With these activities, you use Captur paddles with the material from your current textbook, which you adapt a bit so that students can use their Captur paddles with the textbook. These include textbook worksheets, reading and listening comprehension questions, and quiz questions.
Adapting your current textbook for Captur activities is straightforward. If you like the textbooks you're currently using, you'll like them even more after introducing Captur to your classes. The first step is to just bear in mind that Captur allows you to see an instant response from every member of the class. This helps keep the students interested and focused, and it helps you capture a quick view of how well they're understanding the material. The ideas in the Adapting Your Textbook section all revolve around using Captur to dramatically increase participation and involvement with your textbook materials.
Keep in mind that we recommend you use Captur paddles only some of the class time, not all of it. Language teachers understand the value of student-to-student interaction, and we're not trying to get rid of this. Instead, we're trying to make some parts of the lesson more interactive, like those portions of the class when the teacher leads the students through a textbook activity, such as checking answers, introducing dialogs, pre-task language focus, etc.
The regular past tense in English is formed by adding "ed" to the verb. This past tense regular verb ending has three distinct sounds ("t", "d", and "id"). Captur is an ideal way for teachers to find out how well their students understand these sounds.
With this activity, teachers can review vocabulary with their students. This includes some listening practice, too.
When the textbook has listening comprehension or reading comprehension activities that feature three correct and one false answer, it can be a challenge to elicit students' answers in class in a way that helps you understand how well each of the students have done on the activity. But when students show their answers with their Captur paddles, you get an answer out of every student, and you will know how unanimous (or not) the consensus is.
This short article gives you an overview of using Captur with textbook worksheet activities, such as multiple-choice questions and fill-in-the-blank questions.
Most English conversation textbooks contain model dialogs for students to practice. Usually, these model dialogs are included on a course CD or as a downloadable mp3 file. Here are some ideas about using Captur to focus students' attention while they listen to these dialogs. The point here is to focus students' attention on the dialog they're supposed to be listening to. The teacher shouldn't try to get perfect responses from the students; it's enough to know that they're all staying attentive to the dialog (and, with Captur, the teacher can see how well they're doing).
This activity is more challenging for students, because it checks their understanding of the sentences while also asking them to process some new information. If the textbook contains sentences that the students have just finished working on, then the teacher reads out a sentence in the first person, and adds a second sentence. Students use Captur paddles to let you know if the second sentence logically follows from the first, or at least shares a logical connection.
Use this when the textbook or workbook has a list of sentences that the students have worked on. If you do this before the class-wide speaking activity, it's a good warm-up to check their understanding of the items. If you do it afterwards, it's a good follow-up to review all of the items. You will read out the sentences, and students use their Captur paddles to let you know if the sentence is true about them, or not.
