Today I’m going to show you a very simple tool: Flinga. This web application will help us to assess students’ prior knowledge in order to focus and adapt our teaching plans. It will also help the students make connections between old and new knowledge.
With this activity we want to encourage conversation in our classroom. This is a meaningful way to improve speaking skills.
"Flinga provides the teacher a way to easily engage students in collaborative and innovative problem solving based on open-ended problems that have no correct answers. The key here is, compared to a traditional Flinga whiteboard or a group discussion, that groups cannot see each other's innovations before the end of the session, so their thinking is not affected by them."
"Flinga"
Flinga is a Finnish application created by Nordtouch Ltd, in 2020. This web application doesn't require installation, but you do need to log in with an email account.
Flinga is free of advertisements and very intuitive and easy to navigate. The app is free up to five brainstorming boards at one time. If you want to use more than five, you will need to pay for a membership. I think that for the classroom you probably don't need to pay for it.
Watch this video for an example of an activity that we can do in Flinga!
After we can test their knowledge with this activity that I created with hot potatoes
Bibliography:
- Cornell University (2021). Assessing Prior Knowledge. Retrieved on may 11, 2021 from: https://teaching.cornell.edu/spring-teaching-resources/assessment-evaluation/assessing-prior-knowledge
- Nordtouch ( 202o). Flinga. Simple tool for complex thinking. Retrieved on may 12, 2021 from: http://www.nordtouch.fi/
Hi Sonsoles!
Your blog is amazing, ESL teachers can get fantastic ideas to use in their lessons. Its style is formal and suitable for a professional setting and the explanations are clear and easy to follow.
In the case of this post, I like the ICT tool you propose "Flinga", it is perfect for a brainstorming activity. The tutorial you have created to show teachers how to use this web application is really good and easy to follow. I have never used this web app
but will put it on my list from now on.