INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY: speaking postcards for present continuous

Riddle of the day:

"What does a keen on blogging English teacher on a second honeymoon in Istanbul do?"

She posts cards. :)


I'd like to share a lovely idea a friend of mine, Daniela Becchio, had to teach her students the Present  Continuous tense.
While on holiday in Istanbul she took the time to write a postcard to each student, describing what she was doing at the moment.


Postcards from Istanbul on PhotoPeach



Then it was their turn.

They created speaking postcards using Vocaroo .

Here is an example.

Digital version

Paper version

Thanks for sharing, Daniela. ...wish you were here :) 

INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY : a "LEARNIEing" unit

At the beginning there was ....an orange envelope. One for each student.
On the blackboard they brainstormed ideas about the possible content.



(mistake "a homework" left intentionally, as this is a photo
of what the students produced without any interference)

 Then they were asked to open the letter.

Inside there was a short story.

You can read it here.

After reading the story, they wrote their first impressions on the blackboard.

A class discussion followed on the meaning of the story.


Next task was to unscramble the word CHREATE.

After some guesses, they finally got it.


LiveTyping.com

The identification of Learnie with the figure of the student-learner was the next obvious step.
And the moral of the story

" ...I can take you to the spring but I can't make you drink if you don't want to.."

 was summarized in one word:


 

How much is attitude? How worth is it?

They were quite surprised to discover that

if
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
is equal to
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

then

A       1
T      20
T      20
I         9
T      20
U      21
D        4
E        5
         __


         100%


One student explored the concept a little further and she found out other small truths on the web which she published on her wiki page http://villanovaschoolenglish.pbworks.com/w/page/21155049/Attitude


The class agreed on the closing sentence




In the following lessons the students wrote new versions of the story with different points of view.
The narrators were other characters in the story such as Learnie itself, Chreate, some animals in the farm, a plant, a boy, dragons, and so on...

At this point digital media were introduced.

A new character came out: that was Lalla, Learnie's "girlfriend".

She spoke to the students and asked for their help.

Listen to the Blabberize.








The new task was helping Lalla find Learnie.

At this stage a glogster was created to introduce students to digital storytelling , to help them understand the meaning of "digital explanation" and to explore some of the tools available online.


Click here to open the glogster.







They wrote the texts, drew the pictures and showed great creativity and imagination.

Finally, they gave voice to their characters using Blabberize.


Here are some of their digital answers.

















These were our first steps on the path of digital storytelling.

INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY: embedding songs titles in a text

Lesson 1

Teacher: - Open your diary and write down homework for our next lesson -

 Teenagers grumbling.

Teacher: - Homework: look at your Ipod and make a playlist of your ten favourite songs in English -

Surprised teenagers grumbling.

Lesson  2

All the class have their homework.

Teacher: - Ok, now work in groups of three and, after looking at your classmates' titles, make a new playlist of ten songs. Then, write a text , something like "My day yesterday" , using the simple past and embedding the titles in the text in such a way that it sounds natural and meaningful. -

Smiling teenagers on task for one hour.

Lesson 3

Martino, aged 13 ( 21st century teenager  interested in music, arts and internet ) comes to lesson
with a memory stick .
- Teacher, have a look at this. I thought I could record my voice and let the music play in the gaps with the exact songs words. It took me all Sunday afternoon, but I did it! -

Martino's work displayed on IWB.
 

1) Playlist



Music Playlist at MixPod.com



2) Audio text ( Martino's voice and musical gaps )







3) Text

A Horrible Day - by Musical Martino


Teenagers clapping hands.

Who says teaching teenagers is hard? :)

COPY THAT - Does it have to be boring?

Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools

( Michael Leboeuf)

Providing students with written passages to study and analyze is obviously a good thing for them. They notice vocabulary, grammar structures and syntax and use them as models for their own texts. In a recent post Copy that Jason Renshaw stresses the importance of making students copy down the inputs/models/samples in order to fully experience the text.

For language learners in particular, the process of copying out texts is a fantastic way to slow down the language and encourage some noticing of the finer details (before the teacher with the whole class helps them notice some of the bigger picture things happening with the text). It also encourages more uptake in the form of chunks, as learners gradually learn to memorise phrases and parts of clauses in order to speed up the copying process.

I totally agree with Jason: copying things down helps students improve concentration skills, it's good for spelling and  it engages both eyes and hands.
Despite all these pros, copying down can also be labelled as a BORING activity. That's why I feel guilty  if I simply tell my students  " Copy that" without trying to spice up  this exercise a bit.

The activities which follow are an attempt to find a compromise between the need for the copying process and the demand for more challenging, task-based and creative activities.

 HALF-COPY

Students read a text which is displayed on the IWB. They work on pronunciation and , after that, they are given some minutes to read the text silently.

Here is an example. The text is about Edward Cullen's physical appearance ( adapted from Wikipedia to make it suitable for elementary level ).

Then, on the IWB, the same text is displayed with the last part of each word covered with coloured ink. The students have to copy and remember the whole words.

 COPY RIGHT

This activity worked quite well with my students. We've been studying Martin Luther King and racial segregation. I wanted them to memorize some parts of  his "I have a dream" speech, but I didn't like the idea of handing out photocopies of the printed text.
So , using the site Mirror Writing - pniTiяw яoяяim, I wrote it backwards.
The mirrored text looked like this.






 Then an enlarged copy of the mirrored text was stuck on each student's back. In rows, they had to copy the text the right way  from the the person sitting in front of them .As soon as they finished copying ( ant it was not an easy task at all ) they could stand up, without leaving the queue,  and start memorizing the lines.






COPY RIGHT on PhotoPeach



STRIPED TEXT


Sometimes I do give students photocopies of the texts we have to work on, but with an extra task, as in the case of "striped" texts. This activity is very similar to HALF COPY, apart from the fact the students don't copy the whole text but  they just complete the missing parts. Anyway, I find it useful to focus their attention on  spelling of words and grammar structures as well.
Here is an example of a striped text.




COPY WALKIE







This activity is a quieter version of the well-known running dictation and it is good for kinesthetic learners.
The passages to be copied are put on the walls, the students walk to the wall, read the text, remember as much as possible, go back to their desks, sit down and write. They go on like this until the whole text has been copied down. Both quickness and accuracy are required because as a follow-up the students swap their sheets and check the mistakes.


FINAL COPY


I think that writing essays, having them checked and then recopying them in final drafts can be good practice as well as productive classroom routine. It is time consuming but it helps students develop writing skills and they may even end up collecting all their texts in a personal "coursebook".

Example of a personal coursebook created by a Middle School student, by recopying her texts/short essays.



Does it sound like student created content? Probably it is something like that..Students are an invaluable resource and nothing must be wasted which comes from them. I totally agree with David Deubelbeiss.

I like reading posts from much more experienced and competent teachers than I am  around the world and I've been learning a lot from all of them . Still, the best lesson I've been taught is quite simple and it's a common sense solution: read a lot, think, adapt, experiment, try, take risks, vary what you do and how you do it but, most importantly, do what works for you and for your students.

FASHION - GLOGSTER

For the students who are taking Trinity level 6.

Click here to open the Glogster.

INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY: "Strange Animals" class project

We've just finished a class project which involved 12-year-old Middle School students.

( II E from Istituto Comprensivo Villanova Mondovì. ).

Here is, step by step, how it developed.

"STRANGE ANIMALS"

 

Step 1: Eliciting already known vocabulary

Teaching aim: revising animals words

Web2 tools used : AnswerGarden, Wordle.

We started with an online poll . Students were asked to answer a very simple question: "What's your favourite animal?"

What's your favourite animal?... at AnswerGarden.ch.

Then we created a Wordle using their answers. That was the starting point for further work on vocabulary.

  
We also recycled common words introducing emoticons.
Students were shown smileys and  had to guess the animals they represented.
Some new words were introduced using emoticons.
Here is a link to a site where you can find a lot of them







Step 2: Introducing  new vocabulary

Teaching aim: learning new words related to animals and animal world
Web2 tools used: Tagxedo



A list of words was turned into a dog-shaped cloud, as dogs seemed to be their favourite pets.
It worked great on the IWB: students in turn came to the board and moused over the words, which were highlighted.



We also practiced vocabulary using this site.

Then, as homework task, students had to create new emoticons representing other animals. A couple of them even added their creations to the site. Here is an example.





Answers : )

Step 3: Creating a new animal

Teaching aim: drawing an imaginary animal ( cross-curricular Art )

Web2 tools used: PhotoPeach

At this stage the students used a powerful tool : imagination.
The idea came from "Imagine That"- Helbling Languages - Arnold, Puchta, Rinvolucri, pag.64, "Elesnakes and Zebradiles". The students were asked to imagine a dog, then to visualize the dog whose front part becomes a cat. The students kept changing animals in their minds ( back of one animal and front of a different one ), and they created a lot of them. At the end they chose the one they liked best and they gave it a name.

The Art Teacher, Alessia Gazzolo, helped them draw and paint the animals. She also suggested suitable backgrounds for their pictures.

Here is a Photopeach displaying all of them.

Strange Animals from 2 E on PhotoPeach





Strange Animals from 2 E on PhotoPeach



 
 
Step 4: Bringing the animals to life

Teaching aim: writing about daily routines and descriptions and practicing the Present Simple Tense.

The students wrote essays about their animal's life,habitat,  family, habits and dreams. They recycled vocabulary and grammar structures.

Step 5: Giving voice to their creations

Teaching aim: practicing speaking and questions formation
Web2 tools used: Blabberize, Bubblesnaps

The class worked really hard to digitalize their "pets".

Some of them used Blabberize.




Others tried Bubblesnaps.





We thought we could let people comment on our creatures and we made a Voicethread.
Feel free to add comments if you wish. 





Steps 6 : Wrapping things up

Teaching aims: making students reflect on the meaning of words such as "diversity", "imagination" and "creativity"
Web2 tools used: Animoto

A class discussion was led to fully understand the meaning of creativity and the incredible power of imagination. As a final consideration they came up with these simple words:

Close your eyes

Imagine

If you can think about it

It exists

In your mind

anything can live 

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.





Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.




Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.




 

LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE - GLOGSTER

For the students who are going to take Trinity level 6.

Click here to open the glogster.