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Read full storyHow to Adapt Off2Class for Young Learners – Webinar
As many of you know, our lesson content is designed for adolescents and above.
Despite this design, many teachers in our community adapt Off2Class for young learners. We also receive consistent requests for young learner-focused content.
Lately, we’ve been surveying our teacher community to understand some of the strategies that they use to adapt Off2Class for their Young Learners. In addition, some members of the Off2Class team have extensive experience in teaching Young Learners both online and in the classroom.
As a result, we thought it would be fitting to present a webinar on How to Adapt Off2Class for Young Learners to share some of our findings.
How To Adapt Off2Class for Young Learners, by James from Off2Class
In this webinar, James covers strategies on how to use our content with your Young Learners. More specifically:
- Reasonable expectations on session length when staging our lessons for young learners
- Saving your session progress as a bookmark (if you need to come back to the same lesson)
- Adapting content using our live, ‘right-click’ features
- Using our canvas feature to import your own custom content, to pair with the lessons (e.g. YouTube videos, images and discussion questions)
- Sending your custom-built canvases to students, for review after class
We’d love to hear from you!
Have you adapted Off2Class for Young Learners? Or, do you have experience preparing content for your Young Learners? Tell us your strategies!
We’d love to hear about your experiences. Please jump in on the conversation below. How do you like to use our lesson content with your young learners and what strategies do you use to adapt the content?
In the future, we’d love to prepare content that is designed for ESL learners under twelve years old. Obtaining as much teacher feedback as possible will help us in this journey. Please share some of your young learner teaching tips with us below!
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13 Comments
Leann says:
October 30, 2017 at 12:40 pm
I have some young learners. They do very well with the off2class platform because it is visual and appealing to them. I am going to try to use some more functions from the webinar. Thank you! Leann
Kris Jagasia says:
October 30, 2017 at 2:07 pm
Hi Leann,
So nice to hear from you. Thanks for jumping in. We love to hear this type of ‘in the trenches’ feedback. Can I ask, what age groups are your young learners? Are there any categories of lessons that you think work especially well?
Thanks in advance!
Kris
James Elwyn says:
October 31, 2017 at 2:26 am
The ones that work well already without modification or choosing specific content, is ‘Letter & Sounds’ category’ however, ones that I would have difficulty or would need to change and add supplementary material would be, for example ‘nouns and articles’ most of the content is fine but some vocabulary would be difficult for young learners to understand or relate to, or deemed unnessary to retain. another example is learning ‘introduction’. which would be more suitable for older learners. I think homework can be revised to fit young learners also.
Kris Jagasia says:
October 31, 2017 at 10:57 am
Hi James, thanks so much for jumping in! What age are your learners? When you say learning ‘introduction’ can you elaborate on that?
Kris
AmauryB says:
October 31, 2017 at 9:31 pm
I think when teaching young learners is good to keep in mind that they can’t be focused on theory for too long; they like movement, so classes must be very active; it is important to adapt content to their interest (that is one way to keep them motivated); I like to teach explicitly; however, I think it is better to teach your learners implicitly (it is not good to overload them with tons of grammar rules), I have seen it work best to give them some examples and then use some substitution drills to help them practice the desired grammar structures. In spite of doing that later in class, I will do some explicit grammar teaching to clear doubts or misunderstandings.
Kris Jagasia says:
November 1, 2017 at 10:06 am
Great thoughts Amaury!
Susan Duffy says:
November 4, 2017 at 9:50 am
Hi James
Great webinar as always. Will you be considering any phonics-based lessons? They are very popular in Asia. The youngest age I’ve used O2C for is 6. I’d love to see some lessons on rhymes, digraphs/trigraps and blends.
James Heywood (Off2Class) says:
November 5, 2017 at 4:37 pm
Hi Susan,
Thanks for your feedback.
We are thinking about phonics-based lessons. It’s going to take us a while to get these done, but I promise that they are in the pipeline.
Best wishes,
James
Chelsea says:
November 2, 2018 at 10:29 am
Thanks for the great advice. I didn’t realize that google safe search was turned on. I would rarely use it before because I was so afraid that I’d show something bad to a young student through the search. I appreciate these helpful videos.
Kris Jagasia says:
November 2, 2018 at 10:41 am
Fantastic, yes Google images are safe!
Naomi says:
November 2, 2021 at 3:52 pm
Hi James,
I see this was posted a few years ago, so I’m hoping you’ll see my question. I was a little confused by why students might not see my teacher notes during the lesson. You mentioned they could see our notes early in the video, but later you mentioned they wouldn’t be able to see our teacher notes in we were on 2 different devices? I will be teaching one-on-one lessons with children who are in China (I’m in the U.S.). I plan to use the language function for them to see instructions in Chinese Simplified. If I set the language function for each of my students, will they be able to see my teacher notes/instructions on their screen during our lessons? Also, I plan to use Off2Class using Zoom. Will it work on Zoom? And one more question (sorry), but I LOVE the step by step leveled curriculum, but it does seem to be geared towards older students (high school and above). Is Off2Class going to be providing leveled step by step lessons more appropriate for younger students? My three students are 8 – 11 years old. Thanks so much,
Naomi
Chris says:
November 5, 2021 at 10:24 pm
Hi Naomi,
Off2Class works with Zoom, and if the students log in to Off2Class on their own devices, they won’t see the teacher’s notes (unless you screenshare). The Step-by-Step Curriculum is geared toward adolescents and above, and we don’t have immediate plans to release a young learner curriculum. If you have more questions, you can post them in our teacher Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/off2class/
Naomi says:
November 6, 2021 at 12:15 am
Thank you Chris!