Day 2 July 9, 2013

I'd like to share some of what we did on the second day of our course.

This morning we started with a classic Pilgrims warmer from the now out-of-print book ‘Changing Energies’ by Joan Agosta. Activity 13 is called ‘Saying Hello’.

You ask the students/participants to stand up and walk around the classroom while looking down at the ground. They should explore what is on the floor with their eyes, without speaking. Next, you ask everyone to say hello to the shoes they see – eyes are still kept down. People should say hello to as many pairs of shoes as they can. (Actually it is really fun to guess whose shoes you are looking at!) After that you ask people to look up and make eye contact. Without speaking everyone walks around and greets people. The next round involves saying your own name while you greet the others. Finally, you do a last round of greetings. This time you should say the other person’s name and make a bit of small talk.

This is a fun activity for starting the day. It’s less abrupt than coming into a lesson/workshop and expecting everyone to be ready to talk in English when they were probably speaking another language outside the classroom.

We brainstormed some other adaptations, like asking teenagers to use a hand signal or gesture for greeting each other or saying hello to people’s hands instead of feet.

After a warm-up we started looking at our topic for the morning: endangered animals:

Here are the stages.

1.)          All together you brainstorm some names of endangered animals (or look at some pictures of endangered animals and use the pictures to start a discussion.) Then participants work with a partner and talk about the animal that is the most interesting for them and why. Afterwards the trainer should ask a few people about what their partner said.

(For students the teacher should probably add some support for the next task- which is reading a text and writing a summary. Students in an English language classrooms may need help with reading strategies for getting the main idea of each paragraph. Underlining the topic sentences, identifying a few key words from each paragraph or making notes in the margin can help. The teacher can use another page from the website below or another example text to demo/practise how to do this.)

2.)          Having found about people’s favourite endangered animals, the trainer moves the topic over to the reasons why these animals are endangered. Now we are setting up the task, which is to find out out more about some different reasons.

The trainer divides the participants into 4 groups. I had prepared an email with instructions and details about who was in which groups before the workshop and sent it while they were talking in pairs.  Each group gets a different website and has to read and write a summary of not more than 50 words. 

Participants went to sit with their new partners, read the page, and discuss what they understood. Then they create a summary. Some groups like to work together throughout and others like to prepare individual summaries and afterwards compare to produce a final version. Here are the 4 links we used.

http://library.thinkquest.org/25014/why/basic.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/25014/why/natural.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/25014/why/direct.over.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/25014/why/indirect.habitat.html

3.)          The trainer re-arranges the groups so that when they share, they find out about all four texts. In each group, participants share their summaries. Re-arranging the groups creates an information gap. Not everyone has read the same text so there is something to share with the other group members. This techniques is called a ‘jigsaw’ in English. Jigsaw reading activities are great for making the students speak more.  

  

4.)          After everyone has finished, the groups stay together and use one computer to take the quiz: http://library.thinkquest.org/25014/zedz/quiz/quizwhy.php3

Usually everyone gets 100%. Highly motivating! 

5.)          Afterwards in a whole class plenary, you can discuss what the participants/students have learned or been reminded of. This sets the scene for the next lesson, which is about a very special endangered animal.

In case you haven’t seen the thinkquest.org site before, there are many websites prepared by school age students around topics that interest them: http://thinkquest.org/pls/html/think.library?p_instance=3253927090346370.  I used sites from this page about endangered animals. http://library.thinkquest.org/25014/english.index.shtml . The project officially closed down in June 2013 but the materials are still available.  

It’s a terrific source of websites for classroom activities. 

This first 45-minute lesson sets the stage for Part 2: The very rare ‘Tree Octopus’

I use this to show teachers how important it is not to believe everything they read on the web and how they need to teach their students to check and double check.

Usually I introduce the Tree Octopus (and try to be as convincing as possible.) Then participants brainstorm some questions they have about it, especially thinking about the earlier web pages they read about reasons for extinction.

Then I ask them to read the Tree Octopus webpage and see how many answers they can find. Afterwards I reveal the truth....

In order to explore what makes the webpage believable or less believable, we used the worksheet in Part 2 of Nicky Hockly’s lesson from her blog: http://www.emoderationskills.com/?p=1012. Actually the lesson comes from her new book with Gavin Dudeney and Mark Pegrum, 'Digital Literacies'. We'll be looking at the book in week 2 when we review some Continuing Professional Development resources. 

You can download the .pdf lesson plan and try it in your class!

Note: Nicky Hockly and Gavin Dudeney run The Consultants-E http://www.theconsultants-e.com/ , a company that offers online courses for teachers who want to learn more about educational technologies. They have a free newsletter and post a number of resources on their website, so do go along and have a look. They also run the only certified Cert-ICT (Certificate in Teaching Languages with technology). Highly recommended! And if you get a chance to hear either of them speaking at a conference, do go along.

In our session….

Basically, everybody was taken in by the Tree Octopus article, because the made the mistake of believing me;). As I always say, never believe the teacher! (or the newspapers or the government or….) No seriously, we need to show students that it is important to check and get confirmation of the information they find on the Internet and sometimes tricking them is the best way to leave an impression.

You are not alone. The Daily Mail Online also ran an article about this site in 2011: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1352929/Endangered-tree-octopus-proves-students-believe-read-Internet.html

And the Tree octopus site has a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_tree_octopus

Do follow the links at the bottom the Wikipedia article...

And write and let me know if you use any hoax websites with your students later this year...