Techie Teachers: A Blog by a Teacher for Teachers

(Source: Pixabay) Have you ever tried doing a brainstorming activity in class and ended up being bombarded with so many responses at the same time that you could jot down only a few and skipped most of them? That is an occurrence most of the teachers out there are familiar with. Teachers always find it difficult to manage whole class activities as well as group assignments or projects. Getting students to work collaboratively without losing track or drifting away from work is a tough job. However, with the help of a simple but effective online software like Padlet whole class activities or group work can get unimaginably easier and well-organized. What is  Padlet ? Padlet is a free online shared working space for learners to work on any project, assignment or classwork together. Padlet provides learners with the opportunity of sharing ideas, pictures and resources on a board as sticky notes. Learners can also join a padlet created by the teacher or any other padl

(Source: Pixabay) Often when I wanted to post about what to do before the next class or assign any homework to my students on the Facebook group, I ended up writing really long posts. Obviously, I was aware of the fact that long posts are quite off-putting, but I did not know what to do or how else to make the announcement or instruction concise when I had so much to explain.  I considered making videos to give the instructions a lot of times, but I never ended up doing that because of two reasons. Firstly, I was too camera shy and secondly, I did not want my students to feel like, "Oh come on! We are not having video lectures now, are we?!" After all, who wants to see their teachers' face and listen to their voice again after a long day at school? Imagine, if these videos contained a chipmunk speaking in its cute chipmunk-y voice, would it not be fun to watch? Watching videos recorded by the teacher inside and outside the class can be very interesting, if teac

(Source: Pixabay) It is a well-known fact that quizzes are terrifying as well as nerve-wrecking for students. For teachers, it is a dull affair. Every teacher fantasises about designing a quiz that will be so enjoyable for their students that they will be entirely engaged in it with a smile on their face. Although making a regular quiz that interesting may not be anything more than a fantasy, but with the help of Kahoot you can certainly turn that fantasy into reality within minutes! Kahoot requires teachers to use the computer and projector screen to initiate the quiz and requires students to use their mobile phones and the internet to participate in the quiz which helps learners to come out of the traditional classroom setting and develop their mobile literacy (Hockly, 2015, p. 83). What is Kahoot ? Kahoot is mainly an online platform for creating game based and multiple choice quizzes that can be used in class to review lessons, assess vocabulary knowledge and conduct

              [Picture Collected from Pixabay] How many times did you wish to design the perfect grammar quiz but failed miserably? How many times did you want to create a mind-blowing interesting set of grammatical puzzles but ended up making some usual information gap activity? If you are a teacher, the above-mentioned incidents happened in your life not only once, but multiple times.Teachers and material developers constantly struggle with the task of making meaningful and interesting grammar-based quizzes but in most of the cases they achieve little success. As a result, learners lose interest in learning grammar and it turns out to be a boring and dreadful part of language learning for them.  However, a magical platform like TubeQuizard can solve this complicated problem for teachers. TubeQuizard with its quiz wizardry can entice learners to quizzes without requiring any sort of invigilation or hard work on the part of the teacher. With TubeQuizard, gone are the tireso