Distance Learning: Language Teaching
We all know that learning languages involves a lot of interaction and community. This can be hard to adapt language teaching in distance learning. If you are teaching remotely, you are probably using Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams. You can run your entire class out of your Google drive. It’s really just a matter of permissions. I was really pleased to find that in Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zooms, you can make your own custom background. You can also make a custom banner in Canva for your classroom with your contact information, class schedule and anything else necessary for students to find easily. I wanted to share with you some quick tools and tips to help you survive distance learning language teaching. Kids prep questions from the text, and then they answer in the chat box.
Quizlet Live Quizlet has loads of sets and more than 10 different games to play in group or individual mode.
Bingo Baker makes for a great activity. Try 9-Grid Bingo, a great activity shared with me this spring by @comprehensibleclassroom. Students take a piece of paper and make a 9-grid. You can provide them with a set of answers to choose from, and they fill in their grid. During the game, you ask the questions and they mark off as they get the answers.
Google Surveys I love Google Surveys (made from Google Forms) because they provide an immersive reading experience. However, I discovered during remote learning that Google Translate can be turned on in the user end–not particularly useful for language teachers. With that said, you can take all the graphs and charts created with the results and use them as speaking prompts in the target language. 
Hot Seat. This is one of my activities from acting. Oftentimes when we play a new character, we will learn everything about this character or create it, down to what their favorite food is, backstory about their childhood, favorite games, et cetera, to really bring character to life. It’s a great communicative activity for foreign languages. You can pick a famous person from your target language culture, and give them a set of questions in your target language that they have to research and answer. When it’s their turn, they go in the Hot Seat and students take turns asking the questions. Here are some Hot Seat activities for Spanish class.
Kahoot is similar to Quizlet Live.
Flipgrid and VoiceThread are two great tools. Flipgrid is probably a little bit more user-friendly, but essentially both will let you create something, whether it’s a recording or a short presentation, and everyone gets to comment on each other’s. I love this activity for families in person and it translates well to distance learning. For example, your students could research famous people in history, or celebrities for something like Hispanic heritage month. They research the backgrounds of these people and do a presentation, speaking right into the camera as though they’re them. They can also use a picture and they post on your Flipgrid.
Google Slides are a great collaborative activity. Groups of students, or even an entire class can make a collaborative Google Slide presentation. Everybody adds one slide and some text to the picture. You can use an app like Fishbole to narrate it and have a movie. I love to do this with emotions, for example. Every student illustrates an emotion with a drawing or picture, and writes a caption. I narrate and record, and then we all have a movie to watch.
Real Life Reading. Activities that involve collaborative reading in action. For example, I love shopping activities. Give students a list and they have to go shopping at target language stores and find links to the items. It’s essentially a scavenger hunt, but it’s very fun. They learn lots of vocabulary. They do lots of authentic reading and interact with the target language and culture.
Google Doc activities are fantastic because they can also be collaborative. You might make one Google doc, select a theme and have everyone add something. I love to use this when I have guest speakers that I get on italki. Depending on the level and what we’re studying, I select the theme and I have every student write a certain number of questions. Then I also have them edit and proofread one another’s questions, before I do a final spell check, which picks up lots of little errors like accents and such. Then everybody has a set of questions to ask the guest speaker, who can show up in your Google Meet.
As a follow up activity, everybody can write a summary. Another way to do this can be something like 2 (or 3) Truths and a Lie, where you take a collaborative Google doc and every student writes three or four sentences. One of them has to be a lie. Everyone then has to read and decide which ones are true and which ones are the lies.
Language At The Table. I love anytime I can get informal conversation into my class. Have students brainstorm a list of topics or questions. Get something relaxing to drink and sit around and chat. Obviously for the novice and even intermediate students will need some support. You can go back to your Google docs where you start them with a few questions. They might have to come up with 25 different questions depending on levels and themes. Everyone sits around and chats. Intermediates can bullet point out collaboratively a list of topics that they know how to talk about. Perhaps even add some notes as prep for this. Students can make individual Google slides activities. They can create a presentation. It could be about their life or maybe their dream vacation. They can use the app Fishbole and narrate it and share their presentation with the class.
I love vocaroo.com and I have students often record. You can do something as simple as assign a list of questions that they’ll answer in a recording on Vocaroo and turn into you. They can create an original presentation, perhaps talking about their last vacation or things that they love. We talk so much about flipped classrooms. When I was a foreign language student, it seemed like that’s so much of what we did. We learned a lot of things on our own before we came to class and we came to class and practiced it. While technology enables a much richer and robust version of this, I think it’s still sort of old school. It’s natural to integrate so many different things into one class period. However, necessity is going to probably drive many of us to a flipped classroom. There are so many great tools.
Start your own YouTube channel. You don’t have to actually make anything. You can curate playlists of great content, tutorials and assign those to your students to get the practice before if you don’t have a robust online program. Advanced learners can work on things like watching telenovelas. You can even do a bit of research, depending on the age that you teach, for Netflix shows for language classes. I love the browser extension, Language Learning with Netflix They can have very fun language learning parties.
Crossword Puzzles. I love crossword puzzles because they’re a fun and engaging way to practice vocabulary. I always tell my students no printer, no problem. They can actually just write out the answers on a separate piece of paper. Take a picture and show you, or do their answers on a Google doc and send it to you. I hope you find this list of activities and resources helpful for teaching languages in a distance learning environment.
Here are 100+ already prepared for you. Looking for more ideas for remote and in-person teaching? Check out the https://reallifelanguage.lpages.co/language-lessons-5-weeks-of-low-and-no-prep-fun/