Chatbots to the Rescue: 8 Time-Saving Ideas for Busy ESL Teachers

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  1. Imagine having a tireless, always-available language tutor for your students – that’s the magic of chatbots! Can they replace teachers? Of course not! They are never ever going to substitute teachers. But, can they help students when teachers are not available? There you have it!  Chatbots are fun, interactive, and students can practise anytime, anywhere.

I tried and tested my first chatbot  in early February and wrote about it here. They worked so well that I have been on a creation spree, designing and testing chatbots for different purposes.

Ready to see my chatbots in action? Below these lines, you will find a cool interactive infographic below  -created with Genial.ly-  showcasing eight ideas to use chatbots in your classroom.

Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find:

  • Practice Conversations: Role-play everyday scenarios like ordering food or asking for directions with an anonymous chatbot, or talk about the environment with King Charles III.
  • AkAInator chatbot. A fun and engaging chatbot where students guess worldwide characters using yes/no questions. Enhances critical thinking and deductive skills
  • Grammar Drills: Get personalized feedback on sentence structure and verb tenses.
  • Pronunciation Perfection: This chatbot serves as a personal language coach, focusing on enhancing pronunciation through interactive practice and instant feedback. Ideal for integrating into language lessons to boost students’ confidence and accuracy in speaking
  • Grammar Quiz. Let chatbots design personalized quizzes based on learned material. Include explanations for correct and incorrect answers to aid in comprehension.
  • Topic-Related Conversations suggesting target vocabulary. This chatbot enhances vocabulary and grammar through interactive dialogue on travel topics, offering instant feedback and tailored suggestions
  • Interlinguistic Mediation. A language practice chatbot focusing on summarizing and paraphrasing Spanish texts about the environment into English. Enhances language proficiency and comprehension through guided practice. Teachers can use it to support students in improving their language skills.
  • Giving Feedback on Book Reviews. Students will write or paste their book reviews here and the chatbot will provide personalized feedback.

How to use the infographic. Click on the three dots to expand the Genial.ly and then hover over the texts. The text in bold will take you straight to the chatbot, and +info will explain what the chatbot does. Enjoy!!

 

I have used Mizou to create the chatbots. Mizou is surprisingly user-friendly, and I’d love to help you get started. Imagine the possibilities: personalized practice for specific topics, grammar drills that fit your curriculum, even cultural guides for exploring different customs!

Intrigued? Shoot me an email at cristina.cabal@gmail.com and let’s chat about how to bring chatbots into your classroom.

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Let’s Move!!!! A Simple Low-Prep Speaking Activity to Revise Vocabulary

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Hello hello! Still enjoying Easter holidays? Yeahhh me, too! So, I just wanted to pop in real quick with an activity I think might make going back to the grind a little bit easier.

What are the main goals of this activity?

  • Revise and activate newly-acquired vocabulary
  • Reinforce how to formulate questions
  • Boost students’ speaking abilities
  • Introduce movement in the classroom: gallery walks
How to do it
  • Write six to eight words or expressions you want to revise on cards, big enough to see from a distance. Stick them on the walls of the class for everybody to see.
  • Depending on the number of students in your class, ask them to work in pairs or groups of three. For each word on the wall, the group must think of an open question using the target vocabulary.
  • Walk around the room and help with grammar and spelling.
  • Once the group have their question, ask them to write it on a post-it note or a scrap of paper and put it next to the target word on the wall.
  • When they have finished and all the questions are displayed on the walls, ask learners to stand up and, in new groups, do a gallery walk discussing the questions.

No Batteries Required: A Translation Game with Tic Tac Toe

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Who can resist playing tic-tac-toe with a wooden board and small wooden Xs and Os? If you can’t, then you’re gonna love this game!

Do you like giving your students short translation activities? I do. They allow me to target specific vocabulary and grammar structures and help students to make fewer mistakes.

So, Tic Tac Toe or a translation exercise? Why not have both?  I’ve had this version of a tic-tac-toe game sitting on the shelves for some time now, but life! Time! Work! Life! More work! You get it.

Recently I’ve met several teachers who shared how much they have enjoyed the games I have published on the blog over the years, and though it is not the best time of the year for me, this encouraging feedback gave me the push I needed to sit down and write this post. So, let’s dive right in!!

First things first. You know how to play Tic Tac Toe, right? Well, if you have never played, I suggest you have a look at the rules before you continue reading. I had originally planned to play Tic Tac toe with pen and paper, but then, I saw these beautiful miniature sets. They were inexpensive, so I bought 14 – one for each student pair.

Preparation
  1. Prepare some sentences to be translated. I would recommend, at least, 8 sentences.
  2. Ask students to pair up and explain how to play Tic Tac Toe, if necessary. One student can choose X’s, the other O’s
  3. Provide each student pair with a Tic Tac Toe game. Alternatively, you know, the pen and paper option.
  4. Students who choose X’s go first. They play against each other.
Time to learn!

  1. Display the first sentence for translation or, alternatively, write it on the board. All students have to translate the sentence, even though it’s X’s turn.
  2. Allow time for translation. The time will vary depending on sentence length and difficulty.
  3. When time is up, display the correct translation on the board. Be prepared to discuss and accept alternative translations, but emphasize the importance of accuracy. Small mistakes or typos will result in an incorrect sentence. O’s can monitor X’s translations for accuracy.
  4. If X’s sentence is correct, they place their wooden X on an empty square. If X’s sentence is incorrect, but O’s sentence is correct, then O places their wooden O on any empty square. If both X and O have correct translations, X gets to place their wooden X (since it’s their turn).
  5. Display a new sentence for translation and repeat the procedure. Now, it’s O’s turn!.

Just like in regular Tic Tac Toe, the goal here is to be the first to score three of your marks in a row – horizontally, vertically, or diagonally! Don’t forget, you can block your opponent’s moves to prevent them from winning.

Keep on playing until you have run out of sentences to translate and have fun!!!

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Diffit: Your Go-to Tool for Differentiated & Inclusive Lessons

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Diffit: an IA free tool to easily create resources for differentiation and inclusivity.

I’ve been meaning to write about this website for a few months. To be honest, it is not just this website I’d like to write about but some others as well. The problem with me is always lack of time. Juggling being a full-time teacher, a part-time tech coach, mum, housewife, friend, daughter, and blogger is difficult. You can relate, can’t you? Every time I swear I am going to write about them all, something comes across, and I feel I must write about that “something” first.

But today I have decided to forget about all the other things and write about Diffit. Why? Because I think it is a great tool and can help reduce your workload a lot, especially if you are a primary or secondary teacher and have students with different learning needs.

So, What is Diffit, and how can it help you? To put it simply, Diffit  tailors learning for every student and easily convert any content to all reading levels.

It generates texts in three different ways:
  1. By searching for a topic, theme or question
  2. By pasting a URL of an article in a website or a YouTube Video
  3. By copy/pasting a text
  4. By uploading a PDF
You, then, choose
  • the reading level (from 2nd grade to 11+ grade-you can also keep the original text)
  • the language

More about Diffit to keep in mind
  • It has a very generous free version and works in 68 languages
  • Diffit magically adapts any text, topic, article, YouTube video with a URL to any reading level.
  • Besides the reading text, it also provides:
  1. a summary of the text
  2. key vocabulary words
  3. multiple choice questions about the text (by default 3 questions) but you can add more) and the answers to the questions
  4. short answer questions (again, by default it creates 3)
  5. open-ended prompts
  • You can edit, add and copy the generated text and resources.
  • You can translate the adapted text into 68 languages, making your classroom more accessible to all students.
  • You can get the student activities in PDF format for free.

Ready to try Diffit?

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Politics: Biden and Trump Visit my Class. A Lesson Created with AI.

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Picture this. Me announcing to my C1 students that the next lesson in the textbook was going to revolve around Politics. To be honest, any other year, I would have probably shared my students’ feeling of apathy or disinterest.  But this year I was really looking forward to this lesson as AI is shaking things up in my English class!

Imagine my students’ jaws dropping when I announced a class debate featuring… wait for it… virtual versions of Biden and Trump! And both using the vocabulary we have been studying, revising and reinforcing.

In this lesson for C1 students, you will find

  • Tailor-made texts using specific vocabulary
  • Talking avatars reading these texts to create a listening comprehension activity
  • Mediation activity using the talking avatars and the texts
  • Speaking activity using target vocabulary

How I Did it

Using ChatGPT to Generate Text Using Target Vocabulary

Prompt: You are an English teacher. Write a text divided into paragraphs. Each paragraph should be preceded by a heading. The headings should be: economic policies and immigration policies. Write it from a Republican point of view. Write a short paragraph for each heading, using C1 English and include such as the verbs benefit, trigger, boost, undermine, bankrupt, to earn peanuts, to be into, compound, combat, and lead

I repeated the same prompt but asking ChatGPT to generate the text from a Democrat point of view.

Listening Comprehension: creating talking avatars to read the text

I created two separate talking avatars. I created Joe Biden and uploaded the text generated by ChatGPT, and then did the same for Donald Trump, and uploaded them to YouTube. This step was important as I wanted to use Twee.com to generate the comprehension questions, which you can find here.

Mediation Activity

Download:  Joe Biden PDF, Donald Trump PDF

And … we shouldn’t let the visit of these two politicians to our class go to waste, so the next step will be to use these talking avatars for a mediation activity, hitting several birds with one stone.

  • help students boost pronunciation
  • help students boost speaking and mediation skills
Steps:

Note:The day before, I asked my students to bring their earbuds and mobile phone s with a QR Code reader installed for the next class.

During the class, I organized the students into two groups – Republicans and Democrats – and paired them up accordingly. I handed out copies with Joe Biden to the Democrats and photocopies featuring Donald Trump to the Republicans.

Aim: engage in a mediation activity by conveying the information to the other candidate using your own words.

Instructions:
  • Scan the QR code to listen to the candidate reading the text. Repeat as many times as necessary until you feel confident in pronouncing the vocabulary correctly.
  • Take notes of what each candidate says. Note: You don’t have to copy word by word.

Joe Biden:

C1 Politics Joe Biden by cristina.cabal
Donald Trump

C1 Politics D. Trump by cristina.cabal

  • Time allotted for individual work in this part: 15 minutes
  • Finally, pair up students and ask them to retell their part, trying to use the target vocabulary. This part might take another 15 minutes.
Speaking: Retrieval Practice
  • Give students one minute to write in their notebooks all the vocabulary words they remember from this unit.
  • When the minute is up, ask the students to say their words and write the most interesting ones on the board.
  • Put the students in pairs or groups of three, underline two/three words and ask students the first questions, asking them to try to use all or some of the words underlined on the board.

 

  1. How important is it for individuals to stay informed about current political events?
  2. Do you think there’s a growing sense of disconnect between politicians and the people they represent? Why or why not?
  3. What do you think are the most important qualities for a good leader?
  4. Do you think that social media can be used to trigger political polarization? If so, how?
  5. What are the most important factors that people consider when casting their vote?
  6. Does the current political landscape adequately represent the diverse voices and needs of society? If not, what needs to change?
  7. Are there particular areas of policy you’re interested in, like education, healthcare, or the environment?

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