Kami is your digital pen and paper! This classroom app helps students engage and interact with their reading and writing material. Plus, it’s free. There’s an upgrade option for a cost, but the free option has enough great features. First, you create an account. You decide the format of your account: I originally chose “Open from computer” and uploaded a PDF from my computer as a trial. But then I found opening from Google Drive was easier to organize and use/share documents with students. However, whether you use the Google option or not, both set-ups are easy to navigate and use with students. For students, they need to go to www.kamiapp.com and click “Sign In.” They will be given a choice like the blue boxes above. They can type in their email address. Then, they go back to Google Drive and find the document that needs to be opened. Click on the assigned document. Click on the three dots in upper right hand corner and click “open in new window.” A new screen will pop up. Now, choose to “Open with” and from drop down box, choose “Annotate with Kami.” NOTE: If students don't have Google accounts, they still open an account with their school email. In whatever fashion they receive the documents from you, they would just open the document from their computer via Kami. A new window with Kami’s tools will appear. It will look like this: You can see all the tools available on the left side. The images with a yellow lock are not available with free option. However, you can see plenty of tools available with the free account. Students will be able to highlight, comment, write, and draw on this reading assignment. Super! For this reading assignment, we might ask students to yellow highlight three drink vocabulary words, green highlight three dessert vocabulary words, etc. Next, we might ask students to write their opinions about three of the meals. Perhaps we will ask them to comment on a food item that looks appealing or new to them. Important! Make sure the document is saved during and after the assignment is completed. Now, it is loaded to the Google Drive. For students, they will need to return to Google Drive. There is a box that says “Turn In,” so upload the assignment there. In the drive, they should see this reading assignment as a recent document.
We gave this example with a reading strategy, but this could work with a worksheet that simply asks students to write and/or draw answers. Also, if you have a document you will be teaching from, students can open it and take notes on it as you teach. In review, why would you want to use Kami?
NOTE: We mentioned Kami in our webinar, "Tools for Teaching World Languages at Distance."
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NOTE: All of the following information is available in our webinar, "Tools for Teaching World Languages at a Distance."
****** Teaching world languages via distance learning... exciting or overwhelming? Stressful or innovative? Tiring or energizing? A time to coast or a time to prosper? Teaching and learning? Depending on the day and the class, the circumstances might change your answers to those questions. As fellow French teachers with you, we’d like to share some of our favorite (and easy) resources we have found to use with students during our time of distance learning. As language teachers, we are always focusing on the core skills of language (reading, writing, listening and speaking) and how to incorporate those so that students are met with lower order thinking up to higher order thinking. Meeting Reading and Writing Core Skills Incorporating reading and writing is a bit more conducive to distance learning than listening and speaking. There is a plethora of ways you can ask students to read and write. We like Kami and Boom Learning digital task cards. Check out the detailed and more in-depth explanation of how those work in these blog posts: Digital Pen and Paper with Kami and Boom with Writing. Meeting Listening and Speaking Core Skills Getting students to listen and speak the target language is a bit trickier with distance learning. We have found these two resources to be effective: Boom Learning task cards and FlipGrid. We offer 10 different ways to create listening activities in your Boom cards in our blog post HERE. Boom lacks the speaking capability, so that’s why we have incorporated FlipGrid for speaking purposes and explained it HERE. With FlipGrid, it works simply like this: Teacher posts a video with a prompt/discussion/question. Students respond with a recorded video. Classmates respond to each other with additional videos or emojis. It is very easy to see who is replying to whom. It is fun... and the best part? Students are SPEAKING in the target language. Check out the blog post for more detailed ways to get started and use it in the distance learning classroom. There are so many other resources available for world language learners and distance learning. We wrote out this list of other resources you might want to try. Which mentioned resources have you tried? Which one(s) do your students especially like? Do you have any suggestions for us? Let us know! [email protected] |
Who are the Hobbs?Originally, we are from the Midwest and the East; however, our paths took us to Angers, France where we met and fell in love. Archives
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