Jelenagorczynski's Blog

For our lesson we chose the topic “Isle of Wright”. First of all the pupils have to listen to the pod cast and fill the gaps in a provided worksheet. Afterwords the class is divided into groups and every group works on one of the following topics: 1. Queen Victoria and the Osbourne house on the Isle of Right 2. Adolf Hitler and the Isle of Wright 3. Dinosaur fossils on the Isle of Wright 4. The Woodstock festival and Jimi Hendrix 5. The invention of the Hovercraft 6. The Needles 7. The red squirrels on the Isle of Wright. For their research every group is provided with one or two reliable sources by the teacher. Afterwards one person per group will be presenting the poster the group designed about their topic.

Time	Phase	Activity	Media/Material	Objectives
5 min	Introduction	Listen to podcast	Computer, headphones, podcast	Introducing the topic, getting pupils interest
5 min	Getting an overwiew, working on the topic	Fill the gaps on worksheet	Computer, headphones, podcast, worksheet	Listening excercise
20 min	Gather information	Research about the topic and design of posters	Computer, Internet access, printer	Deepening of knowledge
15 min	Save results	Short prsentation of posters	Poster	Presentation of results, get class on same level

The topic for my “Dream Project” is “The American Dream“, which is part of the curriculum in the first half of grade 11.

1. Pupils’ previous knowledge: I assume that the pupils will have read the book “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller beforehand, so that that they are familiar with some vocabulary and ideas concerning the American Dream.

2. Structure: The project consists of two units.

2.1. The first unit is called “From Rags to Riches. To me the American Dream means…” and requires some interest in the topic and creativity of the pupils. It is done individually; every pupil has to choose a famous character like Madonna, Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jackson, Marylin Monroe etc. who lived the American Dream. The task for each pupil is, to surch the Internet and find information about the life and career of the person he/she chose and to use pictures, song lyrics, etc to design a little poster. The heading  of this poster should be “To me the American Dream means…” and the sentence should be ended by the pupil, choosing a number of adjectives which fit the person he/she chose, and which he/she thinks nobody else chose to characterize his/her person.

2.2. The second unit deals with the book “Death of a Salesman”, which the pupils have read before and is done in group work, not individually. The class will be divided in groups of 4 people and each group will have to work with a particular scene from the movie of “Death of a Salesman”, which they will fist watch and discuss, and afterwards present to the rest of the class, each of them playing one of the characters (Biff, Happy, Linda and Willy Loman). The challenge here is, to interpret the characters which act in the chosen scene in a different way to that shown in the movie, displaying their personality traits and their way of living according to the American Dream. In addition the pupils have to think about the setting of the scene and the accessories they want to use to accomplish that goal.

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Since I was not able to join the field trip last Wednesday I have asked my questions to a teacher I got to know during my SPS 2.

1. Obviously you include the New Media in you lessons on a regular basis. Does it still take you more time to prepare your lessons in the computer room?

She said that it sitll takes her a fairly long time to prepare lessons in the computer room and therefore she doesn’t use the opportunity to go there with her class on a regular basis. Nevertheless, she said, for some topics it is relly helpful to have a computer around. In grade 12 or 13 for example she often uses a labtop to let someone look up a special topic or check facts during the lesson. I think this is a really good way of including the computer in the “regular” lessons, especially in grade 13, when you work towards the Abitur.

2. How do you make sure your pupils stay focused on the task they are supposed to do? Do you sometimes let them work on their own in the computer room (projects etc.)?

She said that she never lets them work alone in the computer room, because then they will sit there and communicate via “schülervz” instead of talking to eachother. Sometimes they have projects in class which request a computer to look up information. If a pupil doesn’t have a computer at home he/she is allowed to look up the requested information in the schools’ computer room. She also said that the problem of keeping the full attention of a class in the computer room should not be underastimated and can only be solved by making the tasks really interesting, so that they WANT to find it out.

3. In contrast to the “regular” classroom setting, do you think including the New Media into the lessons makes pupils learn things faster, additionally or better (except handling the New Media, of cause)?

To this answer she didn’t really know an answer. She said as an introduction to certain topics the computer and the World Wide Web certainly are helpful, but the main focus often is on the media competences, especially in younger classes.

Well, unfortunately I’m not able to make it to our field trip, but I have come up with some questions you could ask the teachers there:

1. Obviously you include the New Media in you lessons on a regular basis. Does it still take you more time to prepare your lessons in the computer room?

2. How do you make sure your pupils stay focused on the task they are supposed to do? Do you sometimes let them work on their own in the computer room (projects etc.)?

3. In contrast to the “regular” classroom setting, do you think including the New Media into the lessons makes pupils learn things faster, additionally or better (except handling the New Media, of cause)?

Have a nice trip everyone!

In the following I want to shortly introduce a New Media project which I found sounded very interesting.

The project was done in a physics and computer science class (10^th grade) at the Colegio Alemán Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Its theme was solar energy (german title: Sonnenklar!) and the pupil’s goal was to produce a ten minute video clip about that theme.

The time the class had were eight school lessons and because this is not that much time the class split up into four groups, each group produced a video clip of about 2-3 minutes and they were put together afterwards. The task was to decide on a theme, to write a concept, and to film and produce it. The report states that the pupils were really motivated and even sacrificed some free time to be able to manage the challenging task. Two of their teachers functioned as project managers, answered technical questions and helped if there were difficulties.

What I liked about that project was that the pupils shot and edited their clips in small teams, which means that the whole team was responsible for the output and that the goal they had “forced” them to discover the possibilities and deal with problems of the New Media on their own, which I think is apprporiate for geade 10.

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The two different CD-ROMs we analyzed are very different. One is called  “Lernvitamin plus. Englisch” (Cornelsen) the other one  “English II (Sek. II 11-13)” (WinLernen).

The initial one is directed to the grades 5-8 and really easy to use; the navigation is quite straightforward and self-explaining. One is able to choose from different levels of difficulty, do grammar- and pronunciation exercises and the software also includes an examination trainer. The design is simple, but appealing. Every exercise comes with a fitting picture illustrating the action or event the content is about. It also has some audio devices which help pupils correct their pronunciation. If you make mistakes during the exercises the program points out that you did something wrong and lets you try again. If you press the “solution” button the right solutions are presented to you.

The second learning program is directed to older learners (grades 11-13), which means that the exercises are more difficult and one would expect that the whole layout, the presentation could be a bit simpler and less colorful, because the focus is on the content. But what we actually found is that the whole appearance was really boring, the navigation was complicated and it all seemed to be designed a bit careless. In contrast to the first one it also had no voice recognition tool and so you need to do the pronunciation exercises on your own. I never would have used it in my school time, I could have opened my textbook instead.

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“Why is drill and practice software still distributed? Do you think it’s useful?”

This poster shows the main advantages and disadvantages of the behaviourist “drill and practice” method very well. I think all of us experienced that it is a rather useful method to remember irregular verb forms or even vocabulary in a short amount of time, but when it comes to long term memorisation or applied knowledge this method often is not suitable.

Although the drills are not used that often anymore and seem a bit old fashioned and boring one should recognize that there are also some advantages, for example the short amount of time and the extreme focus on material, as mentioned above. I think the poster shows that very well, but I would add to it, that the mentioned advantages are mainly advantages that older learners have.

The impact the new media has on our lives nowadays grows bigger and bigger. Many pupils are surrounded by all kinds of electronic devices and use them on a daily basis. In contrast to that many teachers still have major difficulties dealing with the new media, also in their foreign language classes.

Thinking of my own experiences in school, I have to say that it was very difficult for my teachers to include some work with e.g. the computer into their foreign language lessons. One of the main reasons for that is that teachers don’t know enough about computers and the Internet themselves. As we have heard the average age for teachers in Germany is 55 years, which means that most of them know less about computers and the world wide web as their pupils, which is a huge problem for both sides.

But although teachers still have difficulties using the new media in their foreign language classes, there are some major advantages which are certainly worth dealing with obstacles. One of the most important advantages of using new media in the classroom is the aspect of motivation. Pupils will be glad to be able to use the computer for learning, because although it is not often used in school, it is part of their every day lives. They are familiar with using the Internet for communication, making appointments, finding new friends, searching for information, etc. All these communication tools like blogs, chat rooms, and social networks can also be useful in class. They can help to find and exchange information about certain topics, or to have authentic conversations with other students from English speaking countries, for example via skype or icq. Through that pupils will have to learn how to express themselves correctly in spoken and written language and at the same time be motivated to do so. There are of cause many other ways in which the world wide web might be used in a foreign language classroom. Blogs can for example be used as learner-diaries, social networks can be used to form learn groups and make appointments etc.

A disadvantage of the new media might be that the teacher will need a lot of time to prepare the sessions, as long as he/she is not THAT familiar with the topic. The pupils might also play around with the possibilities the Internet offers them during the lessons and the “real life” teacher-student communication might suffer a bit.

All in all I think that using new media in a foreign language classroom offers both teachers and pupils the possibility to teach and learn new things and be creative, but the teacher nevertheless should know very well what he/she is talking about!

Welcome everyone to this wonderful little bolg I had to create for my “new media in foreign language education”-course at university. I hope this whole thing will work out somehow…