Using Charlala for Card Talk

Card Talk:

In the world language classroom, Card Talk is a great way to facilitate conversations that are unique to each group of students that you get to work with. The traditional approach to card talk is to give each student a piece of paper (card) and markers, some sort of prompt, and a few minutes to draw. At the end of the drawing time, you show off a couple of cards around the room and spin a conversation about it.

The beauty of card talk is that you can spin it in any direction you want and reinforce important words and phrases in the target language, and each class period winds up with something different, making everything more memorable to the students because it's actually about them instead of a generic textbook. Some possible prompts for Card Talk include:

• What do you like to do?
• Where did you go last weekend?
• What is your favorite food?
• Where would you like to go on vacation?
• What do you wear in October?
• What do you like to do for yourself?
• What do you do for your loved ones?
• What is your favorite book about?
• What makes you happy?
• What makes you sad?
• What's in your locker?

The down side of Card Talk is that you can go through a ton of paper if you have a lot of students or if you do it very often.

This is where Charlala comes in.

If you're not familiar with Charlala, it can be used kind of like a doodling version of Kahoot, and it works great in One To One classrooms with tablets or touch screen laptops if you have a projector. You can tell students a prompt out loud, set a timer for them to draw their responses, and then everyone's drawing will be visible on the screen at the end. You can then click on one drawing at a time to zoom in and have a detailed discussion with the class.

How to set it up:

Go to app.charlala.com. You can set up an account for free. I used my Google account to log in.

From the upper left hamburger menu, select the Draw Room. There is a video tutorial that you can watch on the website, or you can follow along here.

You can set up "draw sets," but I typically don't. Instead, I just jump right into the DrawRoom session.

For card talk, I always use conversational mode. Click on "Conversational" FIRST, and then set the timer. When you select the mode, it sets the timer back to 180, so if you want to adjust the time, do that as your second step.

At this point, it will feel a lot like Kahoot or Quizlet Live. Students will need to go to charlala.com/draw and enter the room code. The most common issue is that students go to app.charlala.com instead. Students will get a doodle screen while they wait for their classmates to join the DrawRoom, and their doodles will disappear when you click "start." If you don't tell them this right off the bat, you will have some broken hearts in the room.

When you click "start," the official drawing begins! There is some cute, peppy music in the background, and it cuts off awkwardly after 2 minutes. 

At the end of drawing time, the students must click "FINISH" for their artwork to show up on your end. Have them do this before you click the "END" button; otherwise, their drawing will disappear.

Once you can see a thumbnail of each student's masterpiece, select "End Room." At this point, you can move forward in a number of different ways, but I like to have the class point to a person in the room whose masterpiece they would love to see closer. Next, you can click on their chef d'oeuvre to see it up close and discuss to your heart's content!

In a world language classroom, you can ask all kinds of questions to get the conversation going! I always begin by telling my French classes to look at the masterpiece (Classe, regardez le chef d'oeuvre de Bobby!) and applaud it (Classe, applaudissez!) From there, I begin asking questions.

I usually start off with basic questions in the target language about what students can see. For lower level classes, it's easiest to start with yes/no and either/or questions so that students can easily respond in the target language.

Classe, est-ce que c'est un pingouin? (Class, is this a penguin?)

C'est un pingouin ou un cochon? (Is this a penguin or a pig?)

Depending on where you want to go with the conversation, there are all kinds of questions you could ask about someone's Disco Piggy (or whatever else) Masterpiece.

What color is it?

What is the pig doing?

What kind of music does the pig prefer?

What is the pig wearing?

You can also ask students their opinions of things in the picture or have the group use their imagination to add more characterization.

What does the pig like to do?

How old is the pig?

What does the pig want?

Where is the pig going tomorrow?

What did the pig do yesterday?

The options are wide open from there, and it can be easy to spend ten minutes on a single masterpiece, but you can spend as much or as little time on each one as you like.