My Top Five ELT Tools

Whether you are teaching solely online or managing to combine your online lessons with some socially distanced, face to face teaching as I am, technology is where it’s at. My top five ELT tools change regularly depending on what I’ve read/ heard about recently but in no particular order here are my top 5 at the time of writing …

1. Wordwall – I’ve only recently discovered this and I LOVE it. There are interactives as well as printables and you can create your own (be careful though, you are only allowed to create 5 of your own activities with the free version so use them wisely) or use activities that someone else has created (18 interactives and 14 printables with the free version, after this €5/€7,50 per month for the standard/ pro plans). Here at TUGToC we like it so much we have decided it is worth the €5/month investment, we don’t part with money often so that says a lot! There are a lot of different activity types such as:

• random spinning wheel
• wordsearch
• matching (keyword to definition)
• random cards
• ranking
• cloze text / gap-fill
• and much, much more…

2. Flippity – Another relatively new discovery for me and again a site with huge potential. All activities are created through Google spreadsheets and include a demo, instructions on how to create the activity and a spreadsheet template. These do take a little longer to create than Wordwall in my experience but the results are worth it. The activities here include:

• a jeopardy style quiz
• timelines
• word clouds
• bingo

3. Mentimeter – I mainly use this as a brainstorming tool as it creates pretty word clouds but it can also be used for Q & A, ranking, scales and open-ended questions. With the free version it is only possible to have 2 slides per presentation but if you need more than this, it’s simple enough to just create another presentation.

4. Jamboard – I found out about jamboard by reading Katy M’s blogpost about it on 5 things ELT. It’s basically an interactive whiteboard which you can add sticky notes or pictures to, add slides from your Google drive, order sentences, activities or pictures to name just a few.

NB Jamboard works much better with a touch-screen device if you’re planning on writing on it as you would a normal whiteboard.

5. Edpuzzle – I couldn’t choose between kahoot and quizlet live for my number five so instead my final choice is for my co-blogger Emma, as I know this would be on her list. Edpuzzle is a free-to-use website on which you can create video-based listening comprehensions based on any YouTube video. The video pauses at a chosen point and the students are asked a question. This can be multiple choice or open-ended or you can add a note to give the students extra information. There are plenty of edpuzzles you can steal or you can create your own, selecting a video of your choice based on what would appeal to your students. You could set the edpuzzle for a flipped classroom or use it in the lesson directly.

So what would be in your top five? Please share any tools you use regularly, digital tools have never been more important in the quest to improve a teacher’s life!