Sunday, December 18, 2011

When the student becomes the teacher...

In class the other day, my students were doing pair work with the smart phones, ten minutes each of quizzing each other on their decks. As there was an odd number of students, I partnered up with a student who is usually too cool for school.

Using his iPhone to access his Anki account, I quizzed him on his cards, taking the opportunity to ask him how he would assess his own performance and discussing with him what rating he should give. It was the kind of thing supervised/modeled Anki use I would love to do with all my students, but there is just not enough time...

However, the really cool part was when I handed him my iPod Touch and had him open up my current Rosetta Stone Japanese deck. With encouragement, he started quizzing me and helping me with my Japanese pronunciation. Soon, he was totally into it, dramatically making faces at my errors and congratulating me on my successes. Suddenly, the student was the teacher, fully engaged and concentrating hard on the task at hand. It was awesome to see. Somehow, the cool kid had become a language geek like me!

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