. If they answer any question incorrectly they get sent back to the beginning.
I find Quizlet Live a great way to get students talking and supporting one another. As well as being very competitive and lots of fun, Quizlet has many uses across the curriculum.
From learning spellings, number facts, science and topic vocabulary, historical events, to learning languages. The speed of creating and organising the content into subject folders is fantastic and there are already thousands of searchable content ready to use. Students also like to create their own flashcards too!
Sharing is equally easy. You can simply paste a link into Seesaw, Showbie, Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams and it’s ready to go. Another key feature of Quizlet is that it is both app and web-based too which means that it can be accessed anywhere on any device. It’s totally free to sign up, I’d definitely recommend trying it!
Find out more on their website here.
Thanks so much to Paul for sharing Quizlet with us today. I agree that Quizlet is a superb tool and have no hesitation in supporting his recommendation. Definitely worth checking out.
More tomorrow!
