Another good bail out move when you just don’t feel like launching the CI rocket is to have a stack of words ready to place on a central table on the room. This is Bob Patrick’s OWATS activity (originally intended for front loading vocabulary from authentic texts with upper level students to make the texts easier to read) but used here to simply get the kids quiet and working because you don’t want to teach that day.
Just print out a bunch of words, cut and stack them up on a table, and follow the OWATS plan where each group gets to take one word at a time from the pile and make up a sentence with it until they have a story. You get to walk around and pontificate on grammar and the students are proud and happy to have such a serious teacher when it comes to those pesky verb spellings and accent marks.
Simple simple and it eats up large amounts of time. Then process the stories on the overhead projector. Encourage them to draw some pics to go with the story, and things like that maybe with some tech stuff added in. Use this as you would any bailout move when you need it to get the kids working and happy, and to give you a rest from real teaching.