Speaking: An Oral Presentation using Genially

As schools in the country were closed, I haven't been able to complete this activity in class. That's why I have had to finish it at home but with the help of my students. 

Before schools were closed, I had time to tell my students about Genially and all the possibilities this tool has. We decided to work on the Presentation Modality and each group would choose an English speaking country to make their presentation. Then, schools were closed and I decided that we,students and me, would work all together on the same presentation. I would make the presentation with the pictures, information, videos, links, etc they would send to me. 

 Students were divided into groups of four and they, themselves, decided who they wanted to work with. The different groups have been communicating among them and choosing the material they wanted to be included in the presentation. 

I suggested the topic ' Ireland, the Emerald Isle. Some curiosities about this English speaking country' because it is a country that I love and I wanted my students to know it a bit better. 

It was yesterday when I got the last information I needed to finish the project. It's been a bit hard to coordinate all my students from home, but we made it.In order to choose the stuff for the presentation, I sent my students some guidelines they had to follow. 

 When we come back to normality, we will work with this presentation in class. Students will have to talk about the information they have chosen and explain why they chose it. We will watch the different videos included in the project and we will discuss them. We can also make comparisons between this country and its traditions with our own country. 

 I have no photos or audios as I have said before, we haven't been able to do it in class. Maybe, when we go back to school, I can take some pictures or even record their performances. 

 In my opinion this tool is very useful for my lessons because it is not very difficult to use and it allows me to create my own material. It makes lessons more visual and entertaining for students. Besides, it is great to be able to include any types of material ( word documents, pictures, videos, links, etc) in the presentations .

And this is our presentation. Hope you like it.

Interaction

Hello Everybody.

The activity I have chosen is the one created by our classmate Rocío using the Pixton tool. 

https://share.pixton.com/plyi1zj

I liked this activity for its learning objectives and because it is a motivating activity to do with my students. I’d like to do it with my students in 3º ESO making the most of their confinement at home these days. As all of them are connected through Edmodo, I will ask them to use that platform to choose a partner to work with. They will have to start a chat conversation in Edmodo to write the dialogue for their comics and the topic should be related to what they are doing these days they cannot go out. I think it is a good way  for them to be in touch, to get familiar with the tool to create comics, to develop their digital competence and to encourage their imagination. They have to be as much creative and funny as possible. When all the comics are done, they will have to send them to me and I will upload them to my blog so that everybody can enjoy them.

A Reflection on the use of Pixton

This is my reflection on the use of Pixton to encourage and motivate my students to write:

1.     Organization of the Groups: To carry out this activity I asked my students in 2º Bachillerato to work in pairs. They chose whom they wanted to work with.

2.     Sequence of tasks: First of all I told my students that I wanted to put into practice a tool to make comics and I wanted them to do it.  Secondly, I showed them the tool we would use and explained to them how to use it. Then we had to think of a topic for our comics and we thought that a good idea would be to use the different idioms we were studying to be the topic of each comic. Idioms like ‘ bucket list’, ‘ have a blast’, ‘kick the bucket’, ‘pull your leg’, ‘ easy as pie’. The different comics would be the perfect scenarios to explain their meanings. After that students in pairs were working on the scripts for the comics. Later students started to work on their comics using the tool but as Coronavirus suddenly barged in our lives, we only could finish one of them.

3.     Learning Objectives and how the tool helped to achieve them: Learning vocabulary by heart and without a context it is usually difficult. That’s why I thought it could be easier for my students to learn the idioms mentioned above if we used them in a ‘real’ context making use of Pixton tool to do it. This tool helped them  to develop their imagination and creativity.

-        Learn some idioms.

-        Encourage Collaborative working.

-        Develop student’s creativity.

4.     In what ways was creativity and use of imagination encouraged? As I said before, this tool helped my students to develop their imagination and creativity, as they had to make up a kind of story, write a script, choose a setting, and design a character… All these things were possible thanks to the tool and its possibilities.

5.     What students enjoyed most / least? Taking into account that my students are not the most motivated ones on Earth, I can say that this activity was very motivating for them and they enjoyed everything from the very beginning.

6.     What would you change? I would change the circumstances we are living nowadays.

7.     How were the finished projects shared? We haven’t had time to share the projects because they haven’t been finished yet but our idea when we come back to normality is to hold an exhibition in class so that everybody can enjoy what they have done.

8.     Opportunities to co-evaluate and discuss the learning experience: So far we haven’t been able to do it but we will do it using a rubric designed for that. I will also ask my students to write down their opinions about the experience.

This is an example of the experience using Pixton in class:

     https://share.pixton.com/pmtla8c

Bullying with Edpuzzle

Bullying is an issue we frequently have to deal with at school. The first time I watched this video, I felt that I had to use it some way in my lessons because I thought my students could learn a lot from the experience of these two boys (Bars & Melody) and how Music can help us to overcome problems and difficult situations in our daily lives.

Objectives:

• To raise students awareness of bullying and how it can affect its victims.
• To improve students' listening and speaking skills.
• To make students aware of the different ways people can be bullied ( calling people names, teasing them, spreading rumours behind their backs...)
• Discuss what to do in bullying situations.
• To find ways to stop bullying.

Pre-Listening Activity or Warm-Up:

• Ask students how they define bullying.
• Ask students to give examples of what they think bullying is.
• Ask students what cyberbullying is.
• Ask students if they have ever been bullied or if they know someone who has been bullied.
• Teach students vocabulary such as: bullied, bullying, bystander, victim...
• Talk about feelings.

Listening Activity: 

 This can be done in class or if we want to flip the classroom, we can tell our students to watch the video at home and answer the open-ended and multiple choice questions prepared for the activity. As a flipped classroom activity, this could be motivating for our students as it would be something different to what we usually do in class.

https://edpuzzle.com/media/5e693923250f9f40d2f763f3

One advantage of Edpuzzle is that it can help us to prepare motivating listening and speaking activities adapting whatever authentic real videos we like to the level and necessities of our students.

Post-Listening Activities:

• Share students answers in class.
• In small groups students discuss what to do in bullying situations.
• In small groups students discuss and try to find different ways to stop bullying.
• We share in a big group all the ideas.
• We listen to the song ‘Hopeful’ by Bars & Melody and do some comprehension and fill in the gaps activities.

A Time line with TimeToast

➢ Learning objectives of the activity:

I wanted my students to learn about women who have been relevant in history due to the things they have done to make our world a better place to live in.

To achieve this goal, I elaborated several texts with information about the life of these women: Rosa Parks, Malala, Frida Khalo… After reading the texts my students had to create a timeline with the main events and using TimeToast.

➢ The advantages of using TimeToast for this activity:

I´d say that the main advantage of using Timetoast was the motivation my students showed when doing the activity. Reading is usually boring for them but this time they had fun.

Another advantage was the opportunity to work in a cooperative way. I could see how they helped each other and how everybody knew what their role in the group was.

They learnt a creative way of making a timeline.

➢ The steps I followed to set up the activity:

- First I told my students what the next lessons would be about.

- Second I told them what the final activity would be: elaborate a timeline using an application called TimeToast.

- Third I explained the activity would be done in groups of three and for that we would need laptops with Internet connection. I did it with my group in the 3rd year of ESO.

- After that I told them how the application worked and showed them some examples.

➢ Any problems and how I and my students solved them:

Laptops at school are old, slow and Internet connection was not the best in history. In the end we decided to do it one group after the other all together on the digital board.

➢ Students’ reaction – how did they feel about using TimeToast to complete the task?

As it was the first time for them using this tool, they were excited and motivated. Soon, they became anxious and a bit frustrated because of all the technical problems we had. Finally when we took the decision of using the digital board, we had a great time doing it together.

➢ Some things that I would change / improve next time:

I’d change the technical equipment but it is not something that depends on me.

➢ At least 3 ways that the use of TimeToast helped me achieve my learning objectives:

It motivated my students to read. It was easy to have them focused on the lesson and I put into practice some cooperative work.

Click here to see my Timeline