Let Students Teach the Tools: Empower Learners From Day One

All of us have had the experience of teaching students how to use tools in our classrooms: Canvas, Blackboard, or your LMS; Google Docs or Microsoft Word; Tools for sharing aloud, like Padlet or screen-recording software; or even just a dictionary that you think is useful. As valuable as these tools may be, a top-down explanation of these resources often leads to glazed-over eyes and students who aren’t motivated to follow along. But at the beginning of the semester we can flip the script and put the work in our students’ hands, sparking some curiosity, allowing for autonomy, and developing communicative skills right off the bat.

If you’re about to get started with a new group of students, consider a student-driven approach to teaching the tools you’ll use in class. You already know what you’re generally planning on using, so the biggest shift here is giving up control of the teacher talk time, which we should all be doing more of anyway. Instead, create a list of five to six tools you know you’ll be using in class. (And if you don’t know what you want or need in your class, may I suggest checking out the ELT Toolkit?) If you keep your tech minimal, that’s fine, too; you can break complicated tools into subsections. So if you’re just using Canvas, for example, maybe you ask different groups to explain how to use the inbox, the gradebook, and the discussion boards. If you rely heavily on Padlet, one group could explain the basics of posting, and another group could give advice on making clear videos. This will let you make adjustments to match your class and desired group sizes.

Build the Assignment

You will usually find at least a couple of students who have used the resources you work with, so consider asking the class to raise their hands if they’re familiar with the different tools and then you can choose to distribute more knowledgeable students to each group. Once you know what tools or features you want your students to teach, you can choose to prepare some guidance for them, or simply let them explore and figure out the tools for themselves. Because the goal is to be brief but useful, build some expectations into your rubric (even if it’s not graded). One overall structure that can be applied no matter what they’re talking about could be:

• • What the tool does
  • How to use it
  • Pro tips
  • Common mistakes

This gives everybody a chance to present, and you can adjust to the size of your groups. Have a group of five? Add a second pro tip. Have a group of three? Remove the common mistakes. Whatever works for your tools and your needs can be accommodated. You can choose to give them class time to prepare, or you could simply make the prep time part of their homework.

The presentation itself should be a live demonstration so students can see exactly what steps to take and presenters can be exposed to different types of presentations in English. The fact is that students will use their English to give tutorials and teach other people far more than they will to give formal presentations. If you introduce the activity as a life skill, students will better understand how it’s transferable to other parts of their lives.

Customizing to the Class Level

Clever teachers can shift the expectations of this assignment to match the language level of the class. A beginning level class might be asked to use three different simple tense verbs as commands (“Click the blue button,” “Choose the file,” “Submit the assignment”). You could create a template with sentence stems or scaffold the language in any way you need. Meanwhile, more advanced students might be asked to use two different dependent clauses in their part of the presentation, or they might be charged with comparing the tool to something else they’re familiar with, like using social media.

Fill in the Gaps

One great thing about this activity is that you are no longer the tech-support for the whole class. Many of us catch ourselves spending more time explaining technology than explaining the language feature the students are actually enrolled in our class for! Now, when students forget how to use a tool, you have a built-in “expert group” you can refer them to rather than reexplaining it for yourself over and over again.

On the flipside, students’ presentations will show you gaps in their understanding or help you find little places to add in key details. As long as you make this a low-stakes assignment, there’s no problem with jumping in at the end to clarify or maybe even show an additional feature that most students aren’t aware of.

The Approach That Sets the Stage

Let’s take a minute to explore how an activity like this changes the tone and expectations of the class right from the beginning. Rather than a teacher they barely know droning on and on about procedural steps, they’re now working together and sharing out how to get things done. Without explicitly stating it, you’re building a class that respects the student and expects them to be the drivers of their work. They also get to know each other fairly quickly and they’re encouraged to go to each other for help, encouraging peer learning. With a little creativity, you can shift top-down busywork that just has to get done into a fun way to develop expertise and a support system that can last all semester long.