Wednesday 24 April 2019

A2 Flyers - Exam information

A2 Flyers is the third of three Cambridge English Qualifications designed for young learners. These tests introduce children to everyday written and spoken English and are an excellent way for them to gain confidence and improve their English.


Test format

A2 Flyers is made up of three papers developed to encourage and motivate young learners. You can see exactly what’s in each paper below. 
PaperContentMarks
Listening
(about 25 minutes) 
5 parts/ 25 questions a maximum of five shields 
Reading and Writing
(40 minutes) 
7 parts/ 44 questions 
a maximum of five shields
Speaking
(7–9 minutes) 
4 partsa maximum of five shields

At a glance

Word List and Word List Picture Book

The colourful A2 Flyers Word List Picture Book has many of the words children have to learn for the A2 Flyers test. 
The A2 Flyers classroom activities book will help children get better at English and learn new words. 

Download the A2 Flyers classroom activities book
The A2 Flyers progress charts for students and teachers will help motivate learners. 

Download the A2 Flyers progress charts

Speaking test videos with examiners' commentary

This video will help your students understand what happens during a speaking test. You can also download examiner comments for each video.

Free: Paper-based sample test

You can download the Listening sample tests from the introduction page of the sample papers.




Thursday 18 April 2019

The Impact of Technology on Teaching. G Suite for Education and Google Classroom.

Think about the impact of technology on your life. Has technology saved you time and made you more efficient? How it might affect or is actually already affecting your teaching.
The role of rote learning has decreased as students have instant access to the world’s knowledge. Students can take ownership of their learning. Additionally, technology helps cater to individual student needs: resources can be personalized for students and teachers can offer digital feedback. Accordingly, technology is a tool to support teachers in their efforts to increase student learning.
G Suite for Education is a suite of tools that can help you increase opportunities for critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, all while supporting the learning objectives that you have for your students. These tools are free, ad-free, reliable, and secure. They are already used by millions of students in schools around the world. Of course, free is great, but the best thing is that these tools are relevant to students, easy to use, and open doors to many new ways to learn.
G Suite for Education also includes a number of Google products that promote collaboration among students and with their teachers. Students can work together, in class or at home, to complete assignments and group projects. All of their work is auto-saved, and they can even edit without WiFi.
  • Google Docs: documents come to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. Choose from thousands of fonts, plus add links, images, drawings, and tables
  • Google Sheets: spreadsheets for analyzing, visualizing, and charting data
  • Google Forms: quick & easy surveys to gather information
  • Google Slides: a presentation tool that makes it easy to tell stories
  • Google Drawings: Graphics and flowchart creation with shapes, text, and images
Additionally G Suite for Education includes tools that can be used to save you time and increase student engagement. These include:
  • Gmail: Email, contacts, tasks, and communications
  • Google Calendar: Scheduling, calendars, and appointments
  • Google Hangouts: Live video conferencing and messaging
  • Google Sites: Webpage creation and publishing
  • Google Groups: Group communication and web forums
Most educators dread using printers and photocopiers, but they’re necessary when you need to make class copies of your documents. All this changes when you use the G Suite for Education. The great advantage is the concept of a live document: there is only one version of it and edits are made in real-time. When you (or someone you are collaborating with) make a change to the document those changes are all saved in the same place for everyone to see.
Communicating information to all members of your classroom community – students, parents and other teachers – is one of the most important yet time-consuming tasks you face as a teacher.
For help, click the icons below.
What Skills Will You Need?
You’re likely already sharing your students’ work with the wider community whether through parent / teacher nights or a display of student artwork on the walls. Communicating to this wider audience is not only important to keep them informed of the success you’re having in your classroom, but it also makes the students’ work more authentic and important:
You can create a Google Site by clicking NEW in Google Drive and then selecting More then Google Sites. Give your new file a name and it is automatically saved in your Drive. You can also visit the Sites homepage and click the red + in the bottom right corner.
Google Classroom is perfect for copying and sharing docs with your class. You can also use it to distribute and collect assignments effortlessly. Google Classroom saves you time, keeps you organized and helps you communicate with your students. Get started today, with resources, tips and tricks from educators like you.