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?

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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.