Teacher feature: Andreas Ninios on Wordwall Net

Andreas Ninios has a background in political science and has been teaching Greek at ICLS for four years.

Andreas very much enjoys teaching Greek at the Foreign Service Institute and spends time researching new tech tools, listening to TedTalks, and reading articles to refine his teaching practice. He regularly uses YouTube clips, Memrise, Quizlet, and Greek-specific resources such as the greekgrammar.eu website.

As Andreas commented, looking up tech tools and teaching resources is only one step in the process of creating a great class. He also needs to consider how to incorporate them into the curriculum, how to present them to students, and what students will do with them.

One of the tools he likes to use is Wordwall. It is a website that allows teachers to create language learning activities. There are 18 different types of activities that Wordwall calls “interactives”. Interactives include classic styles such as jumbled sentences, multiple-choice, matching games, and less common ones such as random wheels, gameshow quizzes, and anagrams.  Andreas finds Wordwall particularly useful for vocabulary retention.

You can create five free activities with the free license, but you can also access and use an extensive collection of activities created by other teachers. You can search activities by keywords or language in the Community tab. Once you found a suitable activity, you can share the link with your students and ask them to share their screen while they complete it.

While this bank of ready-made resources can be useful, Andreas noticed that the quality of the activities can vary as they are not always created by fully proficient speakers of the target language. It is therefore essential to carefully review each activity before assigning it. This is often true of other tools such as Edpuzzle or Quizlet, where the community shares their work with other teachers. As Andreas noted, “There are a lot of great resources out there, but it is important to spend time researching and evaluating them thoroughly before using them in class.”

Learn more about using teacher tools online (including ChatGPT for language teachers) at our Teacher PD tech workshops.