Bringing CI into the Online Classroom Part 2

Posts in this series:
Easily Adaptable Activities
CI Responses in Zoom (This post!)
Bringing CI into an empty digital class
Bringing CI into a traditional online Latin class
Using Brain Breaks Online

Introduction

As of now, I've spent one semester in a fully online teaching setting. I teach for two school settings, one in a course that is already written, with tests and course materials already created, and one in a course that I have full control over. I will be pulling from both experiences for these posts. They are not meant to compare and contrast the two types of schools (or my thoughts on them), but rather to provide support for online language teachers who may find themselves in either situation. :)

CI Responses in Zoom

One thing I've struggled with this semester is how to engage my students to elicit responses in a CI way (if you will) in an online classroom. Something I loved in the physical classroom was popping in and out of conversations, playing TPR games with students, and using my full range of physical motion to engage them with CI. The online environment doesn't allow for that unless you get creative. In this post, I'm going to share 5 ways to work with CI when it comes to engagement and response in the digital classroom:

1. Use the annotate feature in zoom. I talked a little about the annotate feature in my first post in this series and in the link above you can see my review of a lot of the live features in zoom. This has been a great way to engage with students and I can see things that I normally have to work much harder for in a physical classroom like how often someone specific responds. 

2. Make use of the chat and emojis! I always tell students there are three ways to respond: the microphone, the chat box, and using reactions. Emojis have become a go to for some of my students who don't want to turn the camera on or who are shy. When we do TPR and scavenger hunts, I say they can draw on the screen, find the object in real life, or find an emoji and put it in the chat. 

Students used the chat to show images of the Spanish I said out loud (listen and draw)

3. Encourage speaking and writing from the beginning. Use lots of activities like dictations, calendar talk, etc. to encourage speaking and writing. Don't focus on mistakes or nit pick. Focus on communication. 
4. Give more time to respond. I've found that online students regularly need longer to respond. This could be for any number of reasons, but those honestly don't matter. Pause a little longer and, if no one responds, repeat the question and pause again. 
5. Scaffold! Use sentence frames to encourage writing and speaking early on. Keep those sentence frames as long as you need and then change an element up. In our calendar talk in my Spanish class, I provided questions and sentence frames for our date and we use them every week. This last week, I changed one of the questions. Students were excited and ready for the change. When we do our weather, I keep weather terms and images on the screen and always provide an example before I ask them to write their weather. I tell them how things are where I am first. 

Conclusions

I hope (and presume) I'll discover more ways to elicit responses from students and support them online. What are some of your favourite ways to support student responses in the online CI classroom?