Teens 6 Magazine Project

Making writing exciting

Whenever I get to a writing lesson, I picture my students complaining and moaning about having to write anything. It’s almost as if they had a radar that indicated “boring activity ahead”. These are, thus, the lessons that intrigue me the most just for the challenge of changing that regular pattern.

To do so, I am always reflecting on how relevant and interesting the writing can be for my young teenage students. The formula is not so hard: just take the genre of the piece of writing into account and think about how it could be applied to their realities. That is basically what I did for my Teens 6 group. Writing news reports was the goal, so I decided to take my students from the role of students to the role of reporters.

The students were obviously excited with the idea of becoming reporters and writing a story. The idea was that they would gather in pairs or trios and would each be assigned a certain page of our class magazine. Once I had a Google slide template of the magazine prepared and ready to be accessed through a shortened link (bit.ly/teens6magazine), I instructed my students and took them to the Resource Centre to make it happen.

I had to do it in two classes. The first attempt wasn’t so good because some of my students messed around and interfered in other students’ slides. In the following class, I told them off and told them that they would be given a last chance to finish their reports. I also said that those who didn’t finish would have their pages taken out of the magazine. That gave them some encouragement. On the second day, then, they worked a lot better and behaved as expected.

After joining forces with the Resource Centre at the Main Branch, the magazine was printed out and the students were able to have their own copies. The gleam in my students’ eyes when they saw the magazines I had brought paid off all the effort and struggle I described in the previous paragraph.

Maybe a magazine project cannot be carried out every semester, but something we can definitely do is plan our lessons every day wondering whether they will bore our students or excite them. Bearing that in mind and having some deal of willingness, we will be able to come up with many other ideas that can surprise our students and make a difference in their lives.

Lucas G. Silva

Saying the Unsaid - Silent Movies and Reported Speech

Online Learning and Sharing - Posterous via kwout

Teaching reported speech is certainly not that difficult. When I teach it, I always explain to students that it is used to retell stories, translate conversations between a foreigner and someone who does not speak his or her language, or even engage in a conversation with three or more people in a noisy environment such as night club or a rock concert. I also try to recreate communicative situations that make it as authentic and genuine as possible. If I could take them to a rock concert or a night club, it would be great. Despite my efforts, my students cooperation, and the wonderful ideas teachers always have when planning classes , I am not always happy with the size of dialogues or the quality of language produced by students in follow up activities. You know, we teachers always think that there is room for improvement.
This semester while I was planning one more class to teach reported speech, I thought that silent movies would just be the perfect means to create a situation for having students reporting a third party utterances and actions to each other. How did I do it? I did it in two phases and two places.
In Class
I first showed them a short silent movie (I used a silent version of Star Wars available in You Tube- It lasts only a little more than a minute). Next I paired students and asked them to take turns reporting what was being said right after I paused the movie. So I played a bit of the movie and paused for reporting. It was quick and fun and they really enjoyed doing it.
In the Computer Lab
While we were still in class, I gave them instructions. I told them to go to Youtube and type the search term silent movies. I also told them to choose movies that lasted three minutes or less. Besides that, I instructed them to do as we had done in class: they should first play the entire movie and then play, pause, report. They did it in 25 minutes and posted their reported versions along with the movie straight to our posterous class blog. We later corrected and the posts.The first drafts, however, were amazingly quite accurate to my surprise.

Teacher, *MALL today?

Teacher, *MALL today?

How to overcome Internet connection problems and control fast paced students.

By Fábio Ferreira

Taking students to the Computer Lab is a good way to change your classroom environment and go over the content presented by textbooks. Besides breaking the classroom routine, the lab is a very useful tool to foster students’ independent learning behavior.

There are many options available for teachers to explore and practice the content being taught, as, for example, online exercises (from the e-folder), internet websites, videos from youtube, just to mention the most used ones. Let me talk a little bit about the exercises from the e-folder, since they seem to be the first option for many teachers. The strongest point about them is that they were designed exactly based on the content students have to master and is going to be assessed. However, as everything else in this world, there are pros and cons. In my view the negative point here is that we depend on the internet connection to use the exercises. If the internet is OK, teachers still have to be attentive because students’ paces are different and sooner or later you are going to hear “Teacher, I finish! Everything!” while some students are still struggling to open the page. You will find yourself in times of trouble and there will be no mother Mary to come to you**.

Based on that experience I came up with an alternative to use the Computer Lab, having all students do the activity proposed at the same time and what is better, being very careful about the accuracy of their production. The solution I found was to use Net Operator, installed on the teacher’s computer. Besides the possibility of monitoring all the computers in the room, there is also a chat option there. Here follows the strategy that I would like to share with you. Let’s use Helpful Helen (Teens 4 – Unit 5 L1) as an example. The context of that lesson is that somebody has a problem and the other person has to offer help. (I’m hungry. I’ll give you sth to eat.) With all the chat windows open, T gives Sts a problem. Sts have to offer help using the structure studied in class. The key here is that they are not supposed to press enter and send their lines until T says GO! After everybody finishes, T says Go and Sts press enter. The first (correct) line displayed gets one point***. As the lines will be sent only after T’s command, Sts will be together. All the computers are identified, so Sts are always careful about their mistakes, since they don’t want to be exposed. Considering that they have to be quick after they hear GO!, adrenaline has an important role making Sts forget they are “studying”. No one has ever complained about that activity and now, instead of hearing Teacher, MALL today?, I sometimes hear Teacher, let’s play that game on the computer!?

The purpose of this article was not to say that the other options are not good, but that there is always room for improvement when you let your creativity flow. Think outside the box!

Fábio Ferreira

Ed Tech Monitor - FAN

*M.A.L.L. stands for Multimedia Access to Language Learning (our Computer Lab)

**Let it Be – The Beatles

***The activity can be adapted!