December arrives and we know that ACCESS testing is coming up soon for students in ESL/ELL students. Probably you have been working hard and preparing your students to get the best results. I made a list of best platforms to prepare ESL students for the WIDA’s ACCESS test.
Here are some platforms that you could use to prepare your ESL students for the ACCESS test:
- WIDA has free sample items on its website. WIDA provides various items with the kind of content students will encounter on the test and give them a chance to practice the different question types. Go to ACCESS Test Practice and Sample Items to practice with your students. Here is an overview video about the test for ESL students.
- Vacaroo is super simple with no bells and whistles. Kids record and then share the link with you! It’s free and very user-friendly.
- Seesaw, I used Seesaw, and it’s super easy to use and great for interactive communication and oral language development. I recommend wireless headphones with built in Mic they can connect into the computer, speak their answer to the prompts, and then stop when they are done. You can have session where students listen to the recording of their peers and give each other feedback and then the teacher can give recommendations as well. Seesaw is very suitable for Elementary and Kindergarten students.
- Flipgrid will keep kids entertained and excited about the activity. You can turn off the ability to use bells and whistles and just record audio for speaking to a prompt practices. The free version should be good for recording speaking activities.
- Playposit is an online learning environment to create and share interactive video lessons.
- Voicethread is platform you could you to capture students voice as they are explaining a video or picture. It is entertaining as it has highlighting annotations and self paced participation and reflection
Recommendations
- Set goals with your students. How can they move up 1.0+ in the domains?
- Include consistently speaking activities during regular classes providing sentence frames and other types of scaffolding, on topics that include academic vocabulary.
- Assign students weekly a speaking task that they must respond to by recording their voice and adding the audio of the platform you use. This could even be as simple as telling you what you did over the weekend.
- Give students a checklist or speaking rubric that they can use during their speaking task to self-assess.
- Celebrate progress and success, celebrate ALL of their hard work when you get the results, and give out certificates for certain achievements like perseverance, highest test score, most improved, most confident English speaker, etc. you name it.
Reminders
- The test takes longer than suggested, keep this in mind with younger kids.
- Explain that once they click stop there’s no adding on.
- There is no pass or fail, students get a score and hopefully that reflects growth in all language domains.
Those are some useful platforms to use when you want to prepare students for the ACCESS test.
Before you go, here are more ideas from other teachers to help you prepare for Access Testing:
HOW TO PREPARE ELLS FOR LANGUAGE TESTING
Podcast 5 Ways To Prepare for Access Testing Now
Preparing ESL Students for WIDA’s ACCESS for ELLs Test
What are you doing?
