MLA Projects 2016-17

1. Beatriz Píriz Rico
Spanish MLA
Dundee City Council
Highlights of my British Council
Language Assistantship 2016-17

2. (1) M-Learning and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device):
Kahoot!
 Trying to do something different, I dared to use Kahoot!
for the first time with S3. It is a free online resource that
allows teachers to create sets of questions and
students join with their own phones. They need them to
select the correct answer from the 4 given. It has been
very useful to introduce new vocabulary as well as to
revise.

3.  Pupils’ reactions when being told to take their mobile
phones to learn were memorable. One kid said It is
the first time we use our mobile phones in class!!
 Even ‘reluctant’ learners got engaged in the game, see
this picture – hands to head because he didn’t get the
correct answer!

4.  Once we finished, students asked to play
again. My other school beats the record:
we played the same set of 10 questions up
to 3 times!
 “Kahoot! enhances motivation and
engages students in an exciting
competition. They see their names on the
board, for them it’s like being on a show,
and there’s a lot of interactivity. It’s also
good for teachers – we can see pupils’
achievement and engagement”.
To find out more about Kahoot! follow this link - https://getkahoot.com/

5. Aims
• Promote oral skills by recording videos speaking in the
L2
• Enhance self-confidence
• Have access to what is known as “World English”
The initial idea
• Videos would be uploaded to a shared blog so that a
school in Spain could see us, and vice versa. It would
be like having a blog pal!
See the project here:
https://exchangeschoolprogram.wordpress.com/
(2)

6. Challenges
• Explicit parents’ permission for this project was needed as
videos had to be uploaded to YouTube and then to the blog.
Some Scottish students did not bring in those forms. As a
result, their videos could not be uploaded on the blog were
sent privately to the Spanish teacher.
Positives
• While some pupils were very shy in front of the camera, others
quite enjoyed the experience of recording and watching
themselves later on. It was interesting for the Scottish students
to see Spanish students speaking in English – they were
surprised by their fluency!
How to improve
• More interactivity might be achieved if students did “video
messaging” – they ask questions and receive answers from
the students in the partner school abroad.