FINAL PART OF THE COURSE : INNOVATIVE TEACHING PRACTICES SUPPORTED BY ITC TOOLS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

This entry supposes the last activity of the course. I must say it has been quite interesting as well as all the tools and apps we have learnt about and put in practice to make fun and different activities in our lessons.
 Although in this last part I am supposed to choose a course  mate's activity to do in my own class;  I won't be able to do it as unfortunately our country is going through a very tragic moment and our  lessons at schools  have been cancelled for some weeks. However if  I had to choose one I would have liked to carry out  a very good activity  called " Bullying with Edpuzzle" that I found in "My English blog" by Alicia Robles , a secondary English  teacher .
She proposes a listening activity and a speaking follow up through a video by two young singers
( Bars and Melody) who participated in Britain's Got Talent in 2014 with a song about Bullying . No doubt  I would do this activity  with my students as it can help them raise awareness of Bullying and how it can affect victims. Needless to say that the activity would also help my students to develop both their listening and speaking skills through a topic quite close to them.

Here it is the link to the Edpuzzle activity : https://edpuzzle.com/media/5e693923250f9f40d2f763f3
and "My English blog": https://alicerof.blogspot.com/

A WORD FOR SOME GOOD BLOGS

https://auladingles.blogspot.com
https://teacherrafaalmeria.blogspot.com

These two are the blogs  I have chosen to comment.
 I like the first  blog created by Rocio because it is simply arranged. I find it easy to search for anything in it . The format is easy , simple  but nice .But what I like the most is  the endless material and resources for children she includes in the blog.It  is quite complete ; what makes me think  this teacher has been using this blog for some time. I can't say any negative about this blog, well ; maybe just one thing ....I feel envious of the amount of work  Rocio has already got to include in her blog  , guess the process took time and time is something precious she has obviously invested in her blog. Great job  Rocio !

Another blog I would like to mention is that one designed by Rafa, a primary English teacher.It is also simply arranged and quite clear at first sight.All the activities carried out in this couse are included and perfecly developed and explained  with very good reflections.Not anything negative to mention apart from the fact that although I like the activities he proposes , he is a primary teacher and I am a secondary one so not all the activities he used could be done in my classes. Anyway, good job Rafa!

GENIALLY TOOL FOR VIDEO

https://view.genial.ly/5e63e21875ef8e0fc16c68c2/presentation-advertising-roomba-120

SPEAKING ACTIVITY WITH GENIALLY : ADVERTISING AND SELLING  A PRODUCT.
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PLANNING :

STAGE 1: Establish groups ( maximum 2/3 people).
STAGE 2: Choose modality of Genially.
STAGE 3:Choose a product to advert and sell.
STAGE 4:Think of and write the content for the advert and distribute roles for performing.
STAGE 5: Think of format, images , videos and special effects.

GROUPINGS : Students' own decisions / free to decide and organize within the class.

TIMING: 2/ 3 minutes maximum

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS:

• List of products people could want nowadays.
• List of the main features of advertising texts.
• Ideas about advertsing certain products.
• Display of similar videos done by other students.

Students  loved the activity, especially the making of. I think the project required  a lot of cooperation between members in a group and they felt close to the topic as the Spanish teacher had already been working on advertising texts in her  class so students were already familiarized with the main features of this textual typology . Students had fun preparing the tasks and especially performing the oral part.They told me they felt as real actors and actresses and we had a lot of laughs when displaying each video in class. I consider Genially a great tool to make studenst use the L2.

STORYJUMPER EXAMPLE

https://www.storyjumper.com/book/read/79474875/5e638257e7a93


I think Storyjumper provides an useful and fun tool for students to write, especially for those who consider writing a boring task.This time I didn't prepare a writing group activity as I preferred students could work individually and grow autonomous using this tool by working on an easy activity to start with.I addition , I think that when working in groups  not all memembers in the group contribute to the final product as much as they should and my studnets prepared the work at home.(in  my school , half of the computers in the Computer Room don't work ).

Students in the 2nd ESO prepared a personal booklet where they could provide any kind of information about htemselves. I gave them some tags they could introduce in their works ( family, school, favourites, hobbies, trips, friends, free time , etc ....) and I showed them all the possibilities of the tool in class.( designing of characters, using pics and audios and props, etc.. ). I think the main learning objectives were developing the writing skill by using both grammatical structures and vocabulary they already knew ( what made them feel confident ) and the freedom the tool provides to create their own products by making use of their imagination and artisitic skill, contributing this way to the students' artisitic competence and their autonomy . Students loved especially the feeling of freedom to create something not feeling fixed to a provided model and the posssibility to share information about themselves  with other students in the class so they could both value the design of their  " little pieces of art" (as they referred to them) and comment on their personal information
( students tend to be very gossipy).

Next time I would like to try group writing but so far as I hadn't ever tried this tool and I thought it was  a better idea to start with somehting simple , not too much time consuming and hard to organize for me and the students.

ED PUZZLE : HOTEL RESERVATION

https://edpuzzle.com/assignments/5e5b9f51fe7d5c40a4fc25bd/students
https://edpuzzle.com/assignments/5e5bfeccf327e440a581c36b/students

I have chosen these videos of a hotel reservation as the topic of the unit I am working on at the moment in one of my classes is about travelling and tourism. I think the language used in these videos and conversations are necessary for any international traveller or tourist abroad. I want my students to get familiarized with both the vocabulary and expressions of a real conversation in a hotel reception when checking in so that they can feel competent and fluent linguistically speaking as future travellers if the find themselves in a situation like the ones in the videos.

The lesson plan involved 3 stages :

Pre-activity: At home, students looked for typical expressions and vocabulary which take place when doing the check-in in a hotel. Once in class, they discussed the most typical ones and were written on the board for them to remember and check. My intention with this part or stage was flipping the activity and make students interact with new material for homework first, this way they started working on the listening activity with some ideas about the type of language they were exposed to.

During-activity: Students visualized 2 videos and did some fill in the gaps and multiple choice activities about the information in the videos.

Post-activity: In pairs students made up and wrote a brief dialogue including the expressions learnt in relation to a hotel reservation and check-in .In the following lesson,  students role played their dialogues and voted the most realistic and authentic ones.

I personally believe that the advantage of this listening activity based on adapted videos is that students watch real life situations learning by themselves the language they will listen to ; what helps them for a better understanding and knowledge of real language in use in a more entertaining and dynamic way . In addition, from a didactic point of view , these videos are a great  and useful source of  material to prepare and work on varied pre, during and post activities and follow up ones with an oral and written content involved to be evaluated.

The part the students and  I   liked the most was the role play session, as apart from the laughs and fun of watching peers to role play , it was the moment to check the way the students put in practice the content learnt in simulated real life situation making also use of extra elements as pose, gesture, tone, pronunciation, attitude from what I could evaluate the respect an value students gave to the FL as a vehicle of communication.