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

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. :)

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. 

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. 

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?

Posts in this series:

1. Easily Adaptable Activities (this post!)
2. CI Responses in Zoomwww.matermonstrorum.com/comprehensible-input/bringing-ci-into-the-online-classroom-part-2
3. Bringing CI into an empty digital class
4. Bringing CI into a traditional online Latin class
5. Using Brain Breaks Online

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. :)

In my physical classroom I would use a dictation to introduce a new unit with new vocab, review a story before a test, and practice with grammar structure. In my online classroom I use them in the same way in my Spanish class and for my Latin class (which this semester was an already formed course in a traditional way), I used it as a support for the cultural topics, vocabulary, and grammar. For example, if the author being discussed in the unit was Pliny the Elder, I'd take a passage from their coursework and adapt it for a dictation using the vocabulary and grammar present. Students would then go into that lesson with a set of notes and a video to help them work through it. ​

I won't share the full details of Ben Slavic's work, but you can join his site to read them in full and find a whole host of other activities. What I will share is that this activity includes elements of performative reading (by the teacher), choral translation, and discussion of vocabulary, grammar, and culture. Much like a dictation, it isn't always the most fun activity, but many students appreciate this take on things, particularly those who need extra support and those who want all the little details. 

Read and Discuss
This is really a broader term that encompasses everything from Reading Option A to Read, Discuss, and Draw. The blog I shared details a simpler version of this activity where you take things at the students' pace and include circling in the target language to ensure understanding. I really like this version as is is easily adapted to things like: level of class, needs of students in the room (or zoom), and likes and dislikes when it comes to various activities. 

What I did
I've done read and discuss in both my fully CI Spanish class and my mixed Latin class this semester repeatedly. The image above is from a Latin class. I've included a brief comparison below of what I did in each class. 

As I started with, this is just the beginning. There is a lot more that I've learned and continue to learn about teaching online. In this blog post, I included two strategies I visit time and again in these classes, but I'd love to share more. Here is a quick list of other activities I use regularly. Let me know in the comments if you'd like a breakdown of how I do them!

• Movie short/Movie talk (whatever you call it :) )
• Picture Discussion
• Vocabulary matching (word to image)
• Calendar Talk/Weather Talk
• Free Write (others may call/use timed write)

This year I am embarking on yet another new journey. You can read the details that I'm willing to share on my social media, but what is relevant here is that I am teaching Latin again, but online and part-time. I am teaching Latin in a course that is already written, so I provide extra support and hold a weekly live class. I am also teaching a weekly Spanish class for novice learners. This class meets once a week as well and has no outside expectation of individual work or course materials other than what I create.

When I started teaching here (and to be fair I'm only 3 months in), I knew I wanted to bring what I regularly do (and I think I'm good at) to the course: Comprehensible Input. I don't have it all figured out yet, but I am starting to see some areas of my own expertise that need to be refreshed or adapted to my current  environment and some areas that feel like obstacles or struggles. In this post I briefly want to lay the biggest ones out and set a plan to research, learn, and practice before posting again about them.