Tips – Designing Learning

Try these practical tips to help you integrate digital tools and resources so that they support course aims and learning objectives.

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Sourcing and evaluating digital resources

Remember that your time isn’t free. Give yourself a limited amount of time to search for digital resources and bookmark sites where you find good ones. Create a space for you and your colleagues to share and organise good sources of materials.

Collating and curating

When you find a great reading text, paste it intoText Inspector to check the level of the words and predict which ones you’ll need to pre-teach. Store the text or a link to the text and any related vocabulary activities by level and topic, whether that's in a folder or in a virtual learning environment like Moodle.

Developing materials

Turn your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into interactive quizzes and games! Experiment with ‘triggers’ (from the ‘Animations’ menu) to make objects, clues and answers appear, disappear or move when you click different parts of the screen.

Lesson planning

Wake up your learners with a vocabulary revision quiz on Kahoot! or Socrative. Learners race to choose the right answers on their smartphones. Keep a few quizzes up your sleeve to brighten up heavy lessons.

Use tools like English Profile to predict what vocabulary and grammar your learners already know at their CEFR level, what they’ll struggle with, and what will be most useful to focus on next.

Course planning

Use a bookmarking site like Reddit or StumbleUpon to keep a note of online games, texts and videos that look useful. Then when you’re planning your course, it’s easy to find resources to match each lesson aim.