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

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? 

Project: a tutorial

This week, in my 1º ESO class, we have been working on conditional sentences. We have discussed '0' and 1st conditionals. In order to practice, I have asked them to create a mini-project. These are the instructions,




It's just a short activity in order to practice a specific grammar point. I didn't want to use the typical activity in which students are presented with a 'condition' and have to come up with a consequence or result (we practiced that orally as a chain kind of activity), and I wanted the students to write down sentences, so I came up with this. Not a genius idea, or completely original, but effective (once the students understand they have to move away from just giving instructions).

I asked them to use Snapguide because it's really easy to use and the final product is really eyecatching. This contributes to the students' feelings of achievement and satisfaction... an important element for students!

Thanks for checking in! See you next time!

Project: news stories

Last week, we started working on a new project in my 4º ESO class. In this project, the students have to research a journalistic style and report three news stories according to their chosen style.

Here you have the presentation I used in class:

First of all, the students got into groups, and before choosing a style, we discussed some common characteristics of each of them together. We discussed things such as bias, neutrality, focus, the importance given to personal commentary by the person reporting the news, the general tone, the role of the audience, and some other generalities. Then, each group chose a style and they started working on their scripts. 

Although I have given them three stories to report and examples of raw news to my students, I've actually given them the freedom to develop their stories as they like. In other words, they all have to talk about an oil spill, a new vaccine and a celeb becoming a mother, but the stories described by each group can differ. 

I am really excited about this project because, although we are working on fictional news, the students will gain a deeper understanding of the role of the media in news reporting, and hopefully, this will make my students a little more critical when they read or hear the news, by asking themselves the same questions we discussed at the beginning of the project: is this biased? What political agenda does it have, if any? Is this news or opinion? ... 

All the groups have decided to record a video, and one of them has asked to use Touchcast. As I write these lines, however, we're still at the script-writing stage of the project. I shall update again in a few days. 

Thanks for reading!

Project: a survey (2)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the surveys on role models, which my 4º ESO students had made. These surveys were filled out by other students at school. Once enough responses had been received, the authors collated and analysed the data and presented the results to the class. 

Google Forms is great because it simplifies this job for you. It makes pie charts and and bar charts, so it makes the job of interpreting data easier. The open questions (short or long answers) yielded different results, sometimes unexpected or even wasteful, as the students who took the surveys didn't always take the questions seriously. I think my students learned a lesson there. 

Finally, the results were interpreted and analysed. My students used Google Slides to make their presentations, using some of the graphs provided by Google Forms, and conclusions were drawn in insightful ways, which made this part of the project meaningful and informative. 

The general feedback from the class was positive. They had never done a project like this and they relished the challenge. It was nice to create a questionnaire that was treated like a real one (by most people, anyway), and not like a classroom activity that stays within the same four walls where it was created. 

They did say that making three different surveys about the same topic (role models) was a bit samey, though, and that it would have been better to have used different topics instead. I have to say that I agree with this, and for next year I will probably ask my students to make surveys about a few different topics, such as stereotypes, independence, the rights of young people, and so on.  

The next step is to do a writing on the back of this. We're working on reports and proposals at the moment. I'll write a post about this once we get there. 

Thanks for checking in!

The Raven

I've come to realise that, no matter how old my students are (ahem, ahem...), they always enjoy celebrating foreign holidays such as Halloween. Last October, I decided to humour them, but I had my rules.

1-. They were going to read a poem.

2-. The poem was long.

3-. It had lots of strange words.

4-. I wanted to record their voices reading it.

Their enthusiasm somewhat subdued, I showed them the following video:

Some of them were touched by this point. Most of them, though, still had their suspicions. It was long, it had a lot of long, difficult words, and the subject matter wasn't all that clear. Who was Lenore, anyway? 

Printed copy of the poem in our hands, we went almost line by line, focusing on the rhythm and the sounds, just getting used to the cadence and the images conjured up by the extensive use of alliteration, repetition and rhyme. Even those students who still didn't understand the poem were starting to let themselves get carried away by the intricate, elaborate and resounding mechanics of the poem. 

OK, then. Death, loss, insanity, obsession... the themes started to fly around in class. Written on the board, bubble diagram covering the white surface. The words started to gain meaning, up until then unclear. Mythological figures became more concrete and significant. Most students were on board and started to make decisions about how they were going to read their lines. 

They wanted to read their lines in pairs, so I gave each pair of students two stanzas. We went over difficult words, drawing their attention to internal rhyme so they could predict their pronunciation. Without saying they were turning into actors, the students were interested in the speaker's frame of mind in order to give their performance some substance. And then, the big day arrived. 

I used WavePad, a voice-recording app on the iPad, and recorded stanza after stanza. The students felt satisfied after we finished, our 10-minute long recording testament to their efforts, to the journey they had to make to reach the master of horror literature, even if it was only with their fingertips. 

When we finished, the general comment was... we should do this more often! 

I agreed. 

Have you used Poe's masterpiece in class? What was your experience? Let me know in the comments below! 

A class debate

As far as speaking activities go, class debates are both entertaining and educational. I like them because you can work a lot of skills, some of which go beyond the purely linguistic ones.

This week, I have done a class debate on the subject of ambition.

We looked at a couple of quotes about ambition, highlighting both its positive and its negative side.

Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in. Bill Bradley

He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain its ashes. Proveb.

Then, the students were divided into two groups-- those who would argue that ambition was mostly a positive quality, and those who would defend the opposite. Not every student was going to argue according to their belief, which made it all the more interesting. I have an odd number of students, so one of the teams had one extra member.

We agreed on a few different subtopics: the business world, historical figures, people in our own personal circles, etc. Each team would research these to fit in with their position. I gave the class two periods to prepare, and we established the debate would last between 30 and 45 minutes.

Finally, both teams chose a main speaker, who would start the debate by stating their team's position and a short but strong supporting reason.

On the day of the debate, the classroom furniture was arranged in such a way that all students were sitting down in neat rows, each team facing each other. I had prepared a rubric measuring the 5 main aspects I wanted to assess:

• respect for the other team
• quality of the information used
• relevance to argument
• presentation (voice, body language, eye contact)
• language skills

The students were made aware of the standards required. We tossed a coin and the debate began!

After the debate, I assigned the students an opinion essay with the following quote by Thomas Morton to discuss: "Where ambition ends, happiness begins."

I think that having done the class debate prior to the writing assignment works well to help students generate valuable ideas to use in their essays. A lot of them suffer from writer's block when it comes to talking about abstract ideas, so doing an 'undercover' brainstorming by way of a debate is an effective way to get those creative juices running. 

I am really happy with the result because students have 

• researched a topic they had some pre-conceived ideas about
• worked as a team in order to build solid arguments, in some cases anticipating counter-arguments 
• listened to each other in order to rebuff arguments effectively
• put into practice some complex language, such as second and third conditional sentences, reported speech, relative clauses, modal verbs... 
• used both speaking and writing skills

How about you? What is your experience with class debates? 

Creative writing

I would like to share a classroom experience that I feel particularly happy about.

Last year, I tried out a creative writing activity with my 4th year students. During the week leading up to Halloween, I asked them to write a horror story set in school, the reason being that the creepiest stories are always those that happened near the place where they are being told. I gave the students a few pointers, asked them to get into groups of three, and gave them a bit of time to work on a basic horror story. They were a fairly strong class, and they delivered the goods. 

This year, I have a slightly weaker class in the same year level. Weaker in their language skills, but really imaginative and with a high level of commitment to any 'different' activity I bring to class. I pitched the task to them by first reading a horror story set at school (with some characters they recognised even after a name change, and some locations they could identify without trouble). Then, I explained the basics of story writing (rising action, climax, denouement), and gave them a target of two pages. This time they would work in pairs, and just like last year, I gave them time to work on their stories in class. 

Their response was amazing. They threw themselves into it- they weren't just completing an assignment, they really wanted to create scary stories, and they really wanted their classmates to picture their characters and what they were going through in no uncertain terms. They researched vocabulary I would never have dreamt of teaching them at their skill level, they used grammar structures we had just been working on the week before to express uncertainty and speculation (and if I may say so, successfully as well), and they even were a bit worried they would have to go over the 'limit' of two pages because their story just needed that extra bit of development, or to create a certain effect on the reader. 

To them, this was a writing assignment, yes, but it was also a chance to imagine something and bring it to life. 

To top it all off, we read the stories in class, curtains drawn and creepy music playing in the background. 

The general comment? "We should do this more often!"

You can check their stories (with some minor editing and corrections) clicking here.