My ICT Journey

Transparency

To do this challenge, I decided to integrate some culture into my lessons. I set the students a map challenge. For homework, they had to take a blank map of Germany and label in German the 16 states (using a key), 8 important cities, 3 major rivers and a couple of other geographical features. – Yes, the Geography teachers I share a staffroom with were VERY impressed!

Then in class I put up a political map of Germany on the Smartboard and student’s traced the outline border and then the states, and then used their research to locate and mark with dots the cities I had set. Then I faded the political map using tranparency to reveal a geographical map. Again using what they had researched, students added the rivers , lake, mountain ranges and forest they had found. We used colour to differentiate.

Unfortunately, as student’s were not as prepared as I had asked them to be, this was as far as we got. The plan is that both maps will now be made transparent and in teams they will be challenged to locate and mark which ever feature I call out, using only the outline they have created. Maps will be faded back in to check answers.

I am hopeful this will be a successful learning activity, but again, time has beaten us and the conclusion is now postponed til after the holidays. We are not back at school until 6 October, so will have some challenge catch up to play!! Am still working on an idea for students to use transparency.

Well, the best laied plans,as they say!!! I have a plan for this part, but we have run out of time this term. Yes, time is the biggest issue I am finding in getting ideas up and running!

I have now split my clas into teams and each team will have the opportunity to set a task for the rest of the class.

The group working on this cloning challenge will be working with a song and creating a cloze with frequently repeated words and phrases. This is the plan! It is to round off our unit on freetime and hobbies. Will write again after the holidays (3 weeks) to let you know how it goes.

Yes, my experiementation with our Smartboard continues! I am finding it a little frustrating only getting into the room twice a week, but stilll, it is a start and is allowing me to tackle this set of challenges gradually.

So, Challenge 2 – Cloning! One of my Year 7 students summed up cloning with “cool!” and another wantd to test exactly how many times you cold clone any given object!!!

My task was based on my ongoing work with freetime activities in German. This time I created a seriies of pages with the Notebook software, each with a slightly different task. The were in order of slightl increasing difficulty.The fisrt slide contained boxes representing 2 day of the weekand at the bottom of the slide were pictures of varying activities. These pictures had been set to infinite cloning.

The second slide had circles representing activities around the siides and then names and family members written in the centre. thewords had been infinitely cloned this time. And so on.

So how did this work? Well, while a small group of 2 or 3 students was at the front of the room at the board, the others all had a slip of paper for one slide at a time. in turn the students had to read aloud the story in German on their paper, while the team at the Smartboard moved the pictures or words to the appropriate places to represent what they heard. This method was highly successful in keeping the whole class engaged, as each student had to focus on the story and be prepared fro their turn to read. the students at the front listening very carefully, often asking for a repeat of the reading – which helped sort out pronunciation and comprehension – then discussed with their team on many occasions. The team changed for each slide and a new stiry was distributed. The cloning meant that an activity or person could belong in one or many categories. If I had wanted students to work independently on the activity, a voice recording of each story could have been added to the slide, but this was not my purpose this time.

The activity was great for:

• motivation and engagement
• listening comprehension
• pronunciation
• reinforecment of vocabulary of increasing complexity, including some unknowns to have them focus on gist
• reinforcement of word order and verb ending rules

Part 2 of this challenge involved the students working with the Smartboard software to create their own activities. They worked in pairs or 3s and their mission was to design a task to challenge other students with to help practise the elements I had introduced and worked with in my activity. That is, word order and free time vocabulary. Their only parameter was to include sound files. Many followed my model and did a straight audio translation, others varied it using phrases rather than individual words, and one group created a true/false activity in which they presented a true and a false audio translation of a given sentence. The students would then have to move the correct audio file of “richtig” or “falsch” into the circle near the sentences

The recording of the files in Audacity proved to be technically challenging for some, especially when the mp3 lame encoder could not be located. However, the benefit of them focusing so carefully on pronunciation outweighed this. They often checked with me and were determined to rerecord until they had it right! I was glad I changed my mind about providing some of my files. it was far more valuable for them to create their own.

Once their slides were complete I had them work through them with me to ensure the correct answers were indeed to be found. This too created very valuable discussion and clarification of word order rules. Then it was time to challenge other groups with their activities on the Smartboard. They were very proud of their tasks and took great delight in others’ using them. Also interesting were the explanations which came from the creators of the activities themselves if others made errors. Valuable peer tutoring!

In summary, it was a great motivational activity which reinforce many things in one hit – vocabulary, pronunciation, word order rules and cooperative learning. It also put students in charge of their own learning. It was technically time consuming – but ovewhelming ly positive in both the procedure and outcomes.

Well, this is my first foray ever into using the Smartboard. Our school has just installed 4 in the whole school of 1000 students, so access is still an issue, but I am determined to take up this challenge and learn as much as I can. I have managed to get my Year 7 class into one of the rooms for a lesson or 2 each week, so they will be my primary guinea pigs for my learning and challenges. They are just into their second semester of learning German so are still very much beginners.

Using MY VOICE

I decided to use the concept of sound files on the Smartboard with my Year 7s for several purposes:

• to consolidate freetime vocab in German

• to reinforce verb forms of regular verbs

• to introduce some new word order rules.

The recording of the sounds files in Audacity was a familiar task to me, but was time consuming as I was recording single words and phrases. Still, these files will be able to be used over and over, so begin the formation of my sound file gallery!

For the first part of the challenge I set up a series of pages in my Notebook file which contain random sound files (single words) and a sentence in English at the top of each page. The sound files did not all belong to the sentence, so students had to recognise the vocab, as well as the correct verb form to match the pronoun. The students were formed into 3 teams and each team given the opportunity to do an audio translation. AT first they could not help but call out to help each other (which was actually a great source of discussion and explanation), but later they became much more competitve and waited. Once they got the hang of it, I set a time limit and the team had a minute to put the sentence together. They became progressively quicker at recognising vocab and the correct verb forms – so a VERY positive activity of consolidation! Students were focussed and motivated.

The second step in this challenge will come next week. My plan is, after introducing students to the concept of the verb needing to be the 2nd idea in a basic German sentence and the use of gern, nicht gern, sehr gern used after a verb to express likes and dislikes, I will ask students to record some time phrases as well as the gern phrases. It will then be their challenge to invent similar audio translation challenges to include these elements. OUr Director of ICT is loading the software onto half a dozen laptops for me so that they can work in groups on this at the same time. I will provide my existing sound files for them to use too. I will them have groups challenge other groups on the Smartboard with their activities. I think this shuld be the next logical step in consolidating vocab and verb conjugation and will be a great opportunity to focus on pronunciation as they create their own sound files.

Hope that sounds ok. Will report in afterwards! Would love some feedback.

Or rather the documentation and sharing of the journey begins! On MOnday I am starting the Interactive Whiteboard Challenge

https://whiteboardchallenge.wikispaces.com/

So I will begin there, though the journey really began so long ago…my head is still spinning! Will come back to some of that a little later.

So stay tuned!