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Students Using Personal Whiteboards

Brandon Crowder

In my second school as a language assistant, the primary students had their own tiny whiteboards. This worked great for a number of activities in class. First, it's a great way for them to write and display their answers to questions for various activities. These could be multiple choice answers, single words, phrases, or even full sentences. I did this a lot with online video quizzes; I asked the students to write down the answers and then show me the answer. Another option is to ask students to draw particular vocabulary words.


One activity that I did was more complicated. I had students form sentences with the present perfect tense in teams, but they could only write one word on each whiteboard. Then, the students had to stand in line in the correct order to form the sentence. In my case, I displayed the words to each sentence in a scrambled format so that students had to figure out how to correctly order them. I also only provided the verb in the infinitive so that students had to correctly conjugate them in the present perfect. (A more advanced approach would be to have students form their own sentences completely from scratch.) If there weren't enough words for each student, then the students who didn't write a word played the role of organizer, making sure that their teammates were standing in the correct order and within the time limit. This was great to make sure that students were always working together.


This sort of activity can be adapted to practice many sorts of grammar concepts, especially when word order is particularly challenging for students. It gets students moving, writing, and working together, all in the same activity.

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