» David Jones

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 4: Developing Conversation

Upon retiring from full-time public school teaching in 2023, I took part-time working teaching French remotely. Teaching via video conferencing turns out to be a terrific method and a very satisfying work!

Being also a web developer for a platform designed for remote teaching and in-class 1:1 designs, I was inspired by this work to begin developing a set of applications specifically for teaching world languages remotely.

I always loved improv and when teaching social studies or French in my career, my students and I enjoyed role play as a learning tool that was fun and meaningful. My practice was to incorporate many exercises to develop conversational proficiency using improv or semi-improvised “scaffold” dialogues.

The improv app at Innovation is now well developed. This app is available to subscribers only right now from the Language Console of the dashboard.

The teacher shares the screen in a remote teaching situation (or in-person, displays the screen in class). The first thing is to select the proficiency level. I use the CEFR descriptors.

A notice appears in red in the center advising students not to use AI while participating. This was sometimes an issue for me with some remote students, who quickly consulted Google translate instead of improvising their own contributions to our conversation. Teachers can remove this notice by clicking in.

Once the difficulty level is chosen, the teacher can select from the available conversation themes. These correspond to typical topics taught in world language classes that employ thematic units as the method. The reader will notice in the graphic that a scorecard appears on the right. The scoring method is that used in speaking tasks on New York State world language assessments and instructions are available at the click of a button.

Once the teacher has selected the theme, a set of possible dialogues appears.

Upon selecting the prompt, the conversation can begin. As the dialogue proceeds, the teacher can track the attempts and utterances in the scorecard on the right. They can award 2 points for utterances which are comprehensible, appropriate, and make no surprising errors for level. the can award 1 point for utterances that are not quite right for that student’s expected proficiency. The app automatically calculates the grade.

Now what I like to do is to use the large textarea in the center to provide useful words or phrases that the student asked for or needed during the dialogue.

List the expressions with their meaning separated by an equal sign. Here’s why: the Innovation flashcards app has been integrated so that we can study the phrases! Scroll down just a wee bit and you will find a small button called “Cards”. This will extract those phrases and arrange them into flash cards for study!

My practice is then to give students a copy of that list via email or in their lesson notes. They can themselves use Innovation’s Quick Flashcards app to generate their own drills for later.

The development of the improv app at Innovation has been a particularly exciting work. By incorporating elements of improvisation and conversation scaffolding, I’ve aimed to make language learning both engaging and effective for students in remote teaching contexts as well as for in-person learning. The app’s integration with other features such as proficiency level selection, themed dialogues, and real-time scoring ensures a comprehensive learning experience.

Introducing a New App: Ordered Lists

After a long hiatus while teaching social studies, I began a return to teaching French in 2018. I am a bit of a digital pack rat and was glad to find most of the teaching resources for French that I had developed in the 1990s still on an old hard drive. One of these is a unit for teaching a graphic novel called Astérix chez les bretons.

I found in that trove of activities a reading comprehension task that I had forgotten about: the ordered list or chronology. After reading the text and doing the usual vocabulary and comprehension kinds of tasks, I presented students a set of sentences where the events were out of order. On the worksheet, they were to number them in correct order according to the text. This was a great way to reinforce not only the events in the story, but more importantly the vocabulary and reading skills I was working to support.

I am currently teaching French online and one of my classes has chosen this graphic novel for a unit of study. Since I am teaching remotely, I want digital 21st century learning spaces instead of PDF worksheets. And so out of necessity was born this new app at Innovation, the ordered list.

The ordered list is simple: students either drag and drop or use the buttons to arrange the text boxes in order. They can check their progress as they go and submit a score when done. I can see how this would have been very useful when I was teaching history!

This needed to be easy for the teacher to create. It’s a snap: the teacher merely pastes in the ordered list and clicks a button to generate the activity.

As added features, one can attach a PDF document, an audio file, and/or embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. The student could be prompted to order the text boxes based on these sources.

The usual 21st century learning spaces features are integrated. Teachers will see in the audit when their students access the task and how long they spend on it. The proctor monitors access to the page and student attention. It’s easy to view the scores of grades are taken and to apply standardized scoring or any of the other Innovation features and functions.

Try it for yourself! Use this passcode to access a chronology task for the American Revolution at the Innovation TestDrive: 397Q-NMXL-A15625Z-9-JON

Teaching World Languages in a Digital Environment: “Scramblation”

Translation as a Strategy

Using translation with beginner language students is fraught with controversy. When I was in elementary school, the contemporary teaching methods for modern languages were phasing out from “grammar-translation” toward more communicative approaches. Translation came to be seen as antiquated, impractical, unnatural.

It cannot be denied that some criticism of translation, especially for beginners, is valid. I cannot help reflect on some brilliant students I have had over the years who, by French III, had become held back by their insistence on mentally translating everything before they wrote or spoke. Their focus on the rules, the words, the syntax, the burden of feeling like they must not err, all conspired to leave them tongue-tied and frozen whenever they were called upon to improvise speech or writing.

Nonetheless, I find in my experience that there is a place for translation in novice language lessons. Students should learn the ways that the target language differs from their own so that they gradually learn to avoid applying the syntactical patterns of their own language. The also need to be able to discern morphological differences in the target language that may be slight to their eyes but which meaning can vary significantly. Finally, it is a good way for novices to learn the longer, whole functional phrases that are a part of the earliest stages of learning before grammar has been taught to let them synthesize their own utterances.

Barriers to Using Translation to Teach Novices

Limited vocabulary is the first barrier to using translation to teach novices. In the textbooks at the start of the 20th century, each chapter had a very controlled vocabulary that was repeated in reading and translation exercises. Many of us no longer teach that way. I teach through theme units. The unit has a lot of vocabulary but the higher order language work is not limited to that as a controlled vocabulary list. Narratives and authentic texts, even listening practices, while selected with difficulty in mind, do in fact include words and structures the student may not yet have been taught. The advantages of this approach are well known and it is common practice now. Among other things, the student learns the very functional skill of deriving meaning from context, selectively ignoring incomprehensible utterances in favor of the meaningful, and perhaps learning new words from context.

The second barrier to teaching with translation is, naturally, grammar. Good grammar exercises that use translation have to be very controlled to account for irregulars and inconsistencies that most language boast of. At the very early stages, novices has so little grammar under their belt that translation may not prove worthwhile. Or, the cognitive load of balancing all the rules will render the exercise useless for its purpose.

Here is What I Needed

I needed an app that would auto-correct and let students try again when they made errors. I needed limited vocabulary and limited grammatical competence to be largely irrelevant. I needed an interactive activity where students manage the syntax and recognize correct forms. I call the new app “scramblation”. It is a drag-and-drop interface where students assemble an utterance in the target language from a prompt that is either in text form or audio clip.

Translation plays a pivotal role in the process of studying a foreign language, serving as a valuable tool for language learners to bridge the gap between their native tongue and the target language. It offers learners a nuanced understanding of linguistic structures, idiomatic expressions, and cultural nuances, thereby facilitating a more profound comprehension of the language’s intricacies. Translating texts from the target language to one’s native language and vice versa enhances vocabulary acquisition, grammar proficiency, and overall language competence. It enables learners to decipher the meaning behind words and phrases, fostering a deeper connection to the cultural context embedded within the language. Moreover, translation exercises encourage critical thinking and analytical skills, as learners must carefully consider the nuances of each word and construct coherent and contextually accurate sentences.

A New App

Instructors can generate a new scramblation from the playlist of their course in Innovation. They enter a prompt, the correct answer, and some extra words. I link to use the extra words to enter un-conjugated verbs or words an English speaker might put in that would not go in the target language.

The prompt can be an audio clip (in which case the text prompt is hidden) and can include an image.

Students can see the task in their playlist and access to a scramblation can be made possible from a link in the lesson plan app or an external link that instructors can send to students.

The app itself is simple: first, students should remove any extra words by clicking the small red “x” in the word’s box. Next, the student drags and drops the words into the right order. They save their answer, check it, and the algorithmic AI will tell them how close they are.

Like all of the apps at Innovation, the scramblation has a proctor activated that tracks student activity on the page, including when they leave the page and how long they were working.

The importance of interactive web applications in the realm of remote teaching cannot be overstated. Interactive web applications emerge as powerful catalysts for student engagement, collaboration, and personalized learning experiences. The ability to seamlessly integrate multimedia content, real-time communication, and interactive assessments not only enhances the effectiveness of teaching but also empowers educators to adapt their pedagogical approaches to the diverse needs of their students.

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 3: Vocabulary Building

The Importance of Interactivity

The key drawback to early efforts at distance learning was being kind of trapped behind that camera like a goldfish in a bowl. You could make all the signs and signals you wanted, but the world on the other side of the glass was beyond your ability to control.

Teaching remotely is not highly effective when it consists of essentially just holding up things to the camera for the student to experience. Activate the Zoom – Skype – Meet – Teams session, share your PDF, give verbal instructions… this is a weak instructional practice mainly because it is largely passive for the student.

If the teacher were in a real classroom, tutoring the student at an honest-to-goodness table, the learning materials could be manipulated in real life in ways that support the process. They can fold the paper to hide the answer, they can shuffle the flash cards, they can write and cross out and scribble and erase. The manipulation of the learning materials is important.

The apps at Innovation are designed to promote the kind of virtual interactivity that heightens the effectiveness of teaching remotely. To be a great learning experience, the remote session needs to be virtually interactive in the same effective way that in-person lessons are. This is a big part of what we mean by the “21st century learning space”.

Flashcards

Let’s take up the example of teaching vocabulary using flashcards. In real life, I would want to use a process whereby I selectively show the student a new word, rehearse the pronunciation in some meaningful way, then cue up the words to rehearse the meanings.

Using the passive approach, I could share a PDF through the video conference software and “go over” the list with the student.

Using the flashcard app at Innovation, I can interact so much more effectively. To begin, I can select the target vocabulary word to display.

I prompt the student to repeat the pronunciation, then click to reveal the meaning.

Once we are through the list, I can repeat the process, only this time I can save out those items the student forgot.

Now we are only drilling those items. We can talk about mnemonic devices, use the words in sentences, or just repeat and rehearse. Once the student has the words down pat for recognition, I click Reverse Cue-Response to prompt from English cue.

Integrated Flashcard App

The improvised conversation app and the scaffold dialogue app both have integrated flashcards. During an improvised conversation task, the student may need to ask me how to say some words as we run through the conversation the first time. I list them for them in the textarea below the prompt.

So long as I pair the new phrases with an equal sign and a meaning, the app can generate a flashcard system right underneath after our conversation.

We can rehearse now the new words and phrases before we perform the dialogue once again.

Interactivity is Key

Being able to interact virtually over remote teaching sessions in ways that are as effective as in-person is absolutely necessary to achieve a satisfying learning experience that maximizes our effective use of time. The flashcard app at Innovation facilitates this process of simple cue-response training that is so foundational in teaching language. It allows me to go beyond just sharing my screen to “go over” a PDF!

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 2: Composition

Teaching composition in a world language is always challenging to organize and execute. In my experience, the best lesson series in supporting the development of strong composition skills consists in the following:

Students should have limited access to outside resources in composing their work. It’s too tempting, especially now, to use an AI translator.
Students should learn to avoid translating in their head from English to the target language. Instead, they should learn to “say what they can say, not what they want to say.”
Assessment should provide a clear and understandable measure of the value of the work product and a clear path to remediation for next time.

I started teaching in 1991 (I am now retired). Back then as a French teacher, the method for assessing student compositions involved marking off each clause, identifying each error, and checking whether the clause was comprehensible (to a native speaker accustomed to dealing with foreigners), appropriate (such that it built on the theme coherently; it “fit”) and had good form (no more than 1 error in grammar / conventions). This was abandoned in the later 1990’s for a rubric that was more consistent with other New York State Regents examinations of the time.

I think the only thing I like about the rubric assessment was that it considered the variety of vocabulary used. Otherwise, the rubric did not really satisfy what I wanted in an assessment for composition work and this rubric was far more subjective than I was comfortable with.

Teaching remotely, I wanted an app that met my criteria for supporting composition skills in the target language.

The first challenge was to limit the use of outside references. For this, I coded a sort of algorithmic surveillance AI that I called “proctor”. Proctor consists of a series of JavaScript functions that record when a student has resized a window, pasted text, “left” the page, or restarted the task. These actions are saved and reported to me when I assess the students’ work.

In the remote teaching situation that I enjoy at present, students do their compositions unsupervised for homework. The proctor allows me to curtail student access to other tabs because it announces in red text on the page whenever any of these “suspicious” actions occur. Although students may indeed use their phone separately on the side to confer, I can also check later in our debriefing by asking whether they know the leaning of one phrase or another.

The composition app for world languages allows me to present students a word bank. The word bank can be an antidote to mental translating because students can be taught to weave together meaning from words they have rather than get caught up on words they don’t.

The assessment process in the composition app works as follows. The instructor:

marks off the clauses for evaluation.
highlights each error.
assesses each clause for comprehensibility, appropriateness, and form.
assesses the whole composition for vocabulary “richness” (10% of the score).

This process lends itself well to debriefing because the errors can be studied directly and are readily observed.

A 21st Century Learning Space

The composition app is a 21st century learning space.

Training wheels are temporary assistive devices for young people learning new things. They are a modification to the program that is usually temporary; a scaffolding that brings students upward in the zone of proximal development. The composition app has space for a word bank to support composition from known lexical items.

Guardrails are there to protect us from error, safety features along the road at dangerous points to avoid a pitfall. The composition app includes an algorithmic AI to monitor student activity and discourage assistance that would not be appropriate.

21st century learning spaces lend themselves to debriefing: they are designed such that the anonymous presentation of teacher-selected student work is easily generated for debriefing. The composition app is readily shared with the student and the assessment page is clear and easy to understand. When I debrief these, I paste the student composition into another screen and go over the relevant errors.

21st century learning spaces are a Swiss army knife. Such collections of applications serve many functions from the same core. The composition app saves the composition prompt in a database whose elements can be re-used.

21st century learning spaces are those where the teacher rules the roost and student privacy protection is a high priority. Locus of data control is with the teacher. The teacher can view the composition as it’s being composed and has ownership over the final product.

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 1: Rapport Building

Since September, I have had the distinct pleasure of working part-time for a company based in California that offers remote middle and high school credit-bearing courses in world languages. LanguageBird is perfect fit for a retired public school teacher and I am very contented working for them (not a paid promotion).

The pandemic placed we public school teachers in the position of teaching remotely, some for the first time. A lot of that went poorly in some places, but in other places it went pretty well. My work teaching remotely now has given me the chance to re-explore online teaching practice and the kinds of 21st century learning spaces that meet the needs of that situation.

Besides my work for LanguageBird, I also am enjoying teaching a remote French class for the public school district from which I retired last June. This is very different from LanguageBird in many ways and teaching in both contexts has provided a wealth of interesting experiences that I feel are instructive. In this series of posts, I would like to share my experiences and conclusions as well as the apps I am developing to support remote teaching.

In the public school remote teaching context, we had set it up as a daily synchronous class. This was informed by our pandemic experience that asynchronous courses are a bad idea for most adolescents. It is a small class of five, two for French III and three for college French, credited from a local community college who approved my application to work as adjunct for them in a high school. Each school day during period 2, I fire up a Google Meet and students log in. They are supervised by a language teacher (Spanish).

We (administration and I) were concerned that remote teaching made it difficult to maintain the kind of teacher-student rapport that was so necessary for learning. I suggested that I work in-person for a half day at the end of each marking period (ten weeks) to teach a class and meet with students individually so they can present their projects and practice French conversation. (The district is a 45-mile commute for me one-way, so going in-person for one daily class was not practical.)

At LanguageBird, we only teach one-on-one lessons. I find this extremely useful, so from start I modified my public school lesson plans such that I would only teach whole-group for the first 15 minutes and then each student would have an individual “tutorial” with me for the balance of the time. This turned out to be a fantastic idea and I am guessing the students like it too.

During the pandemic in my district, we had two days to launch into teaching by video-conference (Here is a post on my experience teaching during the pandemic). My current students, many of whom were then in my sixth grade social studies class back in 2020, had a mostly negative experience learning online in general. I felt strongly motivated to demonstrate from the start of the school year that this remote learning experience would not be like that. The first upgrade I made to what I was doing in 2020 was to focus on individual lessons over group lessons.

I think of positive rapport as being a trusting sense of mutual goodwill between an instructor and a pupil. Building a positive rapport with students is extremely important. I had the sense that this was possible only to a very limited degree in remote learning. However, I now stand corrected. In remote instruction over video-conferencing, it is necessary to favor one-on-one teaching situations.

Fostering positive rapport extends not to just being present to interact one-on-one. It is also built on online software applications that foster efficient and readily accessible learning interactions for delivery, practice, evaluation, and debriefing.

Next post: teaching composition to world language students remotely.

Innovation … What’s in a Name?

InnovationAssessments.com brings to mind a testing service. And so it once was!

Was…

But the pandemic spurred its growth toward the full online teaching platform that it is today!

Not to disparage our educational testing apps. This platform started out twenty-odd years ago as a test generator for multiple-choice tests. The test generators, test question bank management apps, secure online testing, and algorithmic AI-assisted scoring of short answer tests and summaries makes it a powerful tool in your teacher’s toolbox.

But…

While we kept the name (Do you realize how hard it is to rebrand a website?), we are more than our name! I invite the reader to explore the collection of apps that makes this a top-notch teaching platform.

For starters, Innovation evolved under the demands of real teachers and students in real classrooms. As my colleagues and students shared suggestions for apps and upgrades over a decade, I modified and adapted the software. My coding students were assigned to try to hack it; I built defenses. My teacher colleagues had lots of ideas for ensuring assessments integrity. We collaborated to built something reliable and intuitive to use.

It is difficult to compose a promo for Innovation because by the time we list all the features, we have lost the attention of the reader.

Lesson Planning

The first thing that I did not like about Google Classroom was how clumsy it was to communicate assignments to kids. I don’t like the comment stream approach. And what about students who are ahead and want to see what tomorrow holds? The planning app at Innovation is the first thing students see when they navigate to their course playlist. They see this week and all the assignments. They can jump to them from the planner or scroll down the playlist. There is a custom note option just for today’s lesson.

Curating Resources

It is important to me to be able to effectively curate my resources; my links to assignments on and off Innovation. I want to be able to hide things until the time is right, lock tests with a key code, schedule the visibility of tasks to the best moment, and so forth. Innovation possesses all of these features and more for efficient curating of class online resources. Link to Google docs and website of any kind, manage who has access and when, hide unit plans for next school year.

But it is also easy if you curate your resources elsewhere!

Many subscribers to Innovation curate their links at Google Classroom or other platforms. Well, most use Google Classroom… But that’s okay! Innovation is a verified app on the Google system. You can embed a link to your Innovation task on Google classroom and after a quick authentication app, students are engaged in the day’s lesson.

Proctor

The proctor at Innovation is an algorithmic AI that monitors and reports on student activity. My colleagues and I wanted to know whether students were really watching our video assignments or whether they were pasting in text in some places; we wanted to know how long it took students to do a task and when they logged in and from where. Proctor AI gives detailed information about what students are doing online in your 21st century learning space.

Study Apps

The Tutor app and the flashcard system are perfect for drilling terms and facts.

The algorithmic AI coach advises students on short answer, summaries, and outlines based on a corpus of models on which they were trained.

Modifications are easily made to drills to accommodate special needs.

Innovation has what your students need to study and what teachers need to scaffold their objectives to individual needs.

The Etude

The Etude is our favorite app. Teachers embed a lesson in video, PDF, and/or audio format and include guiding questions. There is note-taking space for students. The Etude is the perfect tool to curate deliverables online in 1:1 laptop classrooms or in remote teaching situations.

Merit Badges

Manage merit badges to chart progress. Invent your own or import ours. As students earn new skills, automated badge awards provide visual evidence of progress.

Ventura!

Students love playing this Jeopardy-like game. It is easy for teachers to generate games from their test question banks. Suitable for in-person or remote learning situations, the Ventura game is a hit with students.

Why not try it out!

Look, I know we’re a small startup company, unknown and not really able to compete with Google, Scoology, and the big names.

But…

This platform has a lot going for it.

Managing Student Accounts at Innovation

In response to teacher requests over the years, there are a number of different ways to add student sub-accounts to your virtual classroom at Innovation.

Self-Registration

It’s best to just have students register themselves in your virtual classroom. There is a link provided on the Students tab in your teacher dashboard. The links are on the left.

One link is generic, allowing students to create sub-accounts using a password or using Google Sign-in.

One link is specific to Google Sign-in. Send this one if no one is using username-password. You can always switch later if you want.

Import Student Roster from Google Classroom

If you are integrating Innovation tasks into your Google Classroom, you can import the rosters.

Adding Students Manually

Teachers can just add students manually using the Add Student app. The app will create a unique username from the student’s first and last names. You can optionally assign students to a class. More about enrollment below…

Adding Students via Spreadsheet

Teachers can upload a spreadsheet of student data and let Innovation create the accounts from there. Teachers who do this must use the XLSX template provided.

class_roster_template Download

Expiration Dates on Student Accounts: Commercial Licenses versus Free Licenses

Teachers who have a commercial license to Innovation can manage expiration dates on student accounts. This is useful, for example, if you are working for a tutoring service and you are charging students to access your virtual classroom for a certain period of time.

Teachers with Free Licenses do not have expiration dates on student accounts and need to manage them manually.

When a new student is added for commercial accounts, it is by default created for two days at first. Teachers need to add time. Manage student account expiration dates in Students :: Student Account Expiry.

How Students Access Innovation

There are three ways students can log in to Innovation:

Google Sign-in
PIN + Virtual Room Number
Virtual room number + username + password

Google Sign-in

If you are using Google classroom and plan to integrate Innovation tasks into that platform, this is your best choice. Students will already have Google accounts and they can sign in without remembering an extra password.

Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) are for students under 13 because students must be 13 or older to use the Google Signin or username-password methods. But you can use this for any of your students. Teachers need to activate the PIN system and can optionally allow access this way only from certain IP addresses. For example, I have set this up so that my students could only use the PIN from my school.

Username + Password

The traditional way to log in also still exists at Innovation. Students need to know your virtual classroom number, their username assigned on account creation, and a password. The teacher controls the passwords.

The Quick Login Link

If a student cannot log in because they have forgotten their password, you cans end them a quick login link. This link will automatically log students in without a password, Google authentication, or PIN. It only works once and the link is only good for two hours.

Manage Course Enrollment

Teachers can now restrict access for students to certain courses in their virtual classroom at Innovation. By default, enrollment is “open”, meaning students can freely access any course.

For teachers who need to restrict access by students to a certain course, there is an app to manage enrollment. Access the app from Students :: Student Accounts Management :: Manage Course Enrollment. From here, follow instructions to restrict enrollment and then assign students to a class.

Commercial licensees will find this useful if they are charging for access to a course and need to prevent free access to courses for which students have not paid.

Successful Students Share Their Secret for Online Learning

In mid-May 2020, we were finishing up 2 months of remote learning during the pandemic. I conducted a study to find out what I could learn from the students who were very successful learning online remotely.

Twenty-one respondents to a survey asking successful online learners to report on the “secrets” of their success collectively present a profile of the student who will likely do well in asynchronous distance learning conditions. These students are very self-directed, seldom needing much parent intervention or supervision. Most like working online because there are fewer distractions than in school and they can work on their own schedules and at their own pace. These students have a special place set aside for doing school work and mostly do their school work in one sitting rather than sporadically through the day. These students are not necessarily very academic-oriented in temperament and may not even prefer online learning because they miss their friends and teachers. When asked to advise their peers, common suggestions include ideas like planning out the working and break or recreation time, keeping checklists, and self-motivation strategies.

Besides answering my questionnaire, 14 of 21 respondents accepted my invitation to make suggestions for their peers about their secrets for online success. Their comments are as follows:

I think that it easier to get all of your work done during the same time because then that way you can have the whole afternoon to do whatever you want.
As the Nike logo says “Just Do It”! I try not to put stuff off, however I wish it will be over soon so we can have summer and do other productive things with my family.
i have a system that i follow and i check all classes my email old emails at least 19 times a day
I try to give myself some time in the morning to wake up and have some time to myself, like an hour, then I start my day and work until lunch most times which I then take another hour or two to rest, finally I work until I am finished with little breaks and end most of the time right before dinner. I would say just try to get it done early then you could look forward tp having the rest of the day and if you get ahead then at the end of the week you could possibly have friday off, like I do. Also, just try and not get distracted and if you need to tell your siblings/parents/guardians you need quiet, my mom has learned that she can’t talk to me when I am doing school.
Something that motivates me is when I can take a 5-10 minute break between each subject. I use my RC car for this. While it is charging (it usually takes 45 minutes to charge) I do some work, and when it is done (it has a 10 minute run time) I go out and drive it.
I find that it helps to have a list of what I have to do and when they are due. This helps me to prioritize and not stress out as much about my work. I also tend to do my work in the morning. This way I have time to do my work and I can get it all done early. If I forget about an assignment, this also allows me to do it before it is due.
i just think that after i do all my work i can go out an do anything i want the rest of the day so i use that to motivate me
having parental involvement keeps me on task or i wouldn’t stay on task. My parents also checking power school regularly. I do struggle because i’m not getting as much assistance as i would during school.
Make sure to hunker down and just do your schoolwork. try to follow pretty much the same schedule every day and not get into a mindset of “I have all day to finish”, because chances are you’re just gonna keep on putting it off.
Well about the distractions. The main distraction I have at home and not school is food. Now that I am at home there are lots of food breaks.
I think a schedule is really important. Not only does it limit the amount of distractions in the day, but allows you to get through your work without missing anything or falling behind. I was home schooled before I came hear, and sometimes it’s nice to set apart time where you can watch a show or a play a game or something, that way you don’t feel as inclined to take a break in the middle of your work. That’s all the advice I got! 🙂
‘m getting better grades doing the online learning, but I don’t really like it because I’m not getting the same interactions with teachers and friends that I can get when I’m physically in school.
For me, I do a few hours of school work in the morning and then a few hours of it in the afternoon. I always take about an hour or two for a break in between those times. That break is very nice, and relaxing. I either go for a walk, or try to do another activity that is not school related. I find if I do not take that break, I get too overwhelmed. Questions 2 and 3: My parents check up on me, to see how I am doing. But they do not watch over me. Also, my parents trust that I am getting all the school work in on time, so they do not enforce too many rules, because I stay on top of it myself.