Sean Banville's Blog

So how do we use Wallwisher with students?

1. Look at my explanatory Wall.

2. Look at the 105 ideas below.

For more info on how to set up your own Wallwisher, look at this post from Nik Peachey.

The 105 Ideas

Getting students interested

1. Use what’s on the Wallwisher.com Home Page to introduce vocabulary.
2. Create an activity for students to discuss the possible advantages of Wallwisher.
3. Get them to “test” Wallwisher without teacher help and then write a critique of it and its ease of use.
4. Students use the language in the black, green, purple and blue boxes on the Wallwisher home page to create a review or advertising spiel on the website.
5. Students discuss the concepts in those boxes in relation to their own learning or digital life.
6. Discussion over the pros and cons of online stickies versus real stickies (the ones you hold with your hands and stick to things). This could lead to a writing activity.

As a real notice board (all on different walls)

1. Orientation for students new to a course.
2. Put up the class and school rules.
3. Make a class profile – one sticky for each student with a pic and personal info.
4. Use a wall as a class or school calendar with stickies for different events. These can be revisited once they’ve past and updated to make a class journal.
5. Make a wall for the class timetable.
6. Days of the week / Months of the year (at the beginning of class).
7. Notify our students or parents of homework assignments and keep them up to date with what’s happening in class.
8. End-of-semester “best wishes” wall – students sign each others.
9. Birthday wishes, get well messages, messages of congratulations or farewell. (See Marisa Constantinides’ wall for a lovely example.

As a resource sharer – each sticky opens to a new site / video / image

1. Exam practice sites.
2. Grammar practice sites.
3. Games.
4. Project sites – students or teacher posts ideas for the project.
5. Exam stress and study tips.

Video

1. Create video tasks for students to post responses to.
2. Post YouTube / TeacherTube videos for students to comment on.
3. Students post their own (home) videos and create mini explanations with different posts.
4. News videos from the Internet – post two on the same news story and get students to post differences between them.
5. Music videos – students post the lyrics to the song (great for listening).
6. Movie trailers – get a Wall discussion going on the movie.
7. Movie dialogues – Post a clip from a movie and get students to write out the script.
8. Video script – students post ideas, dialogue, storylines for a class video.

Web quests

1. Post different links on different stickies for students to visit, look at and do some writing on / do a project on. Great for exposing students to different media.
2. Web quests – Type in each sticky  ‘find the answer to this / find a picture of… and paste the URL in the box.

Student walls

1. Give students a theme and get them to create their own walls based around that theme.
2. Get students to create fan walls based around a favourite band or celebrity.
3. Me – Students make an ongoing profile – they can allow other students to add stickies to ask questions, add comments, make suggestions, etc.
4. Students make a Wall showing their lifestory.
5. Students make a Wall predicting their life from now.

Grammar

1. Use images to get students to practicing different tenses and structures.
2. Get students to post what they know about different verb tenses or grammar points.
3. Sentence starters – Put the starter in the title of the Wall; students have to finish them by posting stickies.
4. Make a wall for each grammar point introduced in class – include websites with examples of the grammar, student-created examples, screenshots of concordances, YouTube videos explaining the grammar. Students will have a good revision source when exams come.
5. Teacher uses stickies as word magnets for students to move into the correct order.
6. Grammar correction – Teacher posts student errors as stickies; students have to post corrections. This can be revisited over several days in students’ own time. It’s also good for teamwork – how many students on the same team posted the corrected versions?.
7. Present perfect for life experiences – Teacher creates a “passport” using stickies of all the countries he/she has visited. Used to practice present perfect (she has been to…) and past simple (she went to X in 19XX). Also used for any other life experience.
8. Comparatives and superlatives – Students post examples of these based on images, text, audio or video in stickies.

Speaking

1. Post debates – put different arguments on different stickers for students to look at and respond to orally.
2. Strange pictures – post strange images in stickies for students to talk about.
3. Role plays – post different roles on different stickies – these become cues for the role plays.
4. Agony aunts and uncles – Post stickies that ask for advice. Students discuss the advice to give.
5. Talk for 60 seconds about… The teacher (or students) post images or videos in stickies for students to talk about for a minute.
6. Creating stories – put different, unrelated  images in different stickies. Students have to create a story relating them. They cold also write the story down.

Brainstorming

1. Can be used to elicit things students might not want to express in front of the class – they can post anonymously.
2. Brainstorming writing topics – Add a comment to each later.
3. Brainstorm ideas for what to do in tomorrow’s class / that ten minutes last thing on a Friday / as the next project…
4. “Five things each please” – Wallwisher means all students can have time to contribute five things each (or whatever number the teacher decides) to a brainstorming session. This could take a day or two and means quieter students contribute equally.
5. Picture ideas – Students could post images instead of words as part of the brainstorming session.

Feedback

1. Teacher creates different walls for feedback on a lesson, course, idea, project, coursebook, evaluations of his/her teaching style… Leaving the wall up for a semester means students can add to it at will.
2. Teacher can give feedback on the students – praise great behavior of highlight that which is not so great.
3. Instant voting – Teacher can get instantaneous and anonymous feedback by asking students to post their opinion on a topic / class decision…
4. Polls – Wallwisher is a great way of polling opinions.
5. Teacher feedback – if the students have their own walls, the teacher can post feedback on each student’s wall.

Evaluations and Reviews

1. Website evaluation – students leave stickies on their fave sites – learning or otherwise.
2. Book reviews – create a special wall for books.
3. Movie reviews – students put in trailers.
4. Restaurant / club / entertainment guide to the local town / city …

School life – A separate wall for the following

1. Open day wall.
2. The school football team – news and results.
3. Exhibitions.
4. School trips.

Classroom management

1. Use a wall to get ideas or to listen to everyone – great for allowing quieter, more shy students to voice their thoughts and opinions.
2. Put the class seating arrangement on it. This is a great way to change the seating quickly – students simply look at where / how you’ve moved them
3. Lesson aims – post them on the wall of that day / lesson.
4. Assigning different groups different tasks – each group looks at the sticky that relates to them.
5. Important information – the teacher can announce important information via Wallwisher. It works well if the teacher relays the information in front of the students, sticky by sticky – should keep students’ attention.

Writing

1. Wallwisher is good for lower level students to focus on writing a short sentence of two with greater accuracy (due to the character count). The teacher could ask them to write about anything – their weekend, hopes, likes…
2. Stickies for sentences (introduction, topic sentence, arguments, conclusion, etc.) Breaking the writing up like this makes it seem less like writing. The teacher can move the different parts around or add bits so all the stickies in a row make a better paragraph.
3. Simplified process writing – the teacher comments on the short sentences students write.
4. Images – students write about images the teacher posts on the wall.
5. Memos – Students use stickies for what they are.
6. Wish lists – Students write their wishes for class, life, hobbies… Other students can comment on these.
7. Note-taking – students write down information they need for a trip, project etc. in note form.
8. Essay plans – students write down their essay ideas on stickies. The teacher can choose the best plans to use as models of good practice.
9. Poetry – students write short poems. Good for haiku.
10. Dictation – the teacher posts audio in stickies for students to write down as a dictation.

Storytelling

1. Collaborative story writing – students take it in turns to add the next sticky to the story.
2. Students plan a story via stickies.
3. The teacher posts a video that students use to tell the story – short cartoons are good for this.
4. Stickies are a good way of moving the students’ writing around and inserting new parts to the story.

Reading

1. In snippets – fun way to introduce a paragraph. Breaking the paragraph up into stickies means you can add online images or voiceovers to make it more interesting or easier to understand.
2. Signs practice – Exams like KET, PET and IELTS have students match signs and notices – Wallwisher is ideal for this.
3. Paragraph reconstruction – students put the sentences of a paragraph back in the correct order.

Vocabulary

1. Create a wall based on a vocabulary theme (food, environment, sports…). The teacher could fill the stickies with online images, videos, sounds, etc or the students could make their own to share with each other.
2. Matching – students match vocab items with definitions, pictures.
3. Students post unknown vocabulary on the wall from a class reading.
4. Library walls of idioms, phrasal verbs, synonyms…
5. Word Choice: post several “bland” words and have students list synonyms that would be more interesting or descriptive.

Journals

1. Students could create a wall they use as a semester journal – They could section off different parts of it for learning, activities, weekends, hobbies, friends etc. They could open their wall to their friends to comment on.
2. The teacher could create a semester wall and log the class adventures for a record for students to look at after they graduate. They could contribute along the way.

Quizzes

1. One sticky for each question. The quizzes can be based on images
2. Multiple choice.
3. Watch a video (a link in a sticky) and answer the questions in other stickies.
4. Questions on pictures and images.
5. Record quiz questions and stick the mp3 in a sticky.
6. Use fotobabble.com to ask questions about a picture. See the truly excellent blog post from Ian James.

Multimedia projects

1. Students make projects and fill their wall with links to video, pictures, music, websites, blogs, etc.

Matching activities

1. Matching activities – pictures to vocab / vocab to meaning / text or paragraph reconstruction…

As moveable magnets

1. Students move stickies around in ranking, ordering, matching, timeline… activities.