1.Set polls and quiz questions. Many videoconferencing platforms have an integrating polling function. If they don’t, you can easily share a weblink to a poll you’ve created. Use polls as a starting point for discussion, or to check understanding of a language point. And then, crucially, use the answers your students give to deviate from the PowerPoint – don’t be afraid to skip what your learners already know! 2.Use the chat box. The chat function can be a fantastic tool for teachers in the online classroom. You can use it as a teaching aid to reinforce instructions or backchannel with a struggling student with private chat. But also think about how you can integrate the chat function into activities, by getting students to share answers, opinions, ideas etc. 3.Write on the board. You’ll often find it’s possible to give students control to write or highlight on the whiteboard in a videoconferencing session. This can be great for brainstorming ideas or eliciting vocab, or for getting students to find mistakes in a text, or identify words. 4.Use the record function. Set up short speaking activities, and record your learners. Then listen back to these in class, and get students to engage critically with the recordings in some way (listening for use of key language, pronunciation, or whatever your focus is). 5.Create that information gap. Remember to make sure that your activities really are creating some kind of need to communicate between students – sounds obvious, but the clearer you are about this, the more interaction you will generate. 6.Your learners are a valuable resource! Remember that your students will come to class with their own ideas, opinions and experiences. Use this to engage your learners (can they set up the details of a role play to match a situation they have themselves been in, for example?). Send them to a website to search. Plan your interaction patterns. Much more than in a face-to-face class, you need to plan ahead for each task and think about how your learners can interact. It might be ‘round robin’, or you might want to specify tasks.

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