Teaching Languages with Deck.Toys Part 2

Deck.Toys is a great tool 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.

Silvia Valenciaga (@svalenciaga) is the Director of Studies in a bilingual school in Spain. She teaches English, Natural and Social Science in English for 1st and 2nd Grade students. She first discovered Deck.Toys in early 2020 and used this platform during the remote learning phase of COVID-19.

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

Silvia: There are many useful tools for working language and contents. I can introduce both listening and speaking activities for my students. Deck.Toys also allows you to work on visual learning, and this is paramount for learning languages.

For example, I created this visually-welcoming deck as a final review for Grade 2 English students on greetings, weather, body, food and animals:

https://deck.toys/a/QkxAZEpwt

I find organizing my lesson with Deck.Toys also very simple. I can create links to many webpages or powerpoints that I have already created in other apps – and they work perfectly! It also allows me to organize the process of learning and teaching using different activities from Bloom’s Taxonomy, and also to form lower order thinking skills (LOTS) to higher order thinking skills (HOTS) to prepare high quality lessons.

Deck.Toys: Can you elaborate on your point of organizing your teaching process?

Silvia: When you create a deck in Deck.Toys, you are thinking about the goals, contents, programming, timing, assessment and diversity of your lesson – which is essentially the entire process of teaching! It makes you reflect on your lesson delivery and how to make it most effective for your students. You can open or block different lesson paths, which helps to differentiate levels of knowledge. 

You can see how this is demonstrated in this fun English deck that I shared in the public Deck Gallery on learning the human body and human habits with Mr Potato!

https://deck.toys/a/XyCbza8GY

Deck.Toys: How have your student responses been using Deck.Toys? 

Silvia: They REALLY LOVE Deck.Toys! The students would check at night if I had opened a new path for the next section – the level of motivation was amazing! They never got bored with the many study set games and activities in Deck.Toys, and considered it more like playing than learning – but they were surely learning! Even parents loved the platform and saw the many possibilities to try it out for the normal classroom because it gave students different options and perspectives in training their knowledge.

In short, Deck.Toys has been really useful for the students, woken up motivation amongst them and has created a perfect feedback for their knowledge which is necessary for the process of learning – teaching.

Deck.Toys: What else do you like about Deck.Toys?

Silvia: Quick and easy lesson creation whilst incorporating gamification into the lessons where both the students and the teachers enjoy! I can also give immediate feedback to my students. I love learning from others and sharing of decks on the Deck Gallery makes this possible combined with an active social media forum. Finally, it is a great tool that is improving every day as the Deck.Toys creator, Boon Jin is very open to feedback and helping users like me.

We thank Silvia for the valuable feedback and hope other language teachers will be inspired to use Deck.Toys too!

Sign up to Deck.Toys 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