ExamTime and what you can do with it

Examtime is a website which is primarily meant for students to increase their learning experience and help them revise for the exams. But as I have made sure, it can successfully be used by the teachers.

Examtime has four features which you can choose from - creating mind maps, flashcards, quizzes or study goals. The site also provides a range of study tips for students.

I have already posted a mind map that I created on Examtime a while ago. It is my favourite feature of those offered by Examtime and it produces really attractive mind maps.

Today I made a set of flashcards on the topic Publications.

Each flashcard has 2 sides, the front side for the word, the back side for the definition. Students can flip and shuffle the cards, and study the words at their own pace. In my opinion, it's an activity that has to be prepared exclusively by the teacher.


Creating a multiple choice quiz was a little inconvenient because first you have to prepare the questions with answers and only then, in the next step assemble the quiz. In the end the quiz turned out well, and it looked good. After completing the quiz, students can see where they made a mistake and see the correct answer with an explanation which has to be added in the preparation process.

An option Creating a goal means that students can write their study goals as a reminder of the approaching tests or exams that helps them plan their time and stay organized.

The registration and use of the website is free and its creators have given good thought to the ways of helping students in the study process, but I have a feeling this site should have been aimed at teachers. I don't know any student who would spend hours making a set of flashcards (which means looking up each definition in the dictionary) or creating multiple choice quizzes for themselves.

I find it discouraging that there is no option of sharing an activity by URL, only by email invitations. On the other hand, I admit it gives the website owners more control of the visitors and their online behaviour.
But I can imagine a situation when a student who created a mind map would like to show it to the teacher, and the only option will be inviting the teacher to the site instead of sharing the web address which just seems more time-saving to me.

Short writing activities for exam classes

Writing is one of the most difficult parts of the English exam for non-native speakers. While they are coping with speaking and reading tasks quite easily, writing exam may cause much distress and anxiety to a number of students. Teachers can do a lot to help their students to prepare for the exam.

Here are a few suggestions how you can raise students' confidence by using short and effective writing activities.



1. Expand the sentence
Write a short sentence on the board and ask your students to expand it by adding adjectives, adverbs, intensifiers, modifiers, clauses and so on. Ask your students to build a pyramid of the sentences in their copybooks and after they have run out of ideas, ask them to read their final (longest) sentence and vote for the best one. This activity can also be done orally, then the sentence "travels" round the classroom until it is complete, i.e. no more words can be added.

Example: The boy ate a sandwich ✒ The hungry boy ate a big sandwich ✒ The hungry little boy ate a big ham sandwich ✒ The hungry little boy hurriedly ate a big ham and cheese sandwich ✒ In the kitchen, the hungry little boy hurriedly ate a big ham and cheese sandwich and asked for more, etc.

2. Write a chain story
Tell your students that they are going to write a ghost story (an adventure story, a crime story, a love story, a horror story etc). Write the first sentence of the story on a sheet of paper and pass it on to the nearest student who then writes the second sentence and passes the sheet on to the next classmate. Each student writes one sentence.
To involve more students simultaneously, put them ir groups and give the same starter sentence to each group. In the end read and compare the stories.

Starter sentences: It was a dark and stormy night... / Somewhere in the house a floorboard creaked... / The house looked abandoned and bleak but...

3. Write the opening sentence

Tell your students the topic of an essay for which they have to write the opening sentence. Give them 3-4 minutes and then ask them to read their sentences. Discuss which was the best and why. Be prepared to read your own sentence.

Example: Surveillance cameras are a threat to citizens' privacy.

Variants of the opening sentence: a) Today surveillance cameras are everywhere b) Today citizens are being watched, spoken to, and analyzed by CCTV cameras c) Surveillance cameras are used for prevention of disorder or crime, etc. 

4. Associations

Tell the students one word, eg. yellow, and ask them to write a quick sentence describing their accociations with the word or the first thought that comes to their mind when they imagine the word.

Example: I was standing in a huge field of sunflowers and listening to the hum of bees.

5. Picture description

Display a picture on the board and ask your students to write all the words that they can think of while looking at the picture. 

To give the task some structure, be specific - first ask them to write nouns (the easiest category), then adjectives, verbs, adverbs and finally ask them to make up a long sentence using the words they wrote down. As usual, listen to the sentences read out by the students and pick the best one.
If you have time, you may ask your students to write a longer description of the picture or invent a story based on the scene. A variant of the story: Describe what happened before the moment in the picture.

Sample photo:

The image was taken from my favourite website http://pixdaus.com/ where you can find fantastic pictures on any topic.


Here is a brilliant website for you and those students who would like to spend more time on developing their writing skills:
http://www.writingforward.com/

You may read my older post about developing writing with the help of journals.

  

State exams - where have we teachers failed our students?

Students in Latvia are taking the school leaving exams in June and I have been marking the student speaking exam recorded on CDs (which is the procedure for the centralized state exams here). I have a stack of CDs with recorded answers of anonymous students from different parts of Latvia whose speaking skill I have to evaluate.


Task 1 is Interview - the student has to answer the questions on a certain topic read by the teacher.
Task 2 is Role Play - the student has to interact with the interviewer following the script on the exam paper.
Task 3 is Monologue - the student has to give a summary of an extract from an article and his own opinion about the theme.

It might be a coincidence that the students whose exams I have been marking come from the "weak" schools where the majority of learners have poor knowledge and learning skills in general. However, considering the hundreds of answers I have heard, the conclusion is depressing.

Student answers to the questions conspicuously bring out our failure to give them understanding and knowledge of the issues that are part of our daily life and the society we live in. The questions where many students lack the scarcest knowledge all center round technologies, social networks, online activities.

We teach what we know ourselves. We cannot teach what we do not know.

Can teachers discuss social networking with their students if they have not made the acquaintance of the virtual world and learned about the trends in online environment? Our students are there, they just do not know everything has a name and everything has a purpose.
Technologies can be explained, taught and used. If you tell your students that what they do online every day for hours is social networking, they will no doubt understand it and probably remember because they learn easily what they like.


There is a great website Social Networking dealing with the topics a teacher should know about social networks, addiction to online sites, cyber-bullying etc. It gives a down-to-earth explanation about what is social networking. Teachers can turn the text into a reading or discussion task and they won't need more than a couple of lessons before their students have learned the basics of the subject.
More sites have been given in the handout.

I have made a table with a few exam questions and typical student answers which fall short of understanding of the topic. There are some suggestions for the teachers about how to give their students some knowledge about social networking and online activities. 

Download the document here.

Summarizing skill

Since students have been asked to make a summary of a short text at the state exam, the teaching of summarizing skill has come to the fore.
It has turned out to be a tedious job because summarizing skill is not easy to teach. It actually involves many skills - reading for the gist and detail, concentrating on the main points, seeing the key words and getting the central message of the paragraph, being able to join many ideas in one.

Why is it for a student sometimes easier to write a passage of 200 words instead of 100 as required by the task? What if they just do not know how to curb their imagination and control their flow of thoughts? That is where summarizing skill becomes essential. I believe, it can be developed through practice but it takes time. And it is a very creative process, I'd like to add.

Here are some links to useful web pages about writing summaries.

• Summary writing by Drew University
• Summarizing by Reading Quest
• Summarizing skill by Googol Learning

I have prepared a worksheet for practicing summary writing.
 


Here you can access it on Google Docs and download it for the use in the classroom. It consists of five paragraphs taken from the internet and a space for writing a summary. I have also added sample summaries for each paragraph but they are not absolute. The teacher can accept many different variants.