Posts

A GPS For The Scavenger Hunt

I am pretty sure that all teachers, and I am one of them, have already used bi-dimensional maps whether they were those fold-up maps, illustrations that were in  textbooks or even a simple map drawing on the board. But, imagine the reaction of a student whose daily routine is all about iPads, Playstations and smartphones. Such map would be really boring to this kid.

That’s exactly when someone might say “map apps are also bi-dimensional. How can they be so different from what has been done in the classroom?”. Well,  many maps nowadays are 3-D which means that teaching directions and even some expressions that are very useful for those who travel often or those who don’t want to get lost when looking for a place or address. As a drilling activity the teacher can design a game in which the classroom becomes a neighborhood and then students are separated in groups. Each group  can be a car, given that every car would have 4 people, then there would be around 10 cars on the “street”. In case there is and odd number of  students, there can also be pedestrians and bikers. The teacher can be a traffic guard controlling the “traffic” so that students respect the rules (all communication must be made in the target language). When students do something other than what they were asked to, the teacher corrects them using the appropriate technique granting the “traffic” flow.

I know I have mentioned Michael Tomasello and his study on language acquisition through its use before. This means that interaction takes an important role in the acquisition process of sintax, phonetics, semantics and pragmatics whereas the brain then has the responsibility of decoding  all these features, thinking, in other words, to produce sppech in an organized manner. I wonder if the proposed activity is aligned with Tomasello’s proposal. Let’s find out. The interaction between student and teacher happens naturally and the fact this is a group activity the Zone of Proximal Development takes place and students can assess one another and communication in the target language (maybe with very few words in Portuguese) stimulates cognition in the acquisition process. Mission accomplished! But what about the map? And what is so techie about it? At the end of the lesson plan there may be a performance activity, when students fly freely, without interference from teachers. Considering a class of Primary school, or maybe the first grades of Secondary, the teacher can suggest a scavenger hunt. The plus here is tat the teacher can hand out GPS devices and set them to English language so that students find their treasure by listening to the directions given by the device.

Almost everyone has seen and used a GPS device. Stepping into a classroom with an activity that requires old fold-up maps is nonsense in a context and reality where students use smartphones and tablets. Doing it so might demotivate students and they are not going to be as engaged as you wanted them to, resulting in a poor performance. Once motivation is zero, then the whole process is disabled. But that is an issue for another post.

/0 Comentários/por

Let’s Hang Out

In the last 14 years working as an English teacher the top-3 most heard sentences from students are ‘I hate English’, ‘this present perfect stuff has no equivalent in Portuguese, does it’ and ‘this phrasal verb thing is too hard’. Well I would respectively reply like ‘maybe our previous teachers were not so good then’, ‘yes, there is’ and ‘yes’. Say what?! Sure it is hard, phrasal verbs are idioms that carry a strong semantic function and therefore are really tricky to be taught and learned.

The dilemma of teaching an idiom is how to shape meaning so that students understand it and at the same time the teacher’s talking time is reduced? Of course that depending on the methodology adopted, the teacher will indeed speak a lot (not recommended by CELTA), but with a fun and well prepared activity the teacher may have an A+ performance in the classroom and also engage his or her students. As it was previously discussed in another article, Google offers more than just a searching tool. There is something called Hangouts which is some sort of Skype embedded in Android OS and allows us to make calls and video calls with those who have a Google account. In addition, hangouts provides people with live stream automatically uploaded to a YouTube  account which means that someone might be visiting MoMa and call a group of students who are inside a school on the other side of the planet. Although this might look like a Google ad it isn’t. What happens is that there are so many resources available that can be used in the classroom that encourage the development of activities.

Let’s take the following phrasal verbs: ‘come up with’, ‘get along with’ and ‘set in’. The teacher can prepare a very interactive and communicative activity using Hangouts. Making use of context that involves friendship, social interactions as themes, it is possible to introduce such idioms and for drilling students can interview one another. To make practice more interesting, the teacher can hand out roles to students in which they can be athletes, celebrities, filmmaker, whereas the other student (considering an activity in pairs) plays a journalist. Students can also drill questions besides the idioms for many find asking questions quite hard to be produced. In order to make it up for the time possibly spent by the teacher to introduce the content of the day and the highly used talking time, the activity can have a grand finale with the students’ performance using Google’s tool. Inside the computer lab, students can make contact with other students around the world who were previously arranged by the teacher so that interview could be held and the studied phrasal verbs could be used. As the video is automatically uploaded to YouTube, the teacher can evaluate the students more accurately.

Thus, learning a controversial such as idioms (frowned by many) gets a plus through a very  real experience that might motivate your students. Leave your students hanging out with other from abroad with Hangouts using the phrasal verbs that were taught in the classroom.

/0 Comentários/por

Google Beyond Research

Everyone is more than used to turning to the greatest research tool in the world: Google. Everything there is in this planet can be found there, there is not a single thing this tool cannot  fetch and if Google cannot find it, then it just does not exist. What maybe few second language teachers know is that there is also another tool that can be very well used in language classes.

Even those teachers who are not tech aficionados ended up giving in to Google. However, a very low number of them have used their precious time of lesson preparation to explore every single corner on Google For Education. Calendars can be synced, files are shared and edited there, which is good for students’ work. In case you haven’t been introduced to each other yet, Google Drive offers their users a powerful tool to receive and share content with your students which means that if you want to flip your classes, you can kiss goodbye your excuses. Inside the core of lesson planning (warm-up, drilling, performance), with the resource of Google Drive it is possible to create a video clip that is going to be used at the warm-up stage. For instance, supposing that the content of the day is about looks, it might be interesting to go to a park and record all walks of people tall, short, fit, skinny, blondes, brunettes, people with curly or straight hair. Such a beginning of activity can expand the options for other sections of the lesson plan and, in addition, you will not be stuck with the school’s technical resources which are, in many cases, unfortunately limited.

On the other hand if Google Drive is already your BFF and you think you know all its features like the back of your hand, coding may be a good option for you to work with in your classroom. Yup, coding. That programming language used to design websites, apps and softwares. Of course Google’s Made With Code is not going to teach us exactly how to write codes, instead it uses the concept of functional blocks and offers a valuable tool for second language classes. Creating an avatar through geometric shapes can also be a fun activity with a techie pitch for K-12 groups. In this activity creativity and logical thinking are worked on and the outcome can become a tangible evidence of how students perceive, for instance, a character of book previously read. The stimulus for students to present and justify, in the target language, what each part of the avatar represents will make them communicate and use the vocab they learned such as geometrical shapes, colors, body parts. And what about asking your students to reproduce a poem in another language, with the same theme, but with a contemporary viewpoint? Too boring? Not if they can make their work into music. After they make their version of the poem, the students can use Google to create beats and become a rockstar for one day.

We all know how powerful Google has become and its education division has developed so impressive tools as the research. Knowing how to use such tools hinges on how willing a teacher is to understand how they work and think about implementing them in their activities. Go beyond the basics.

/0 Comentários/por