How often do you really get to listen to your students talking English? In the mad rush of the day, with over 30 kids in my class, I do not often get the opportunity to hear my 11th grade students speaking in English for longer than the few seconds for the interactions we have in the framework of our class. Considering the fact that our students will have to pass an oral exam with an external tester at the end of the 12th grade, and more importantly: we want our students to be able to communicate competently in English, the face-to-face classroom English-speaking time just isn’t enough.
Thankfully, these days, we have lots of options.
Israeli students must do 4 book reports during the process of their high school careers. I decided this time, to require an oral component for that book report. The oral component is worth 40% of the book report grade.
These are the instructions I gave them (this is a Googleslides presentation which is embedded in our class Googlesite):
And here is the grading rubric (also embedded in our class site, using Googledocs) .
Rubrics for Oral Presentation
Spoke clearly, fluently, used appropriate vocabulary
20
Clearly read and understood book
10
Handed in written drafts
5
Participated in someone else’s oral presentation
5
Some of them asked if they could do it using only an audio file. In this case, I decided NOT to be flexible. Here's why:
It is so easy these days for kids to record themselves on their smartphones, or tablets. It's also another opportunity to tell them to take OUR their phones (rather than put them away) and use them for educational purposes! Some of them might even figure out how to do some editing on it and learn other tools via English! So why not make it part of YOUR EFL teaching routine?!
Do YOU have your students record themselves on their phones, in English? Please comment and share your activities for improving their oral proficiency using this tool!
It is the middle of the spring break. My students were
supposed to have completed their blogs by now.
However after realizing that most of them had not, I pulled them in for
a mini-marathon session. I brought them into our English Learning Center, gave them a quick review of what they were
supposed to have included in their project, plugged them into the laptops and
told them to get on with it.
The research paper, itself, had been written in Googledocs.
It has been a fantastic way of doing process writing. The umbrella topic was
“Customs and Beliefs”. Each pair embraced an area that could be considered as
falling under this umbrella topic, and devised a research question, querying a
connection or relationship or influence of one aspect of the research question,
upon the other. From within the research question, each one of the pair had
their specific focus. For example, a pair who did their research question on
“What was the influence of the Rastafarian beliefs on Bob Marley’s music?”
divided the work between them, with one of them researching Bob Marley’s music,
while the other investigated Rastafarian beliefs. They then had to draw
conclusions by reading each other’s research. They wrote all of their work in
one Googledoc, which was shared with me. As they forged ahead with their undertakings, I was able to
access their docs, write comments, suggest ways to clarify, improve, correct spelling and
grammar.
Thanks to Googledocs, nothing got lost; it all gets saved
automatically in their Googledoc within their Google Drive. If they made a
mistake, they went back in time and looked at the history. From within the Googledoc history, they could
either reconstruct where things had gone amiss, or just completely revert to an
earlier version. Magic!
In the past, when doing a project like this, I used to to
collect reams of summaries and drafts each session, review them at home, write my
comments, and give the pages back to them at the next lesson. By doing it all online,
in Googledocs, I have the capability of accessing the projects-in-progress any time I want. I annotate the Docs, and then send the students an email
telling them that I had written critiques; inviting them to go back in and work revise accordingly.
Unfortunately (as also happens in other modes of project
work, when you “set them loose” in the library, not all of them use their time
wisely. Hence – we find ourselves in the middle of April and not everyone has
finished their project.
Back up the truck!
Of course, all of the students had an automatic, inborn
understanding of what Googledocs were and how they are used.
NOT!
Prior to
embarking on the research project, as an “enabling” exercise to teach the
students how to work on a collaborative document, we did a round-robin activity.
We had just finished learning a story which we had described as being a modern
day fairy tale. I defined a modern day fairy tale as being a fairy tale that
has the aspects of a traditional fairy tale (good vs. wicked, magical creatures
or enchanted aspects, fairy godmothers, etc.) however the story was set in a
contemporary environment. The kids were then all taught how to open a Googledoc (of
course, at the beginning of the year, at the same time that I told them what
school supplies they would need, I instructed them to open a Gmail account).
The class was then given approximately 10 minutes to begin composing their "modern-day
fairy tales". After 10 minutes, they were instructed to share their documents with
three other students. The other students had to pick up the tales from where
the previous writers had left off. They ALL had to share their fairy tales with
me.
A view of the Fairy Tales in my Drive
And thus, they all became acquainted with the wonders of
collaborative writing through the glorious tool which is Googledocs..... and we all worked happily ever
after.
The End.
Note: Embedded, above, are two tutorials which I made for different purposes, but since they teach how to open and share a Googledoc, I used them to teach my students how to do so for our project, if they were absent on the day I taught it in class (or just as a reminder).
Any one of the five people (and that's an optimistic estimate) who perused my last post, way
back in October, read that I had promised to be more active and consistent with
my blogs. Well I am rebooting once again, however now, I am steeled with oodles
of inspiration. First of all, are some truly exceptional blogging colleagues
(+Yair Farby and +Efrat Maatouk) as well as the urging of someone whom I
consider a mentor (+Aviv Tzemach), who has stated that part of the job
description of a counselor for teachers in digital pedagogy, includes running a
blog. To top it all off, was the timely
appearance of +Jules Taggart and her “Blog Revival Challenge”, in which I am
participating this week. The “Challenge” promises to turn my blog content from
"blah" to brilliant in 7-days. So…as a result of the “Challenge”, I have
revamped the look of the blog slightly, changed the name to “Digitally Yours”
and have now officially declared thesaurus.com as my best friend, to give my
verbs (and adjectives, and probably nouns, as well) some “oomph”.
In my last blog, eons ago, I wrote about my
intention to do an online research project with my 10th graders,
using a Googlesites Template. So now, 6 months on, I can report on how that has
been going. Since I do not want this blog to be agonizingly long, I will break
it into a few blog postings. For now, I will just bring you up to scratch on
where we are as of Passover break.
Although we finished working on the projects in our lessons
in February, in order to move on to other curricular endeavors, most of the
students have not completely finished their projects. Not that it would have necessarily been
different if the projects had been done in the usual tree-killing printed-out-on-paper
mode, but there HAVE been some aspects of the online project which has made it
more challenging than previously, among them, the issues of keeping track (for
both myself and my students).
To start out, my colleague Lily and I devised what we wanted
to see in the quintessential project website, and prepared a basic template. The
role of the template was to enable the students to simply copy the template,
with all the required webpages. Based on
that, the students were expected to design, decorate and in short: take
responsibility and ownership of their websites for their projects.
We invested considerable time and thought into what we
expected the projects to look like, and I built a template on Googlesites. A
few days before presenting the concept to our students, I approached the task
of preparing short tutorial webcasts to
teach the students how to copy and edit their sites, filled with the anticipation and excitement of
doing something new and inspiring. Then came the sucker-punch. To my horror, I realized that I was locked out of my
template! After a few hours of frantic emails back and forth between my
Google-savvy colleagues, and fruitless attempts at catching the attention of
anyone of import at Google, itself, I caved. I reconstructed what I had
envisioned for the template, and saved it as a model site, while at the same
time screencasting the procedure as I built it.
I believe I can honestly say that, putting aside the initial
mortification of having been exiled my own house; of having something I had
developed unceremoniously hijacked from under my nose and within my realm of
cyberspace, in the end….. I probably gained more than I lost. Because the
bottom line is that, not only did my students learn how to do a research
project; they also gained the experience of actually building a website.
Easy it wasn’t. But I believe that at least a few of them
feel pride in having learned how to build a website that they can show to
others. And when their time comes, in two years, to present their projects for
their oral matriculations, I do not expect to hear the excuse that their mother
threw out their project… or that the dog ate it.
Digitally yours, @dele
P.S. Below is an example of one of the tutorials I produced for the purposes of teaching the students how to build a website. They can all be found on my class site: AdeleEFL.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Blogging about blogger!
We have just completed the final session in a series of webinars about using Googletools in the classroom. Blogger is a tool that I have been drawn to for a long time (as you can see my sporadic blogging attempts from the past) but have not yet really made "friends" with. I think it might have something to do with "commitment issues" ...I am committed to so many things, that committing to a blog has been scaring me off. But maybe the summer is the perfect time to conquer them.
Most exciting is that I am looking for a tool to use with my students for working on a portfolio for a project - and I believe that blogger might be a good tool for the process part of the portfolio. I will try to work it out, while brainstorming with colleagues - in person as well as on Facebook. Will keep you posted!
