5 Ways English teachers use Atomi in the classroom

We recently hosted a webinar on how an online teaching and learning platform can support teachers and students in the English classroom. The nature of your subject is so different to many others, so we wanted to share the key takeaways with you!

In this session, we explored the various ways in which Atomi can be used to support your students with skills they might’ve missed in earlier years, as well as providing them with subject-specific skills such as text analysis across different genres.

So let’s jump into five ways English teachers can use Atomi in the classroom!💡

Encourage self-marking with extended response questions

There’s no doubt that English teachers have a significant amount of marking. Not only do you have to mark countless essays for assessment tasks, but all the draft and practice essays in the lead-up.

By using our extended response content type you can lean on Atomi to reduce the marking load, while also providing valuable feedback and building up your student’s self-marking capabilities.

You might like to ask students to respond to a question, and then switch their work with a peer. By using peer marking, you are asking students to engage with the marking criteria and think critically to analyse a response. And by doing so, you are demystifying the marking process for students.

Close the feedback loop by having students take the feedback and re-draft their work. This should lead to higher quality writing, which means you can focus on your feedback areas that will lead to higher marks, rather than the basics.

Build foundational skills with multiple-choice questions

We get a lot of questions around how an English classroom would use Atomi’s multiple-choice questions, as this is not a question type students will be exposed to in their final exam.

While we expect that students coming into years 11 and 12 will have sound essay writing and literary analysis skills, this is not always the case. By assigning our content and quizzes to students as homework or pre-learning, they’ll be able to take the time (that you don’t have in class!) to build and consolidate skills they are missing.

A lot of our multiple-choice questions are designed to equip students with the skills they need to analyse the text and understand the themes and characters. Through using these multiple-choice questions outside of class, or in class as an intro to your lesson, you can ensure your students develop the basic skills required for each stage in English.

This leaves you with more time in class to work with your students on analysing the text and digging deeper into the themes, archetypes, and characters—along with the sometimes heated debates that go along with that!

Assign tasks to various skill levels using differentiation

English can have one of the widest ranges of student abilities in a class, and we need to set each student up for success. Using Atomi as a differentiation tool can help students build up their confidence in English skills and content.

By using Atomi to assign tasks, you can quickly and easily target those students who need help or extension, and those who might need remediation. This may look like giving some students some work on how to structure an essay versus a student whose essays and writing skills are sound but they aren’t able to analyse a text beyond the surface level.

Additionally, you can attach your own resources to Atomi tasks - meaning your favourite resources can be coupled with our content to make some great lessons. This is especially helpful when teaching texts. For example, you can pull in your own links to a performance of a play or a modern-day translation of a Shakespearean scene to support the Atomi content.

See how each student is performing with actionable insights

Having data is good, but it only becomes great when we use it to respond to our classroom in a meaningful and consistent way.

Using Atomi quiz data can help you to create a functioning classroom environment. With mark book, students are given a strength score which pulls every data point together, making it clear where students’ strengths and weaknesses are.

By highlighting this so clearly, it saves teachers from needing to step in and help determine this for students. When a student asks what skills they need to work on for assessment or exams, you can direct them to their Atomi revision reminder to help personalise and target their revision practice.

Mark book also enables you to quickly identify who needs further support and then group these students together to provide the support they need.

Support students in composing texts through speaking, writing and creating

Peer teaching can be a great way of consolidating knowledge and understanding among students. It gets them to articulate feedback to one another and explain their thought processes in composing their own texts. It also has a very high effect size in the literature when it comes to student attainment.

Consider having your students compare notes and ideas on what they’ve learned from the how to analyse material you assigned. This creates a great connection with the content as students can see how another student of similar ability has mastered the content and may lead to a deeper understanding than if they’d just watched the material on their own.

You’ll find plenty of examples particular to your state curriculum on how Atomi can support kids in developing their composition skills—such as our writing fiction and non fiction courses in Year 10, and how to write an essay courses in the senior years.

That wraps up the five tips we have for you here.

We covered a couple of additional points in the webinar. We also spotlighted some of the awesome syllabus-specific content we’ve launched recently. You can watch the on-demand session to learn more! And keep an eye out for more subject-specific webinars coming soon.

Ready to try out our English courses for yourself? Get started with Atomi today—it’s free to try!