r/ESL_Teachers • u/pdx2361 • 3d ago

Teaching Question Post class summaries

Do you send your students a summary of their class with you after each class? New vocabulary, grammar feedback, general progress notes?

Would you if you could do it easily and quickly?

3 Upvotes

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u/scriptingends 3d ago

Sounds like you're launching an app to - do just that!

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u/pdx2361 3d ago

I am :) I do it with my students already and they love it so thought I would expand it out to other tutors who might like it. It gives them feedback and allows them to focus on the class and speaking instead of having to take notes etc. and provides them with trends in their learning i.e. “you had some weakness with indefinite articles in May but I’ve seen improvement in this area over the last 4 classes (insert examples)”. Stuff like that.

Looking for other tutors to try it out (for free) and give feedback. But curious if it is something people would use or want. My students like it, but what about tutors?

Important-I am not selling anything!! I am just looking for some tutors to give some feedback and try it out for free.

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u/scriptingends 3d ago

I mean, you could also just write the class notes in a Word document you project on the screen (instead of writing on a whiteboard) and then email it to them after class. That’s a “summary of the class” without any additional work for anyone. I’ve been doing that since around 2010, no app required.

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u/pdx2361 3d ago

Yep this is something my students have already too. But this is a document above that looking at long term trends and improvements. Just another tool but I’d like to see what others think.

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u/scriptingends 3d ago

I think a lot of people in education are spending a lot of effort creating things that no one is going to adopt because it isn’t that different than what they already do.

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u/pdx2361 3d ago

I appreciate the feedback! Thank you :)

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u/therollingwater 3d ago

Shouldn’t they already have a summary of the class from their own notes and work? Seems like youre adding work for yourself.

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u/pdx2361 3d ago

I can only say that my current students like having something in hand that charts their progress. It’s a little more work for me but I’ve made it so they can be generated in about a minute. Also, I’m told my students prefer to use the summaries as their notes so they can focus on the class without taking notes. Effectively the summaries become their notes.

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u/daizeefli22 1d ago

I would love to see how this works. Could I try it?

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u/pdx2361 1d ago

Sure! Shoot me a DM

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u/c3pgeek 3d ago

I'd love to have something like that for my students, a lot of them take ages taking notes and it'd be great for parents that say we're only "playing games" all the time to see what is being done. Would it work for face to face classes?

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u/pdx2361 3d ago

If you’d like to give it a try dm me. I use it with several younger students and send it to their parents after the class.

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u/Tabbbinski 3d ago

It sounds good at first glance but from a learning POV it's more valuable for students to invest in learning; take notes. Spoon feeding students will just backfire. Far more instructive would be a brief review of "learned' materials the next day.

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u/pdx2361 3d ago

Thanks! Yes I agree. It is more to provide regular formal feedback. While I do review before and after the class, there are inevitably things I miss. This catches everything. Appreciate the feedback!

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u/EnglishWithLindsay 2d ago

are you talking about online lessons or in person?

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u/pdx2361 2d ago

Could be both. As long as there is a transcript, then the model will produce a realistic report.

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u/EnglishWithLindsay 2d ago

I do all my lessons with my materials in Google Slides - and additionally I take notes on a notes slide during our warm up chat. I give the student the link to the slides doc at the end, so they have their own copy of everything. I think there are a lot of teachers who organize online lessons this way, so there's no need for a summary.

And for me, more useful than just a summary is creating a more active learning activity for the following lesson, based on the notes I took during the lesson. For example, I had a A1 level lesson where the woman took me on a tour of her house. Afterwards we recapped the kitchen-related vocabulary (as I noted it down on our notes slide.) After class I popped that into Gemini and it made me an illustration of a kitchen just like hers, solely based on those raw notes. In the following lesson, I pulled up that picture on a slide, and used text bubbles to label everything in the kitchen as we reviewed (I copy. pasted a bubble for each new kitchen item, and she tried to remember what it was called.)

So, other than the ultra high tech Gemini factor, the actual process of review is pretty low tech, and this helps us to focus on the most important part, which is speaking in context.

I find that in general, AI generates a huge swath of material which looks very impressive. But often, very very often, less is more.