Wordwall Tutorial for Advanced Users

I'm a huge fan of Wordwall, and in the past I've been lucky enough to work with the organization on several occasions running training courses. This isn't a paid video, and I don't have an affiliate link, but I'm going to show you how you gamify Wordwall activities, which is something many teachers and students don't realize you can do, and you'll also learn a few other tricks at the same time. Really hope you like the video, and as always, if you do, please like it, please share it, please comment on it, but most of all, love to have more of you subscribe to my YouTube channel. Let's get started. Now, this isn't an introductory video to Wordwall. If you don't know what Wordwall is, then watch the video that's on the screen now, and that will take you through complete training. This is very much an advanced set of training where we're going to look at the gamify features in Wordwall, but also learn a couple of other brilliant things at the same time. So, let's start by quickly creating a Wordwall activity, and we'll do it using AI, and then we're going to gamify that particular activity. Okay, so what we're going to do is click on create activity, and we'll come down. For this first one, we're going to do find a match, but I'm going to show you a trick in a minute that will completely change the game anyway. So, we're going to click on this one here, and to do this, we're actually going to click on generate with AI. It will This will save us a lot of time, and I'm just going to write in the instructions of exactly what I want, and I'm going to do a set of activities around football. So, here are my instructions. I want to learn words associated with football in English, words like crossbar, referee, whistle, yellow card, etc. I want 10 words and 10 definitions for students at level B1 in English. And now I'm I'm to click on the generate button. Okay, so we've got the word and the definition. Always look through, make sure you're happy. Now, one thing you can't do with the AI is generate the audio, but we can add the audio. In this case, what we can do is add the audio to the definition. So, what I'm going to do here is click here and just point out one thing as well. If you click on swap columns, if you'd rather add the audio to the actual word that you're trying to learn, well, you could do that. In fact, that probably is a better idea. So, I'm going to click on these words, crossbar. Make sure you set it to English and choose your voice, and you even got a speed control these days if you want it slightly slower. And I'm going to generate all of the audio. That's the first one. Let me just quickly do that. Okay, so I added the audio. I'm going to click on done now, and that game is ready to play. But, I want to point out that if you come down here below, you'll see that there are a number of gamify options. So, remember this is going to be a match activity. So, first of all, I'm only going to have one life. Let's say two lives. So, I can only make two mistakes before I'm out of the game. And I'm going to say that you've got five We've got a speed of let's not go too fast. We'll go three. Okay? Shuffle item order. Always show the answers. Correct answers are removed from the game. So, apply these to the activity, and now watch what happens when we play this game. So, let's play this game. We can go full screen. The word's going to come across the screen. We've got limited time, and then I've got to quickly find the word and click on it. Or find the definition. >> stadium >> Again, very quick. Try to click, and that is the game. Now, it's really important to remember that each game, each different type of game, will have different settings that you can control underneath. And remember, when you make any changes, remember to click on the apply button. Now, I'm going to show you one more feature in a minute that I think you'll find really interesting. Now, I'm a lifelong language learner as well as being a lifelong teacher, and I'm currently learning Polish. And generally, I wouldn't do exactly what I've just shown you. I wouldn't just generate a list of words on a topic and then study them. Rather, I would be reading or listening and finding words that I wanted to learn and then putting them into WordWall. So, if you look on this example here on the screen now, this is, for example, from the football commentary that I was listening to today, and I've got the word in Polish, and then, of course, on the other side, I've got the definition. So, I'm normally studying vocabulary that I've already come across in a text or in audio, etc. However, you could do this the other way around. You could, for example, get the students to study the words first and then do a reading based on the vocabulary. So, that the WordWall activity would almost be preparation for the reading, would help them to be able to do the reading. And the key trick here, then, would be to include the same vocabulary in the reading activity. Now, there's an amazing reading feature in Google Storybooks. You can generate your own stories of up to 10 pages with pictures, with text, with audio, and you can specify the vocabulary that you want in the story. And this is something that I do a lot. If you want to learn about Google Storybooks, it's one of my favorite technologies for learning languages. Watch the video that's on the screen now. I'm going to show you one more feature in WordWall. And just to remind you, if you're finding the video useful, please click on the like button. Let's look at the special feature in WordWall that a lot of people don't know about. If you look at this game at the moment, if we just quickly play it, the game is very easy. You're simply just going to put the words match the words and you put them into supposedly the right or the wrong box as you can see, okay? But you might not realize that here on the right-hand side, you could completely change the way you play this game. So it would be the same content but with a completely different template. Now, this is something that I've not seen in many tools. I actually work on developing tools. And for me, this is a really clever feature. So let me give you an example. If I wanted to turn this into a quiz game, I could click on here. And now the game is completely different. Let me just show you. It's going to work in a completely different way. Now we've got a quiz game with questions coming up onto the screen. And here we would have to choose the correct one here, okay? So it would be B for example, okay? Now, this is something else I want to show you that you may not be aware of. If you like your new game, what you can do is just come down below. So I'm just going to scroll down below, click on edit content, and click on duplicate. And now give this a new name because you've now totally changed this game. So I'm going to call this keywords keywords. I'm going to call this now quiz. And I've now reproduced a completely new game. Don't forget to save it. Completely new game with the same content. So this ability to take the content that you've got and completely change it is something that I do very often. So, I might have a game or an activity and decide, "Okay, I'm not going to do this in the standard way that I've generated the game in. I'm actually going to create another version of the game." But, remember, if you do this, and it doesn't always work. So, you have to try out the different ones. But, let's say I'm going to do this one now. Whenever you create a new game, the best trick is to make sure that you save that. You can play the game now straight away. But, if you wanted to save it, you would click on edit content and duplicate. And now you've got a completely new game. Uh give it a new title as well based on the same content. This is a really clever feature in Wordwall. Okay, I really hope you like that video. I'm a huge fan of Wordwall. It's one of the best designed uh learning platforms I've ever come across when it comes to vocabulary. It's so well thought through. Interesting enough, there is another product does actually different things, but it's also very good for languages that's nearly as well designed. They're perhaps my favorite two technologies, and that is Wordwall and EdTech Cafe. If you want to learn about some of the features in EdTech Cafe and learn why that is so good, then watch the video that's on the screen now. One final thing, uh many people ask me how I make my videos. Am I AI? I can promise you I'm definitely not AI generated. I've been making these videos since 2006 2007 on teacher trainingvideos.com. But, if you do want to learn how I make my videos, then watch the video that's on the screen now. You'll learn exactly how I made this whole video. Thank you very much. Okay, I really hope you liked that video. And if you did, then please come over to teacher trainingvideos.com. Loads more free videos. Look at the different menu items at the top of the screen here. If you're a teacher and you want to keep up a little bit more with the work I do, we often organize webinars, online courses, etc., then sign up to the newsletter. And if you sign up to the newsletter, there is a free 14-part mini video course in using technology in language teaching, and nearly everything I suggest is free. If you want to take it a little bit further, then think about joining me on Patreon. If you join Patreon, you get extra videos every month with no advertising. I just go straight into the training, lots of ideas about how you can use the technologies in the class with your students, and you also get the chance to meet me online once a month for some direct training, and that's a real opportunity for you to practice using the technologies with me. And finally, if you want to go even further, join me on my very popular course Technologies and Approaches to Blended, Hybrid, and Online Teaching. I do that in collaboration with NILE, that is the Norwich Institute for Language Education, a very prestigious organization in the UK, and that course has been running for many years and is very popular. Thank you very much. I'm going to leave a few more videos on the screen now that you might find useful.