Your Year 9 lesson works. A starter, some input, practice on paper, a short speaking task. You know where every minute goes.
Then the school buys a tablet trolley, or the timetable says “digital learning”. And you can see the risk at once: twenty-eight screens, twenty-eight speeds, and nobody talking to anybody.
Holding back is a reasonable reaction. Screens can eat a lesson.
The first attempt
Most of us start the same way. Hand out the devices, put the link on the board, let the class work.
The first ten minutes look great. Then the gaps open. Three students finish in four minutes and drift to another website. Five are still trying to open the page. The rest click answers until something turns green.
At the end the room was quiet, and you have no idea what anyone learned.
The rule that changes it
The answer is not fewer screens. It is a shorter screen phase inside a lesson that still belongs to you: paper, then screen, then talk.
- Before (5 min): key language on the board or on paper, so students arrive at the exercise with a reason to do it.
- Screen (10–15 min): one exercise with a clear finish line. “Exercises A and B, then screens down.”
- After (5 min): talk. “Which answer did you get wrong first? Why?”
The problems that come back
The routine doesn’t solve everything. Three problems keep coming back — here’s the fix for each.
Fast finishers. Give a fixed extension before you start: the next exercise, or two sentences of their own with the target language.
Guessing. Ask for the reason, not the answer. “Why have been and not were?” A student who guessed cannot answer that, and knows it.
Setup time. Logins and passwords come straight out of practice time. Use exercises that open without an account.
And some lessons will still go wrong. The wifi drops, a device dies. Keep the paper version of the task in your folder.
What you get back
Once the screen is one phase rather than the whole lesson, it does what it is good at. Students get instant feedback and correct themselves. That frees you to walk the room and go where help is needed — which was the point all along.
Try it next week
- Pick one lesson where you already use a paper practice task.
- Replace only that task with one interactive exercise, 15 minutes at most.
- End with five minutes of talk about the mistakes.
Free exercises for your class
Every exercise on activities.englishonline.training is free, needs no login, and gives students the instant feedback that makes the “screen” phase worth the ten minutes. Pick one for next week’s unit and try the routine once.