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00:00:04
I'm an English teacher in Barcelona based in Barcelona I have 20 years um teaching experience with teenagers and most recently I also have um a teenager at home as a mom so I'm surrounded by teenagers 247 now which is amazing I would say pretty intense but um but really cool nevertheless so all right so this is our this is our plan for our session hold on let me I went I went ahead of myself there you go so this is the plan for our session first of all we're going to look at what teenagers nowadays are like and I'll

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need your help with that um and then we're going to look at how to take advantage of those features and incorporate them in our classroom so how to teach the alpha Teens and I'll give you some tips and show you some sample activities that have worked well in my lessons one of the first tips is this here you can see my Alter Ego use loads of images and gifts and I I love gifts so anyway so without further Ado um first of all I wanted to say thank you thank you thank you to Emily Bryson and

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to hold on I learn his name I hope gak yeah I I think I got it right this time hopefully if there's um if there are people from Poland you can you can um double check that I said it right he gave a session for McMillan on um how learning happens and why we should care connected with generations and teens and This was um great inspiration for the talk today and I also wanted to thank Emily Bryson because she did the sketch noting for this session so thanks a lot for my two sources of inspiration among

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others um we're talking here about the alpha generation or gen Z sometimes um it's called as well um the alpha generation is anyone who was born in 2010 or after so personally to me 2010 sounds like it's around the corner but it's already been 15 years and so 201 10 was when the first iPad was um invented when Instagram was launched so quite quite a long time ago actually all right so oops sorry I I don't know what I did I just clicked on the link there you go all right so this is where I need your

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help so my question is what are today's teens like and instead of doing it through the chat I've created this slido presentation so you can contribute your ideas in um in a word cloud so let me type the oh my God I'm sorry technology today is sort of playing up um let me show you this slide you can um you can screenshoot the picture or you can um go to slido.com ww.com and input this code hopefully I wanted to oh hi from Mexico okay okay done um instead of doing it through the chat it'd be great if you could do it

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through the slido link so we can all get a picture of how things work let me let me show you what you're actually writing there you go look see if you can I'll make it bigger for you so this is a word cloud the word cloud that you're creating with all your contributions so they're for example they're anxious they're tech savvy they're challenging they're artificial they're self-aware they're technological self-motivated uninterested depending on what okay some people in the chat are

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contributing as well oh you need the code please sorry yeah the code is right um thing is I can't I can send a message to everyone ah there you go yeah sorry the code is here um 1 12 98455 there you go so these are all the things that you're saying words that appear bigger um it's because a lot more people are saying them so Tech saavi easily distracted definitely Alisia is going to talk about distractions in the teenage classroom later they're creative on the other hand so not everything is

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bad they're sensitive they're challenging they're digital natives they're smart technological Sigma exactly Sigma skib yeah all these things um they're understanding they're a lot more empathetic than we think sometimes vulnerable independent short attention span obviously unfocused I think this is linked communicative okay open-minded sassy yeah there's a lot of sass in teenag I think that some people are saying in the chat Dynamic insecure addicted to social media um creative all right so that

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gives us sort of a picture of where we're at and the cool thing is that we're from way I mean different countries from all over the world I we're seeing turkey Ukraine um Argentina Uruguay kathan um I mean there are loads of different places but there's a common ground right there's a commonality between teenagers in all these different places so this means we have some sort of groundwork to work with or Saudi Arabia as well Sri Lanka Colombia yeah sorry I'm forgotting I'm forgetting

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countries because there's so many hello from Peru okay Hi Jacqueline so anyway this is our starting point this is what we need to work with this is what we have or who we have in the classroom right so what I wanted to do with you now is to look at these features and see how we can incorporate them in our classroom so and the name of the uh tool is slido slido.com it's similar to Mente yes slido and you can create word clouds like this all right so let me go back to the presentation and

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let me show you the first feature that I've chosen um which is empowered I think you will all agree that teenagers nowadays are quite empowered they they think yeah they know um they're very critical with things they're very inquisitive they ask lots of questions they always want to know why why things are this way why they're doing this why it works this way um but they're also at the same time aware of world issues and what's going around them so how can we deal with this in the classroom what can

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we do to make sure that we address these sort of features and integrate them well the first thing is designing challenging tasks that connect the classroom with the real world I think this is essential and then another thing that we could or should do um is be open to suggestions and show that we are active listeners and trying to provide Choice whenever this is possible and um I know from my experience not only in the classroom but also at home so trying to to be active listeners trying to be open to what the

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teenager in front of you has to say because often their opinions and their suggestions are really valid and very interesting so exactly engaging them in activities making them involved totally yeah all of this goes along these lines and I wanted to show you this tool that I use very often with my students it's called wheel of names this is just one of the websites you can use but there are many and this is basically an interactive wheel with their names you can see here these are my real students

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names they were working in groups of three and we were about to do a project and so there were a list of topics for them to choose from but of course there's always some conflict because more than one group wanted to choose the same topic and I thought that was not very appropriate because I wanted to cover all the topics and so um I created this wheel with their names and how it works is that you spin the wheel and the group or the person whose name appears here in front of the arrow is like the

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winner and so gets to pick first so this is really easy it's really easy to make it took literally 30 seconds copy paste the names um and it's hassle free because I was I was not um forced to choose anything it was the wheel who did it so basically they couldn't complain and they got the idea that I was listening to them I was letting them choose without me taking the decisions so that worked really really well oh hi from Vos hi Yolanda okay the name of the last tool we wheel of names maybe I

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don't know hopefully exactly all right so next um feature that I wanted to discuss with you is global this is global teachers Festival I mean actually we're here together from all around the globe but um te teenagers nowadays are also Global Citizens and they're used to meeting people and connecting with people from all over the world be um through social media be through media games just meeting people for example here in Barcelona there are a lot of people International people um and so this is a huge difference between

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for example when I was um a teenager which is quite a few years ago because I'm an 80s child basically so um and this should be taken into account in our lessons because no matter if they're shy teenagers are very used to collaborating to interacting to talking to people to discussing things and I think this is something that we should regularly incorporate in our lessons and one way I do this in my lessons um which works really well and that's why I wanted to show you this is by doing pair

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challenges right partner challenges this one for example is called the irregular verb challenge you can imagine that it's to deal with irregular verbs which are not particularly fun to learn in fact and what I did was I created this chart here on the right and um students paired up in groups of two and they decided what kind of questions they wanted to ask their partner about which verbs and these are verbs that we had sort of gone over in class and studied and they also had the regular verb list at the end of

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their students book so they could check it if they had questions um and here to the left you can see all the scaffolding I came up with five different types of questions that students could ask each other and you can see that they they're awarded different um amount of points depending on their level of difficulty so for example translation questions are 10 points whereas reverse translation so from their mother tongue to English which is more difficult is 15 points yes so um this scaffolding serves not only

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as an example for students but also as a tool to then use when they're asking their Partners so they don't say um break but they ask so how do you say break in Catalan for example Catalan is most of my students um mothertone and of course the points adds an element of competition gamification which always works great with teenagers um I've created a um PDF from this template so I can give you the link later where you can download it at the end of the session if you like and um and now let

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me give you a couple of samples real samples this is Aran and Paul for example you can see Aran was asking Paul and Paul got all the answers right he got 130 points Aran got eight out of 10 answers right he got 105 points which is actually really good and then here you can see danela who was working with Ugo they could only ask each other or danela could only ask Ugo five questions and she colorcoded them which is linked to Anna's session yesterday right um and here Isabelle also colorcoded the

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questions and you can see she didn't use any translation questions only difficult questions right pronunciation spelling reverse translation so the level of the students can be tweaked to their choice all right more things um I also wanted to discuss this visual element I started my presentation with a gif of me saying hello I love this kind of things um and I think it's essential to incorporate different sort of media images icons audiovisual contents in the lessons because uh teens nowadays um are

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very Visual and they're used to the visual element surrounding them so how can you incorporate images in the classroom this is a an activity I love and I do almost every week um I've used it as a warmup at the beginning of the session or as a wrap up at the end of the session and this is an activity that I learned from a fellow teacher from Spain from Madrid called SATA and you can find her on Instagram under the the handle teaching teup and so this is something that I do with my students I

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project this sort of Nine Square grid and this is called on a scale of in this case I chose Harry Potter on a scale of Harry Potter because I have a lot of potterheads in my classes and so they all get very excited to see Harry Potter and the question I ask my students this time is how are you feeling today and why so the students have to choose which Harry Potter they're feeling like and why why the beauty of this is that the images sort of hint toward a feeling but they're not limited so for example in

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number three you could say he is worried he's sad he is absent minded something like this so I mean it's open to interpretation so now I'm asking you 30 seconds how are you feeling today and why if I have to give an example which I always do with my students I would say I'm feeling like number eight so I would say ecsta because I'm delighted to be here again this is my second year here and I'm delighted okay so let me see your numbers and your reasons which Harry Potter are you feeling like so like

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number nine okay like number one happy to be here like number one three it was a busy day yeah I can imagine eight four du due to weather oh I hope it's not too cold there three tired okay three very early in the morning okay eight good news yeah one fine okay so energized about the techniques glad to hear that that's really cool happy to be here curious lots of AIDS so that that's great lots of ones happy to be here number three tired I can imagine it's been a long day in any case this works

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great with teenagers again it ties in with expressing their feelings social emotional learning so it's always a hit every time I do it one more thing that you mentioned and that I also totally agree with is that teenagers nowadays are digital natives or so-called digital natives because um they're very good at things like Tik Tock video editing typing really fast on their phone things like this but for example they might not be as efficient um sharing files on Google Drive or editing text or sending an email and not

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writing everything in the subject matter so they're digital natives with some things but not all of them right yeah Grace says yet they cannot figure out how to attach a document on an assignment exactly so so I would say digital natives so selective digitally natives right they use it for their own benefits exactly that so they're probably very good at what they're interested in which might not exactly be academic right and that's why um yeah AR saying for social media yeah social

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media they're really really really good at so I believe given these um characteristics that we should definitely integrate technology in our classrooms but do so in a sensible way trying to select the most appropriate tools and showing them how to use them not only in the classroom but also outside the classroom because email for example is not only a school thing although teenagers nowadays see it only as a school thing but um but it will be a work thing as well someday so I think it's essential to show them the

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existence of these tools and teach them or like help them to learn learn how to use them be it web tools be it spell Checkers dictionaries or AI for example and so one of the things that I show my students that I really like is word reference um this is basically my go-to dictionary and um I show them this dictionary because it works really really well um and so by the end of the first term I I drill my students and I encourage them drill SL encourage them to use um word reference refence instead

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of Google translate or instead of chat GPT all the time and um by the end of the first term I usually ask them okay so if you have a question and you need a dictionary what you going to use and they usually um shout word reference as in like Ghostbuster sort of thing so yeah I I use word reference all the time yeah Rome you say word reference is great exactly so yeah web web dictionary I mean there are lots of dictionaries Dan is saying you use lingu lingu is also really good and of course teaching

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them how to use dictionary is useful an online dictionary obviously is is really useful something else that I also um use with my students a lot and also use myself as a teacher is language tool language tool is a great um spellchecking device what spellchecking tool more than device um yeah Lis is saying it's environmentally friendly too exactly everything is online so um there's no need to download language tool on your computer it's just an extension on your Google Chrome which is

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very convenient and what I do is the first time I show my students this tool I give them these instructions that you can see on the screen it's a step bystep sort of guide of on how to install language tool in their computers and how to do it so make a copy of this document um make uh don't don't edit this document edit your copy change their name it's all very step by step because they're digital natives but not so much when it comes to editing um Google docs documents for example and this serves

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also as a checklist as a step-by-step checklist that the students can then follow and what I do with language tool um I get students to write their text by hand uh and then I collect them and give them feedback and then for the final version for the definitive version they type up their text which they take quite long with and um and then I asked them to correct their text with language tool so once they have their type text they make a copy they basically duplicate the text and using language tool they make

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all the corrections but they have to be a bit careful because um I tell them that language tool is a very useful tool but they should be critical they should be critical with the suggestions and I always give the same example in my case when I um type something on language tool and I mention my name waso always comes up as a mistake and I say well no language tool does not know that so is correct because it's my name so I shouldn't be blindfolded believing what the tool says but I should be critically

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taking a look so some of the corrections I accept some of the corrections I say no this is not correct or I don't like this and so um with language tools Corrections or suggestions um they highlight the changes they make in their text and then they collect all their mistakes in a learning Journal yes only saying same with translators you have to be critical exactly I'm I'm actually a translator um so like background wise and I think that's why I always have that in my head so thanks for your

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contribution Sonia and so anyway students take their mistakes their own individual mistakes and they um analyze them and classify them in a learning Journal using the correction code that I've given them at the beginning of the year which I also prepared for you to download if you like so I give them um groups of mistakes categories of mistakes and the students have to um put the their mistakes into the different categories and correct them so let me show you an example this is on the left is Mila's

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example uh you can see that she had a lot of spelling mistakes which she corrected some capitalization Mistakes One verb tense wrong word grammar preposition she corrected them and colorcoded them and then um to the right is Elena's learning Journal um she had quite a lot of spelling mistakes as well then some word order wrong word this really helps students to know what their weakest point is where they can improve and it's 100% personalized because there are these are only their own mistakes so

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categorizing yes Susan saying categorizing is great categorizing um shows that you've understood so it's a way of processing information all right and last but not least um saying great feedback thank you this is excellent idea thank you you um I do this with every text or like almost every text I write with my students and the first time took quite long for them to know the procedure to understand what they were going through understand how to install this extension and how it works but now they're like okay language

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tool learning Journal right yeah you know the drill so so they they know how to do it and it's fine and so I think this is the beauty of like teaching them because you're giving your students not only English in this case but also resources for their future life because personally a lot of you were saying that you also use language tool that you use lingua that you use word reference and these are all different tools that the students should be familiar with or like be able to use to their advantage in

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fact right all right so last but not least um something that I wanted to highlight as well from teenagers nowadays and you said it some uh some of you said um they're spoiled this is the downside of it right cuz a lot of them um have everything they want at their disposal they're spoiled for choice they have so much to choose from um which is really convenient it really works to their advantage but at the same time this is this is a disadvantage right that we should um deal with and so all of this

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wealth of resources is is great to cater for diversity because we know our classrooms are diverse always um and to offer personalization but at the same time I think I think we should use this opportunity um to help students and to ask students to gain ownership of what they're learning and to make them responsible and accountable for what they're learning because they have so much to choose from but they should know how to select how to use it and they should be able to analyze what the

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results are so in this respect I created this um tool that uh was inspired by my fellow teacher Anna here from catalunia um and I created this document called progress Journal basically a progress Journal um is like a diary a learning diary for the students to set weekly goals exactly neita saying guide them and guide them in their learning so I'm trying to help them to see what they want to achieve I'm giving them lots of ideas on what they can what they can achieve how they can achieve it so what

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they can do to um reach their goals and then I want them to look back the we after and reflect okay what did I actually do this week I said I would practice my listening did I really do that or not to what extent am I happy with the results what results did I see what was the sort of um highest or like hardest thing uh in in this week in my learning what do I need to do better or different or again yeah somebody's saying sort of coaching them through the progress Journal totally totally this is a bit of

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there's a bit of coaching in there too so let me show you how it works this is this is what I tell them about the progress Journal um they all have their individualized progress journals and they choose what kind of note most of them choose a notebook or a notepad and um I showed them my own because I personally started my own progress Journal as well um I'm learning Portuguese and so I wanted to do this myself as a student as an experiment um although I have to be honest with you I started uh writing it by hand and now

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I'm doing do it on a Google Docs so I'm I'm cheating there a little bit because I'm getting my students to do it by hand um but they could all choose their notebooks um some of the students were doing lettering in the cover and that was that was so cute it was really cool and so they felt very strongly they felt very attached to their um yeah to their journals and this is how we do it we do it in two different sessions one I I usually have two hours of English a week with this students these are um 14 15

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year old students level B1 but I mean it varies a lot some students are more like A2 and some students are more like B2 but in theory they should be at B1 level um and so one day on we usually we usually do this on a Thursday so one Thursday we take care of part one and two so in part one students set their objectives for the whole week objectives or just one objective I'm I'm always saying that less is more um and then they look for ways to achieve their objectives so the question is what would

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you like to achieve how would you like to achieve it to make them more realistic to make them more specific you know the more specific the goals the better and the more accountable I can make my student then and then this is what they do on Thursday of one week a week goes by and the following Thursday we look at part three which is the results and reflection so I ask my students to reread the objectives they said the week before and to think okay what did you really do what resources did you use um what was the hardest

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thing for you during the week and how do you feel and this last part is also regulating emotions and I get them to express them visually which is linked to uh Emily Bryson session yesterday right with the thermometer so let me show you a couple of examples this is the scaffolding that I use I mean I spent quite a long time or like session at least um going over the journal and giving them ideas there's a there's an additional worksheet that I give them full of ideas classified by skills which you can also um download um

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through this link I'll give you right now um and this chart sort of thing is scaffolding for the students so I gave them sentence stem sentence Beginnings to help those students who need extra support and I said I encourage you not only encourage you but it's great if you use these sentences no shame in recycling the sentences and so what this does is that anyone everyone and anyone can write their progress Journal no matter their level no matter their abilities in English um some students

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write a lot more some students write just this so a couple of sentences and one student cat actually said once but this is very little I'm like well if you do this every week this is not little this is a lot it is very doable every week because I don't know about you but um I've tried to go to the gym quite a few times and I start very very strong going trying to go there three times a week four times a week and then it just it just I mean it just Fades because the hype is low so yeah and so I'm trying to

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um show them that less is more exactly nether saying teaching them writing in a smooth way exactly needs to be nonpainful right so overcoming writer's block overcoming the fear of the blank page where do I start this is where you start you have some sentences that you can fill the gaps for and it's basically a gap F if you look at it and so anyone can do it and that's why with with this support students feel um really confident to do it so here for example is a student polls um journal for

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example he said this week I'm going to improve my listening and speaking to achieve my objectives I'm going to speak a lot in in my English class after school and watch a film or TV show in English with English subtitles this student um has after school English lessons but obviously not all of my students do and then the following week he said this week I watched two episodes of a TV show in English with English subtitles which is already great and I spent 2 hours and 45 minutes speaking

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English in English class after school what I found the hardest was understanding all the words in the TV show and what we were saying because students um then share their goals and their outcomes what we're saying is that do you really need to understand all the words in the film probably not right here is Mila and I wanted to show you an example of somebody who's not that happy with their goals too because MAA said this week I felt disappointed because I've only overcome or like achieve

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rather um half of my goal so the thermometer is sort of lower you can see and this is also okay I mean I tell them sometimes life gets in the way so we cannot be as ambitious as we set out to be a couple of more examp examples here on the left was Jana and Jana said at the end this week I felt happy because I understood some parts of the film so she set out to improve her speaking by watching a film and she did it here in the middle is Elena you can see Elena again Elena is actually much longer so

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she wrote quite a lot more um but she's not very happy with the result because she said after this week I don't feel bad but I'm not very proud of myself um because the objectives I had were not a lot and I didn't do it everything in any case so this is also self-reflection exactly they express the same themselves freely neita exactly and they also they're realistic I mean sometimes some weeks are better than others so here chabby for example the last example said I'm not really happy

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with the with the results because I didn't complete my goals at 100% um if you see yeah this is totally authentic Maria thank you um I don't correct this and the main focus is not on accuracy but on getting them to write yeah IR is saying self-criticism totally which graders are your students these are um 14 15 year olds so in in Spain this is SO3 exactly neita this is for fluency this is to get them to overcome their fear for English which is sometimes quite scary so all right this is basically it from

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me we're coming to the end of the session and I just wanted to recap all the ideas that we've um discussed basically the first thing is that it's very important to challenge students and Link the outside world with the classroom um oh Joanna is saying sometimes it's better to have less content but present it in a proper speed to follow and enjoy it okay I well I mean I I hope the rest of you are enjoying it thanks for the suggestion Joanna um in any case it's really important also to

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uh yeah Willie saying if you have any questions just put them in the Q&A so I'm trying to look out for the for the chat as well so it's really important to Foster interaction group work pair work um also to integrate the visual element we already said and also I have an example here with my bitmoji um if you're not familiar with bitmoji I also find it very useful um in terms of Technology trying to select appropriate tools use technology sensibly and trying to help them to learn how to do it to

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cater for diversity to personalize lessons but also to make them responsible for their own learning and accountable for their own learning and so this is basically um everything that I think should be born in mind in a teenage classroom nowadays