Final task

All good things must come to an end. 

It's been a pleasure! The course contents have been thorough and innovate and I've found it very inspirational! I surely will implement some of the introduced tools in my classes!

Today I share with you my final activity. I loved Miss MMar's Easter videos with EDPUZZLE and I sort of became jealous, hehehe! That's why I'm bringing an EDPUZZLE activity based on a Youtube video. The activity is about the worldwide character that the Irish Patron Saint Festivity has achieved over the years. My students are usually fascinated by the Green Festivities all over the world and I thought it might be a nice activity for my older students in Bachillerato.

Hope you like it!

Saint Patrick's Day worldwide

Working with genially

[GENIALLY ACTIVITY]

This activity has encountered many problems – once again- due to the poor technical availability in the high school.

Nevertheless, the activity was developed in three sessions as shown below:

     - The activity was introduced to the students in the second year of ESO. The students were shown a short video of Australia and the teacher located the most popular Australian cities in a map. Then, they were asked to design a presentation (no longer than three pages) in pairs covering the most interesting facts about Australia. The students were shown a list of questions that could be used as a guide for their project (they were provided handouts).
     - The second session was dedicated to the design and development of the project. Due to the weak wifi signals, most pairs/groups needed an extra session.
      The students should have handed in their projects during this session but the due date was ultimately delayed.

-    -  The last sessions were dedicated to the presentations of the projects by each pair.

Long story short, although the activity has originally been planned to last no more than three sessions it finally took five to develop. 

Once again, the students seemed to be very motivated at the beginning but the technical problems encountered during the process were very difficult to overcome in some cases. They found the tool very useful and other teachers have reported their use in their subjects, so that is an interesting turn. I’ll probably continue using this tool to prepare my lessons but I won’t design any more projects involving in-class work until the technical problems are solved. Most of the sessions turned up being stressful and upsetting as a teacher although the final result was OK. 

And here are some of the materials I used to develop this task. 

[STUDENT'S HANDOUT]

Answer the questions – your partners can help you.

1 Who were the first people who came to Australia? Where did they come from? How did they travel?

2 Who was James Cook? When did he arrive in Australia?

3 What colours does the Aboriginal flag have? What do they represent?

4 What symbols appear on the Australian official flag?

5 What is Uluru? What is another name for it?                  

6 What is interesting about the Great Barrier Reef? How many islands are there?

7 What is the climate like in Australia? What do the Australians celebrate in summer?

8 What Australian words come from the Aboriginal language?

Working with PIXTON

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:

COMIC

COMIC 2