Assessment (part 2)

Hi again!!

This post will be dedicated to the second short story I’ve chosen for my course assignment. It is “Jack and the Beanstalk”, a fairy tale that you can find in the collection English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel; the same anthology I used for the other short story that I presented, “Tattercoats”.

In this case, I’m going to present some actual and post-teaching activities in which I will focus mainly on reading comprehension, vocabulary and storytelling. The story is intended to 4^th of ESO students and in order to carry out the activities, they will have to split into groups of 4 people. 

In contrast to the work carried out in the other short story proposed, in which I promoted collaborative learning, now students will be asked to work cooperatively so they will be a part of a team in which each member has a specific role to fulfill, a specific task that will be an essential part of the whole task in the end. The purpose of it is to promote responsibility and autonomous learning, so they will increase personal skills together with linguistic skills. Digital skills will be also encouraged by the use of digital tools as learning strategies. Other strategies used are searching for information, and differentiation between main ideas and details.

As a final point, they will have to create a blog with Kidblog. I have already introduced you this tool in another post; it allows students to publish posts and participate in academic discussions within a secure classroom blogging community, and the most important, teachers maintain complete control over student blogs and user accounts, so I find this alternative very useful to encourage writing and autonomous skills.

Actual Activities

1. Find words or expressions in the story to show that these sentences are false. Each member will answer two of the statements and then they will put all the work together.

- Jack’s father was a very strong man

- Milky-white the cow always gave loads of milk

- The queer little old man wanted to exchange Jack’s cow for 5 common lentils

- Jack’s mother threw all the queer man gave to him out of the window

- Jack went up to the sky with a ladder

- The ogre’s wife didn’t give Jack anything for breakfast

- Jack took the ogre’s hen and it laid a very beautiful egg

- The orgre catched Jack when he was escaping with his magic harp

2. As you have been looking for the answers of number 1, you should have looked up for new words on the dictionary. Now, each member will provide his/her words, together with the words that you think are important to understand the story, and with all the bunch of words, you will create a single word cloud.

3. With the use of a digital tool called Character Scrapbook, you will have to analyse all the characters of the story. There are 4 characters, so each team member will have one character to evaluate. You will have to follow the indications provided in order to complete the different section:

- Ten things I know about the character

- Ten words that describe him/her

- Ten details about his/her appearance

- Ten facts about his/her personality

- Ten challenges he/she faced

- Ten accomplishments he/she achieved.

Once you complete your scrapbook, you can print (in pdf) each character’s description and put all the work together, so you will get a Jack and the Beanstalk characters' Scrapbook with all the characters of the book analysed.

Post-Activities

    1. As an extension activity, you will have to think the 4 most important scenes of the story through which the whole plot would be understood (the first scene is the exchange of belongings between the queer old man and Jack, and the other 3 important scenes take place in the ogre’s white house).  
    When you have decided the scenes, each member of the team will have to represent one of those scenes by using the Kerproof digital tool. You can represent them by making a movie or telling a story, that's your choice. But, the important thing is that when all the scenes are created, another person has to be able to watch or read them in order and understand the story without more details.

   2. The final activity will be the creation of a personal blog using Kidblog, in which, individually, you will have to tell all the activities you have completed by working on “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale, together with your reflections and feedback. 

      So, this is it!!! Hope you enjoyed with my activities!! see you soon!!



Resources

- Word cloud creator: http://www.wordle.net/
- Making a movie or telling a story: http://www.kerpoof.com/
- Blog: http://kidblog.org/home/

Assessment (part 1)

Hi there!!

Today I’m going to introduce the assessment part of the course I’ve been presenting you these days, which would be related to short stories teaching. In order to carry out the assessment, we have to choose 2 short stories and design some activities by ourselves that can be directed to the pre-, actual or post-teaching part of the task.  

The first short story I’ve chosen is “Tattercoats”, a fairy tale that you can find in the collection English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel. I’m going to present some pre-and post-activities for this story which will be intended to 4^th of ESO students. They will have to make groups of 5 people each one in order to work in a collaborative way through all the pre-teaching part. In this way, they will be able to learn about some English writers, about fairy tales as a literary genre and to get a gist of this short story before reading it. I will try to promote collaborative work within a groupwork; students will have to discuss, comment everything and decide their answers as a group, so they will have to negotiate and come to an agreement.  

After that, I will also present some activities for the post-teaching part. In contrast, these activities will be focused on individual work, in order to increase personal skills and personal responsibility. I will propose the game strategy with the use of an interactive game in which different activities are created around different learning styles, as visual or auditory. For this reason, listening comprehension is also emphasized during the activities, but students will also increase their writing abilities since they will have to write different answers using their own words. What's more, they will learn the different elements of a story in English, and this could be considered as a cross-curricular learning, given that these elements are taught in previous years in mother tongue classes.

On the whole, the PURPOSE is to facilitate learners’ communicative competence in English through the use of literature. They will develop linguistic, communicative, personal and social skills, together with the increase of their digital skills, with the use of digital tools as learning strategies. Other strategies used are searching for information, clarification of terms or guessing information. 

Pre-Activities

1.      “Tattercoats” is an English fairy tale found in several picture books and in various collections, so your task here will be to click on each author and tell us in 2 lines the most important facts about his o her life as an English writer.

-          Margaret Greaves, Tattercoats, 1990

-         Flora Annie Steel, Tattercoats, English Fairy Tales, 1918

-         Joseph Jacobs, Tattercoats, More English Fairy Tales, 1890

2.      Did you know what a fairy tale is? Could you explain it in your own words now?

3.      Do you know the meaning of the short story’s title? This word has become old-fashioned, could you guess the corresponding word we would use nowadays?

      Definition: The term "tattercoats" means more than merely "homeless people", although all beggars are automatically tattercoats (the original meaning of the word was "beggar or habitual lying-in-the-street drunk"). It refers to all "ne'er-do-wells" or undesirables, and it is also a polite way of referring to what a slightly tipsy, and therefore loose-tongued.

4.      Which is the collections’ hardcover for each one? Could you design your own hardcover of this short story? you can use the option "make a picture" in the webpage Kerproof.

5.      Here you have a short overview of the story, could you guess what is going to happen? Could she finally go to the ball?

Ragged Tattercoats lived in the kitchen of her grandfather's castle. She had hardly any friends and no freedom. Although she loved to dance, she was not allowed to go to the ball.

6.      Now that you have already imagined a possible story, you can check if your ideas have been the correct ones with this Tattercoats’ video.

7.      Finally, you will have to create a Glogster using all the information you have already got and it would be like a way of presenting this short story to other people. Here you have an example of Glogster about the English writer Roald Dahl so, be creative and design your own one!!!

Post-Activities

Extension work: Connections with Tattercoats: Ciderella

One of the most well-known stories ever written is Cinderella, a tale that all of you know about. Variations on Cinderella's myth appear in folktales in almost every world culture: she's known as "Yeh-Shen" in China, "The Rough-Face Girl" to the Algonquin Indians of North America, "Chinye" and "Nyasha" to the people of Africa, "Cenerentola" to Rossini and "Tattercoats" in England.

While these versions vary in some degree, the general tale usually centers on a kind, but oppressed character persecuted by the step-family. Typically, the father is either neglectful or absent; consequently, Cinderella must rely on a magical guardian for assistance in achieving her deepest wish.

Therefore, working individually on the English lab, you will establish similarities between these two fairy tales, but at the same time, you will study the different elements of a story, all thanks to this interactive game. The answers about the following Tattercoats' questions will be done in a worksheet.

1.   The first step would be to listen again to the story of Ciderella in case you don’t remember it, by clicking on Cinderella.

2.   After that, you will learn what the setting is in a story, by clicking on setting. Here, you will have to choose Cinderella’s setting and after that you will write what the Tattercoats’ setting is in the provided worksheet.

3.  Now, you will work on the characters. You will have to choose who the characters are in Cinderella’s story, who the hero is, and who the villain is. After that, you will do the same in Tattercoats’ worksheet.

4.    Next, the sequence part comes, in which you will just order Cinderella’s story.

5.   After that, it is presented the exposition. You will have to choose Cinderella’s exposition and create the Tattercoats’ exposition in the worksheet.

6.   The following activity will consist of deciding which Cinderella’s conflict is and to write by your own what you think it is Tattercoat’s conflict.

7.   Then, you will also have to decide which Cinderella’s climax is and write by your own what you think it is Tattercoat’s climax.

8.  In the final part, you will have to choose Cinderella’s resolution and write by yourself Tattercoast’s resolution.

Resources

Kerproof: http://www.kerpoof.com/

Glogster: http://www.glogster.com/

Cinderella around the world: http://www.edenvalleyenterprises.org/blhrc/educational/cindtour/world.html 

Interactives:

http://www.learner.org/interactives/story/index.html

We finish with... Session 4

Hello people!!

In this new post, I’m going to explain an unusual activity we performed in session 4 of the course. I have said unusual because it was new for me and I think for most of my classmates too. This session was called the ‘Library class’, and with it we learnt different methodologies which we can use to teach literature in our English classes. 

We started the class by choosing a book from a variety of them that were placed in a row at the front. The majority of the books were English classics from some famous English authors like Dickens, Poe or Shakespeare, among others, and the level range was also varied. 

Our lecturer gave us the opportunity to choose the one we wanted so, once we all had one in our hands, we had to choose some methodologies from a variety of them that were explained in booklets around the class in order to create some activities related to some aspect of the book, and it could be intended to be done as pre-, actual or post-activity. The provided methodologies were: cooperative learning, collaborative learning, problem-based learning, task-based learning, project-based learning, games, simulation and role-play.

The book I chose was "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and I did the task with one of my classmates. Before choosing the method we took a look to the different suggestions we had, and finally we decided to work with the Problem-based method as it was quite new for us and we wanted to have a try with it, and with the Collaborative method. Both are styles usually used with active learning which follow a student-centered pedagogy. With the use of both methods we wanted our students to work in groups and learn about a subject through the experience of problem solving. Therefore, the goals we could achieve with their use were effective problem solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation, so that’s why we found them a very good option to develop.

The creation of the activity supposed a challenge since we had not read the book before, so we had a quick look to it and by taking some ideas from the activities that were proposed at the end, we designed the following post-activity that include information and steps to follow in order to solve the problem:

Problem: Imagine that the animal fingerprints were not found by the police on Camille’s neck. If you were the police, how would you find the murderer?

Brainstorming – Hypothesis: In this step students would be split into discussion groups of 5 people each one, so they have to take a first thought about how to solve the trouble.

Re-structure the problem: Here, the groups would have to throw the irrelevant points away and organize their members to look for possibilities.

Solution of the problem: At this point, students would have reached an agreement so they would have created the alternative or solution.

As a conclusion, I can just say that this session was very positive for me; I learnt lots of methodologies and strategies to use as a teacher, both to teach literature or other language fields, since all of them can be applied to achieve any linguistic point, just the teacher has to be conscious and has to know how to apply them successfully. 

The “library class” strategy can be very appealing for students since it becomes an active way to explore a book or a short story before or after reading it. Unlike the traditional way of reading a book at home, this strategy can engage students into reading, so I think that the use of these active strategies by teachers should increase considerably.

Therefore, the active participation makes students to get involved in the teaching-learning process easily when the teacher is able to encourage them with information related to their interests and daily life, so this fact should be taken into account by all language teachers.

This has been all for now!!! See you on the assessment part!! 

Traditional Class... ¿Contradiction? Session 3

Hi people!!

Today I’m going to present you a different class compared to the active learning we’ve been seeing these days. It seems such a contradiction, though, but session 3 of the course I’m writing for, followed the traditional system of teaching: lecturer talks in one direction and students listen to her. However, it appears as necessary as well, in small pieces, though, in order to present the content, but always followed by a practical task or activity to ensure that students have understood it by practising it.

In this session, our lecturer presented us different theoretical notions related to the teaching-learning process. First of all, she explained a basic difference between: approach, methodology and strategy. A teaching approach is the direction that an instruction follows, so it comprises the whole teaching process. Within the approach all the principles and methods used for instruction are included, so different methodologies can be used within an approach depending on the task or activity the teacher wants to perform. For example Cooperative and Collaborative learning are two methodologies that can be used within the Communicative approach. The last concept, strategy, refers to the different tools or techniques that can be used to perform a methodology, so, for example, we can present a cooperative task in which students have to fulfill the activities with the use of ITC or a discussion. 

This explanation was very useful for me, since I’ve been taught different approaches, methodologies and strategies during all the year, but it wasn’t till this moment that this difference came clearly defined to me.

After that, we reflected on the purposes of Active learning. We said that this methodology makes information more interesting, so it catches students’ attention easily. It develops students’ linguistic skills as well as skills about life, together with cooperative methods that form them for life (interpersonal skills). I totally agree with these considerations, since to attract students’ attention is one of the best strategies to make them have interest and learn a second language. For me, motivation is the basis of learning, and the active learning helps with it.

However, we also commented that the best option to teach a language is to integrate both methodologies, that is, traditional and active teaching, given that with the traditional you can strengthen the basis in order to assure it with more active ways to practise it.

Traditional Teaching

Active Teaching

We specially talked about the use of word clouds in the teaching-learning process. We mentioned different ways to use them into the different parts of the teaching, namely, pre-teaching, actual teaching and post-teaching. I have referred to this teaching strategy in the previous post as we used it in the station 3 of the active activity we completed in class, so I can just stress again its usefulness because of two things, its simplicity and its originality.

In the end, we made a distinction between Simulation and Role-play. They both are strategies used in active teaching and they could be confused at a certain extent because both of them imply the performance of a role, but we find the difference in the ending of the task. In a role-play, the participants have to ‘act’ and play a defined role, so the ending is already known by the ‘actor’, but in a simulation the participants do not ‘act’, they discuss and negotiate as themselves, so the conditions and decisions are impossible to know, there’s an open-ending. 
In my opinion, the use of both strategies can be positive since to act out some role can make students understand and put themselves in other people's shoes, but with a simulation is the student who expresses his/her own feelings, so there is a personal development.

As I said before, it is certain that this session had a more theoretical nature, but it was very valuable from my point of view in order to set the basis and be able to go to the next step by practising the theory with active tasks that will make our students to understand the content better.

See you soon!!!

We continue with... Session 2 (part 2)

Hi there!!

This post will be dedicated to the second part of session 2 in which we carried out the activities from Station 3.

Station 3

This station was fully devoted to “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”. We were provided with different activity proposals which had to be divided into pre-teaching, actual teaching or post-teaching activities. In order to take our decision, we bore in mind whether the questions demanded information from the actual reading or they could be carried out without a reading, so based on that, we considered, for example, the discussion about the author, Roald Dahl, and the think pair-share to be at the beginning so as to set the story in a context and relate it to other author’s works; or the exercise to find words and expressions to be in the actual teaching since it demanded a concrete reading comprehension.

After that, there was a more practical activity in which we had to represent a scene of our choice using some digital tools in which comics can be created. It was quite exciting for us at the beginning but as we looked into the provided webpages we let down. They were Goanimate and Bitstrips, both with very limited use unless you pay for it, so we found this fact so harmful for our students, since we don’t want them to spend money or have them in front of something that incites to do it. 

In addition, we considered that both pages were not so flexible because they would imply to create a new account out of our personal account, and that means again an inconvenient for our students’ use of digital tools, going against their personal privacy. However, I tried to do a comic scene with the limited uses that Goanimate offers without charge, just for you to see an example; for this, I chose the part of the story at the end when Mr. Bixby and his wife are in the dentist and he wants to uncover her from her lie about the pawnbroker ticket she supposedly found by chance: “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’scoat” comic scene.

Regarding to this comic scene, we were also asked to consider the possibility to post it in an educational webpage called Kidblog; my teamwork didn’t consider this option because as we decided not to create the comic, we skipped question 3, but I’ve done it by my own and I find this webpage very interesting. With Kidblog students can publish posts and participate in academic discussions within a secure classroom blogging community, and that is because teachers maintain complete control over student blogs and user accounts. I also like it because it is not necessary to create a new account, you can access it as a google user, so this is very functional. I have created a teacher’s blog were students can follow me and participate on discussions, and I have posted on it “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat” comic scene. You can see my Kidblog’s page here.

Finally, we had to create a word cloud image using Woodle and consider if we would use it in class. Everyone in my team considered this tool very beneficial and witty to use it either in pre-teaching or in post-teaching. It can be used to provide the context of an activity, as a brainstorm to learn new vocabulary or to highlight the most important words found in a text and summarize it as well. So, here you have our word-cloud, thought to sum up “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat” short story using key words that can provide meaningful information about the story. 

Cooperative teamwork final conclusion

As a final thought about the work we performed as a cooperative team, I would say that it is necessary a great implication from all the members of the team so as to achieve the intended goal, in our case, the fulfillment of the 3 station activities. We started quite motivated, each member assuming his/her role as an important element of the group, but as the time went by some members had to assume the role of others because they were not so much integrated. Anyway, it has been a great experience for me, I have learnt another way to work in contrast to the traditional way, with the use of active learning, cooperative and collaborative learning and digital tools. They make students to help each other, socialize and get responsibilities so, in my opinion, active learning provides very important sources of motivation, social-affective relationships and personal knowledge. For all these reasons, I will keep on studying about these methods and strategies for sure. 

This has been all for now, see you soon with more active tasks to perform!!!! 

Session 2 (part 1)

Hi people!

Today, I’m going to explain you what we did in session 2. Our group got together and we split the class into 2 parts: first part for the activities in the Station 2, and second part for Station 3. In this post, I'll explain Station 2, and Station 3 will be explained in the next one.

Station 2

This station was centered again on both short stories we saw in class, “Lamb to theslaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”. In this station we were asked to get into a simulation, a learning strategy that consists of a given-task which requires participants to resolve a problem of some kind using their own life experience and character, that is, they do not have to “act” a role, because the role a person has to play is not specified.

In this way, a disaster was presented: a major environmental disaster was going to happen in the earth and it would bring an end to all humankind. Only 7 people could survive in a deserted island in the Pacific because it would be not affected by the disaster. We, as a group, had to decide which 7 people would be saved and which must stay behind, so, in order to perform this task, we had to work with the collaborative strategy, that is, all the members as a group had to decide and agree on a solution.

As you can see on the worksheet, we had 12 characters from the short stories studied, so we must come to an agreement on why save one or another. We had a deep discussion on the matter, it was quite interesting because we first consider as an important fact their profession but when we had more or less all the survivors, we realised that we didn’t have chosen almost any women. We changed our mind and included some more women since without them the humankind was not possible to procreate so it would die out. Finally, we came to an agreement and designed a glogster to present it: Salvation Island– The Chosen.

After doing the previous work, we didn’t have much time to finish the other activity we were required to do. We were asked to create a smart card in which present the island, and this could be an example I made by my own:

The fact that we had to choose the 7 survivors was also related to more significant aspects, as prejudices and human rights. It was certain that at the beginning we had some prejudices towards the homosexual, the priest or the top model, but finally we decided to include them into the list because these features were not really important, the significant aspects were that the homosexual was a SAS officer, familiar with surviving under extreme conditions, the priest has experience in agriculture and the top model was a young girl ready to procreate, so they could contribute to the group situation very positive qualities.

Moreover, the task included a webpage were we can give a little help to poor people (freerice.com), so in this way, we could help the characters of the short stories to survive from the environmental disaster but at the same time we could also help real people. Here was used the service-learning strategy, a strategy which uses what students learn in the classroom to solve real-life problems. In this case it was in an insignificant way, but service learning can be related in a considerable way into the classroom, bringing learning to life (for further information you can visit: National Service-Learning Clearinghouse).

Finally, the task also included some questions for us to think about the possibilities of use of the digital tools: Glogster to create the glog, and Kerproof to create the smart card. It was interesting for me again, since I could grasp some ideas from my classmates about the uses of the digital tools in the different parts of the teaching process.

So, here you have the station 2 explanation, see you soon!!!