Teaching Languages with Deck.Toys Part 1

Deck.Toys is a great platform to teach Languages, whether in English, Mandarin, French, Spanish or German! In this “Teaching Languages with Deck.Toys” series, we will be featuring Language Teachers from around the world on how they use Deck.Toys to engage their students.

Jimena Licitra (https://linktr.ee/jimenalicitra) is one of our avid fans of Deck.Toys. She teaches German and English Years 7 to 12 in Spain, where students are between 12 and 18 years old. She has hundreds of students every year and is always on the lookout for new ways to motivate them and enhance their learning process. 

In the summer of 2019 while looking for innovative ways to teach and find tools that can create engaging activities for her language students, she discovered Deck.Toys and has never looked back!

Deck.Toys: What features do you find most useful in our platform? 

Jimena: “I think when you teach a language you need to motivate students towards their learning. Deck.Toys offers teachers the chance to create customized content easily and gamify their learning experience. You can create a customized guided learning path which you can assign or use live in your classroom.” 

This is a deck that Jimena has shared in the public Deck Gallery* on an amazing German lesson on Prepositions for A2-B1 level German learners:

https://deck.toys/decks/7yg0miTbK/Praepositionen-Deutsch

She used this deck remotely during the COVID-19 Lockdown in Q2 2020, and her students loved it. 

“Apart from creating videos and presentations, I decided to create this deck because I thought it would help kids with motivation. I planned it as a review activity to help them study for their final exam. And it worked!”

She found that her students loved the challenge and played this deck more than once, which helped them study without even noticing that they were. The final exam results were awesome, students had acquired knowledge by playing and hence the learning process was successful. 

“I checked students’ reports to make sure everybody tried my deck but I also included an Exit Ticket at the end of the deck (in Google Forms format) which allowed me to send students a certificate automatically by e-mail. They loved the idea of getting a diploma for finishing their deck!”

She also created a fun vocabulary deck about recycling: 

https://deck.toys/a/myWdJMQzt

She even created an educational escape room game in German: 

https://deck.toys/a/7kN_9GWfY

Her students were really grateful and even sent her emails at the end of the school period to let her know how much they had enjoyed these activities.

Deck.Toys: What makes you recommend Deck.Toys to other Language teachers?

Jimena: “You are the one who decides on the contents and Deck.Toys creates the games for you instantly with those contents. It is any teacher’s dream come true, the sky’s the limit!”

We thank Jimena for the wonderful feedback and hope other teachers will be inspired too!

Sign up to Deck.Toys for free here: https://deck.toys/getstarted

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*Deck Gallery contains thousands of decks created by fellow educators around the world! You can get access to these decks and modify them for your own teaching by signing up for free here: https://deck.toys/getstarted

To connect with other teachers who are using Deck.Toys to create fun and engaging lessons in their classrooms, join us in our Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/decktoys