Year Zero (2º ESO)

Making students question their reality is part of their education if we want them to grow into critical thinkers. This doesn't mean making them question everything just for the sake of it. It means making them aware that there are other ways of doing things apart from the mainstream way, and that there may be a lot of valid reasons for doing so.

Usually, debates are productive class activities to encourage students to consider different points of view. However, I wanted students to produce some individual work this time, and I created the following activity, which I called Year Zero. You can have a look at the presentation here:



I showed my students the excellent 12,017 In a Nutshell video, in which the authors argue that using our current calendar is misleading and gives a distorted vision of History. If you haven't watched it, I recommend it, as I would many other videos in the same channel. My point was that our calendar is just one of our cultural conventions, and that conventions can be changed if there is a strong enough reason for it.

My students, then, were given the challenge to choose an alternative 'year 0' from any point in history. They had to explain why they had chosen it and the advantages of using it as the starting point in history. The aim was to make a 1-minute long video using Spark Video or Shadow Puppet Edu explaining their choice.

The students had to write their script and then, after arranging the pictures they wanted to use in their video in the correct order, they recorded their voices over the pictures. To ensure sound quality, I asked them to do this part at home.

The assessment was done by rubric, taking into account (1) Grammar and vocabulary, (2) Pronunciation and intonation, (3) Correspondence between images and text, (4) Originality and creativity.

The final part of the activity would have been to show all the videos in class and to have a vote for the best videos. Because of time constraints, we never did it- maybe next time!

With an activity like this, students develop their cultural awareness, their digital competence and their communicative competence--first, by reading information on a topic; secondly, by writing a script; and finally, by reading it out loud while recording it over a video. They also develop their critical thinking skills.

This activity definitely took a lot of my students out of their comfort zones!

Thanks for popping in!

Maite

Edgar Allan Poe: Short Stories (1º ESO)

The master of horror, the father of detective fiction, the main contributor to the obscure and the macabre... Halloween wouldn't have been completed without  Poe. Last year, I got my Advanced students to read The Raven collaboratively. Because of technological glitches, I haven't been able to upload the recording anywhere... so this time I approached the task differently.

It was my 1º ESO students this time. First, we had a look at the following presentation, which I created specifically for this project:




The students were given a calendar to help them plan their work:


Then, we split the class into two groups, and having a close look at the (adapted) text of the two stories, the students began to unleash the performers within and finally... we made two recordings, added pictures and... voilà!

The project was complete.

In a task like this, students learn about literature, read a creative story, practice pronunciation and intonation, and develop their digital competence by putting together an audiovisual product. They also work as part of a team and develop collaborative working skills.

The assessment was done by using this rubric:




As expected, this project involved quite a lot of hard work, but the students really enjoyed it.

Thanks for popping in! See you next time!

Project: news stories (2)

And we're back after the Easter break!

My 4ª ESO students showed their news stories projects on the last day before the holidays began. As the group is so reduced (only 11 students), there were only 3 projects to present, but the experience was really positive for everyone. 

The first group had chosen a kids' programme. They adapted the topics to children and included songs and a dance to highlight the importance of taking care of the environment; interviews with experts to talk about the importance of health and vaccines (no doubt an important aspect of every child's life!), and they gave news of a celebrity baby in the most tender way possible. The students wore animal onesies as well, so they definitely had the target audience in mind. 

If anything could have been improved, I think it would have been the setting in which the programme was recorded, as it was fairly obvious that it had been filmed in a classroom and no attempt was made to hide desks, chairs, and other school paraphernalia. I guess that if we do this again next year I'll have to make students think of this aspect as well, and bring easy-to-use decorations and props to dress up the classrooms a bit better. 

The second group had chosen a standard news programme. In this case, the main difficulty was to adopt the right formal tone usually found in this kind of show. The students had to work a bit to remove opinion and bias from their news stories, achieving a more neutral register. This group used Touchcast Studio, and they benefitted from more professional-looking backgrounds and format for their videos. They thought their project lacked spark in comparison with the previous one, but I think that they still produced a decent news programme. 

The final group had chosen gossip, and this was a bit harder to adapt as there are few TV shows that combine gossip with current affairs, so they reached a compromise by producing a talk show with guests who were commenting on news stories, including dramatic fall-outs between them, heavily opinionated contributions and the hostess trying to keep the peace. It was fun and there definitely was a lot of thought behind it, but I think this group could also have made a bigger effort to make the classroom elements less obvious. They used the IWB to project a background for their programme, including a picture and their logo, but this could have been done more 'professionally' using a green screen as the background. 

The students had a lot of fun making these programmes, and they said they also learned about different reporting styles, apart from practising writing, speaking, audiovisual skills, teamwork, critical thinking... 

Have you done anything similar in your classroom? How did it work?