The Pixton activity has been the most challenging so far.
The technical problems arose from the beginning as a result of the poor state of the laptops in the high school (missing keys from the keyboard) or the repeatedly dropping wifi signal. All these issues combined added extra pressure on the students and the teacher, since we spent most of the time trying to solve these issues instead of enjoying the activity.
As a result, I had to redesign the activity several times in order to cope with the problems.
Originally the activity was planned as pair work. However, once we discovered that many of the laptops were useless I had to reorganise the class and transform the activity into a group activity. In the end, some of the comics were design by 3 students, whereas others were created by groups of four.
Since the wifi signal was not very strong, I decided to use some dialogues that my students had previously seen and studied in class. They used those dialogues as templates to create their comics. They had already studied those dialogues in class: we had read them, worked with them (fill in the gaps, matching activities, put the sentences in the right order) and seen them in youtube videos. All in all, there were three different situations: at the doctor’s, at the shopping centre, at the school. Once their comic strip was finished, they had to perform it out loud in class.
The objectives of the tasks were:
- to develop my students’ ability to engage in conversations,
- to develop their vocabulary of conversational skills on everyday topics,
- to develop my students' confidence in spoken communication.
- To ask questions to gain specific information,
- And to open, keep and finish conversations in a well-known environment.
I believe that the use of the comic helped my students’ confidence when they had to perform the activity in front of their classmates. They had given a lot of thought while designing the comic and they felt at ease with their chosen roles.
Long story short, the activity was successful but we had to overcome lots of technical problems. My students were hooked at first, but their motivation decreased as soon as the first problems emerged.
All in all, it was a stressful activity for me as a teacher since I lack the technical knowledge to solve the technical problems that we encountered. However, my students were very proud of their work and some of them have continued using the website.
They also had a ball when performing the activity in front of the whole group, since they had to give marks to one another. They used coloured cards (green, yellow or red) to assess each comic/ performance and I gave them the final mark.
Click on the links below to see some examples:
