[Testimony]
English teacher since 2006, Claire Parmentier teaches at the Louis Pasteur junior school in Petit-Couronne (76). For 4 years, she has used the Skolengo EMS more known under the name Arsene76. Being the digital reference person, she is a member of the digital skills centre of the Local Educational Authority. She has been exploring the various digital uses to develop with the EMS and to share her experience with other teachers. Discover how the EMS assists her daily in her tasks and how she has produced an escape game* with the EMS’s exerciser to motivate students in their learning.
EMS: a key tool for performing teaching tasks
Since the beginning of the year, Claire has used the teaching binder exclusively for performing her teaching tasks.
It is a real benefit. The EMS allows me to centralise all my work. I am more productive and efficient using the EMS as the basis of my work. From my agenda, I prepare all my activities that I distribute to the students via their teaching binder.
I am convinced that it is a tool that teachers must adopt daily to accomplish their teaching tasks but it is also indispensable for students to help them with their learning.
Make courses fun to facilitate and motivate learning
During the remote teaching period, Claire set up activities in the form of a path by using the exerciser to ensure educational continuity. Thus, students performed attractive activities on their own from their homes and obtained responses to their work in real-time. Claire uses the exerciser whether remotely on in face-to-face. At the beginning of the class, she can propose an activity on the exerciser in order to review previous classes in a fun way. « With this interactive tool, the students are more reactive than with an exercise on paper. »
By using the exerciser during this period of remote teaching, it made my students motivated to perform their activities. They liked having the result of their work in real-time. They were proud to prove to me that they had done their exercises correctly by sending me screenshots of their results. It is a real gauge of success for me as I avoid having many losses of interest in school by opting for the exerciser in this context.
Concrete case: setting up an “escape game” with the exerciser
After having tried the many features of the exerciser (video, fill-in-the- blanks, drag-and-drop function, etc.), Claire Parmentier set up an escape game when the health crisis led to a new remote working period. Making learning fun seemed like an obvious solution for avoiding losses of interest in school and ensuring educational continuity.
She therefore created a set of activities in the form of an escape game for working on English understanding and vocabulary. The activity was then made available to students in the work-to-do. Thus, she automatically had the list of students having delivered their work. She could thus follow those who had lost interest in school and discuss their difficulties encountered with them.
To build her escape game, she put in place, a series of exercises. If the students answered 75% of the exercise correctly, they received a letter. When they finished all the exercises, the students had to put the letters obtained in the right order, to obtain a vocabulary word. To check if they had found the key word to discover, Claire integrated a strong-box via the application. If the strong-box opened after the student has entered the « word found » code, they discovered for example, either the topic of the following class, or a fun video linked to the current topic.
The students were motivated by this fun approach to learning. Even if they didn’t do the exercise correctly the first time, they could begin again as they wanted to obtain the letter to find the secret word. It is very motivating for them and is the guarantee for me that they have worked on their lesson.
To check if the student has done their work properly, in the work-to-do, they must specify the topic of the next class.
This escape game was very well received by the students and parents. They liked the idea of working alone on this type of activity. As a teacher, to be able to reuse and modify these activities created using the exerciser from one year to the next is a real bonus.
*Escape Game definition: a game in which a player or a group of players locked in a room must solve a series of enigmas related to a story within a limited time.
