The lesson time given refers to the in-class part of the lesson. As we have been creating this type of lessons over years, we will review older Flipped lessons to make sure that’s true everywhere on the website.
As you probably have already realized we love using videos for teaching English. You may wonder why? First of all, that’s how people consume media nowadays. We stopped reading and turned to video (YouTube) and audio (podcasts) as the primary type of online content we get, whether these are vlogs, how-tos, educational videos or news pieces. Secondly, video is much more engaging than text as it involves more senses. There’ve been studies [1] [2] [3] proving that using authentic videos (e.g. from YouTube) for teaching languages motivates students, makes their classes more interesting and benefits the whole learning process. However, authentic videos can be enhanced to serve specific purposes in your classroom and further engage your students. And that’s where interactive videos come into play!
Video is a media format that usually isn’t so interactive as the only thing you can do is to rewind, pause or fast forward a video. Not much of an interaction, I would say. But when we add annotation to a video to enrich its content, then it starts being really interactive. There is a multitude of things we can actually do: add open-ended questions, multiple choice questions, fill-in tasks, insert text boxes, add links, extra sound and commentary or a reflective pause. The possibilities are really endless and I’ll share with you some examples below to introduce you to the world of interactive videos.
Before we start with some examples, I want to assure you that creating an interactive video is a piece of cake. There are many online services where you can use a YouTube or Vimeo video to create interactive video for teaching a language. Personally, I’ve used three: Edpuzzle, Playposit and iSLCollective. The last one was created specifically for language teaching purposes and is the one I’m most familiar with that’s why I’ll show you some ways you can use it to develop interactive videos for teaching English.
Our first interactive video was based on a TED-Ed video called “The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars”. Our approach here is to make this video interactive by introducing reflective pauses and open questions. These questions correspond to the questions posed
during the video. This way students get involved into the concepts discussed in the video and can talk them through before continuing. Additionally, we provided a vocabulary list attached to the video so students can check more difficult words before watching.
This approach resulted in a more engaged discussion as students could confront their ideas with what the narrator in the video presented. We also noticed that the fact that students learnt to expect that something will happen made them more focused and interested in the video. You may say there is not so much interactivity added as most of the annotation involves reflective pauses but even such a small change was enough to make a difference. By the way, the lesson plan with this really cool video is one of your favorites. See it yourself here.
Another lesson plan with interactive video I want to present is called Filter Bubbles. Here our approach is to focus on listening comprehension. We used there open comprehension questions, multiple choice questions, listening for details tasks. All of these tasks are either focused on comprehension or vocabulary.
This way we built in standard paper tasks into the video so that students can focus on watching and not writing things down (quick tip: you can easily replay a few seconds of the video before a question if your students need to listen again). We found out that students are more engaged into watching the video and we saw better comprehension results. One comment: don’t add questions more often than every 30-40 seconds.
In our Flipped Classroom lesson plan called The Story of Frida Kahlo (with Advanced Past Tense review) we added grammar tasks to the video. Students must watch the video and understand the context to answer grammar tasks correctly. For the sake of simplicity, we only used single-answer multiple choice questions with focus on past tenses. Basically, it means that we added a typical grammar task to a video. While it may not sound like rocket science, it actually makes it more fun, and a boring grammar task evolves into an interesting story of the famous Mexican painter.
I still feel that I’m just scratching the surface of interactive videos. iSLCollective has many features which I haven’t explored yet, including assigning videos as homework, listen and tap or even taking advantage of various play modes. I hope we got you excited about interactive videos and our examples inspired you to explore this idea further. Don’t wait any more, just try it yourself, it’s simple and fun.
I have been using ISL Collective especially with an advanced student, in order to cater to her interests. It’s important to use a variety of activities and not just the “fill in the gaps”. This is a god-send now that all my lessons are online!
I have interactive video software, been trying to find a way to utilise it as a business, looking at advertising for businesses, product advertsing, just can’t get it started
We often say that ‘your voice matters‘ and ‘feedback from teachers is super valuable to us‘ and these are not just words or clichés that we want to repeat. We treat feedback seriously as it helps us develop ESL Brains in the right direction and prioritize changes.
The top requested change content-wise by far was low-level (A2) lesson plans. And at the beginning of this year, we decided it’s high time we tried to tackle that.
Our A2 lesson plans will be structured following the same mindset as any other lesson on ESL Brains. You will see lessons that let your students learn and practise new vocabulary, acquire or revise grammar structures and practise their listening and speaking skills through authentic video content. However, a bit of a novelty is that you will also get more video-less content. That’s because we feel that you don’t always need to do listening tasks during your classes and they might just get into the way of meeting a lesson objective.
Today, we’re kicking off with three A2 lesson plans available exclusively in the Unlimited subscription both in printable PDF format as well as our e-lesson plans (Google Slides) for teaching online:
Expect to see a steady stream of new A2 lessons plans coming to our platform. We’ll start slowly, but plan to build a solid section of lessons for A2 learners in the upcoming months. This will not greatly affect our standard publishing calendar so we will still publish new content for intermediate and advanced learners.
We hope you and your students will enjoy using ESL Brains lesson plans and as always feedback is more than welcome. Try them out and send your opinion to us ([email protected]).
ESL WorksheetsThank you all for such a positive response! Your enthusiasm is super motivating to us and makes us want to keep going and coming up with new ideas.
I know it’s a little bit more difficult to find videos related to lower-level lessons, but the students like to see how native English speakers use the stuff taught in the lessons. Mainly short-time videos, like this one.
Almost 600 of ESL Brains users participated in our annual survey. Thank you for your input 🙏🙏🙏 You left hundreds of comments, insights, opinions and ideas. We read all of them and will be shaping ESL Brains the way that works best for you. If, for any reason, you are interested in the survey results, keep reading and get a glimpse of what we’ve learned thanks to the survey.
First of all, we are extremely proud to announce that you rated your experience with ESL Brains at 4.68/5. Thank you! We couldn’t be happier! We also see that there is still some room for improvement, which makes us excited and eager to come up with even more innovative and stimulating ideas for you to use with your students.
When it comes to the teaching setting, around 60% of ESL Brains users teach only or mostly one-on-one classes. And, 40% of you teach only online and the vast majority (75%) continue having at least some online lessons in this post-pandemic world. We hope that the e-lesson plans are useful and make your online teaching job a bit easier!
We’ve asked you about problems you had as teachers in 2022 and it turned out that the two biggest problems for you were lack of teaching resources and the amount of lesson preparation work. You mentioned the struggle to find exciting and fresh lesson ideas and the need to adapt the materials you use in the class to your students’ needs. Many of you expressed how challenging lesson prep is as it requires lots of creativity and can be very time-consuming. We hope you find ESL Brains helpful in this area.
Some of you also mentioned lack of free time as the biggest problem you had to deal with last year. Many of you had unmotivated students, which put even more pressure on you to prepare engaging lessons. 2022 was also a challenge due to the stress related to war and power outages, economic crises, the difficulty of finding new students and teaching exclusively online.
When asked about your expectations towards ESL Brains materials, most of you are interested in additional homework and/or revision tasks. We have great news: 📢 we’ve already started adding homework/revision activities to standard and flipped lesson plans! See examples in the lessons: A better way to brainstorm and Towards a car-free future. We’re just starting and plan to improve these extra tasks also through your feedback.
