It’s so fun to see a company grow and develop. When the Z team started off back in 2010, they were using Microsoft Word to create simple teaching resources and card games for French teachers around the world. Fast forward to 2024 and we are releasing our very own teaching application for two different languages! Many of the original resources and games created by the Z team were card-based games where the elements of openness and chance were used to guide students to generate their own language within certain constraints. This created a more engaging and fun atmosphere for both teachers and students. Students were learning and practicing by using the target language in novel contexts. A lot of things changed for traditional language teachers with the pandemic. Many of us found ourselves without a classroom, a table, paper, scissors… As teachers, we found ways to work around it. Some of our favorite content providers began making online-friendly activities, games and resources (hm hm… ESL Expertz). But we never got that “draw a card” feeling back. Until now.

Introducing Zappli!

This is our answer to the problem, a tool that offers a simple and elegant way to recreate the “draw a card” type activity digitally. In the following blog posts, we will show you what this application is capable of and how you can use it with resources from ESL Expertz and beyond to bring another dimension to your online teaching.

Our first example: Where is the sheep?

For the long-standing users of ESL Expertz, you are surely familiar with the prepositions of place game Where is the sheep? For the new recruits, this was one of the first resources we offered before the world went into lockdown. It was envisioned entirely as a printable PDF and card-based activity. That meant you needed a printer (color, preferably), scissors, a laminator and about 30 minutes of free time on your hands. However, it was something sold as “Cut it out once and you can use it forever!” And we thought that was pretty great… The pandemic locked us inside, so we went back to our special sheep and gave them an update. Yes, now there was a digital version! One big JPG you could screen share and use with your online classes. It worked, but we looked for better. Better came with Zappli.

The video will explain the process much easier than I could, but in case you don’t feel like watching it, here’s what I did:

• I located the folder with the images I wanted to use;
• OR I created a separate folder on my desktop with the images I wanted to use;
• I opened Zappli;
• I selected the folder with the appropriate images;
• I selected how many cards I wanted to appear on the screen;
• I pressed “play”.
• And that’s it! With this process you can get pretty close to the “draw a card” type activity we had been missing.

Stay tuned for more posts about how to use Zappli in your online (or even offline) classroom. There will be a growing library of resources and activities we believe suitable for Zappli which you can find here.