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/

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!!!!