lunes, 19 de abril de 2021

Using EDPUZZLE in my English lessons

 

This entry is related to the use of EDPUZZLE for listening activities. The aims in this task were:

  • To use authentic materials (spoken texts to be used by native speakers).
  • To plan the tasks and learning process step-by-step (pre, during and post tasks).
  • To make the experience significative and interactive.
  • To give a greater degree of autonomy to students (flipped learning)

 

As always, I upload the video to my blog and leave a reflection which explains how exactly I planned to meet the 4 objectives mentioned above.

- This is the original video I used for the task https://youtu.be/y3gBNBtJMJw

- This is the cut video in which I included the questions using EDPUZZLE https://edpuzzle.com/media/607c5eb0f2411e419abbe4fd

 - This is the link of the Assigment Task for the students https://edpuzzle.com/assignments/607c646e9309624181061758/watch

 

Now, I will explain how I made use of EDPUZZLE in my lessons. I proposed this task to my students in the Sixth Grade, as they are the oldest in the school and who have a better control of new technologies, as they spend too many time using them.

I have used a video entitled “Lemons to lemonade”, which is a chapter of the series “Warren Buffett's Secret Millionaires Club”. The reason that encourages me to use this video is that it is motivating for my students: they are teenagers, so they can identify with them, as they are the same age; they have a goal to achieve, as they need to solve a problem, this can catch their attention to watch the video. Moreover, they are a “club” and at this moment, the unit we are learning in class is entitled “At the youth club”, so it is similar in some ways.

 

The learning objectives of the task were:

    • To recognize certain words while listening to the video (bottom-up).
    • To understand the general meaning of the story using the images of the video as an aid to get the big picture of listening (top-down).

 

To carry out this listening task using EDPUZZLE I have sequenced it into three main activities.

    • Pre-listening: after explain in class how to use EdPuzzle I uploaded to Google Classroom a file they read before watching the video. In this document they found a Picture Dictionary of relevant word they will listen on the video, as well as the definition of some important words.
    • While-listening: while listening to the video they answered the questions I designed for them thanks to EDPUZZLE.
    • Post-listening: In class we discussed about the following questions: what do you think about the activity? Did you like the story? Do you like doing this kind of activities for practicing listening? Retell the story in pairs.

Pre-listening and while listening activities where flipped, that is, they were done at home to improve students autonomy. Furthermore, in this way, they could listen to the videos and played it as many times as they need before answer the questions. Finally, the post-listening part was done in class.

 

Finally, I would like to highlight some points of the experience. What I really enjoyed of the activity was that the students were very motivated, when I explained in class the activity, they were surprised that they can do an activity of this kind. Some of them wanted to download the app on their phones and they have asked me to propose more activities like that.

Moreover, the high school, made us a report about the student’s level of the children who were in our school last year, and listening is one of the points they really need to improve. I explained this  to them and used it as an excuse to introduce the use of EDPUZZLE.

As a suggestion in order to improve next time is to use it as a tool to work on the contents that we are studying in that moment. This was difficult for me as I did it as a task for the CEP course, so I used a motivating video for students, and similar to the topic of the unit in some ways, but not closely related to the vocabulary and grammar we were working on. Although, in the end, if we use authentic materials, to find something exactly related is a rough work.




<a href='https://www.freepik.es/vectores/personas'>Vector de Personas creado por freepik - www.freepik.es</a>

No hay comentarios:

Publicar un comentario

Foro Interaction

Looking at my partner's blogs, I found a very attractive idea for my students in the Sixth Grade such as "Interactive Picture"...