- Team Members: Daniele Almeida and Elaine Santos
- Level: Intermediate
- Time frame: two weeks
Activity Objectives:
In this activity, students use a wiki to describe their city and to introduce a friend to a new visitor. The purpose of the activity is to work on describing vocabulary and textual skills including coherence & cohesion.
Description:
In this activity, students work over two weeks on describing their city in a chronological perspective, so that students can compare their city and analyze the changes occurred in a period of time. This activity is linked to the following book lesson in which students are supposed to introduce a friend by using the given structures and vocabulary.
Teacher Instructions
Part 1
- Reading activity: Students are asked about things they like in their cities.
- Students read a text (book) in which a city is being described. After answering the comprehension questions students are told they will have to write about their city.
- Teacher asks students if they are familiar with the wiki. Teacher explains that a wiki is a collaborative webpage in which stories can be built and information can be shared.
- Teacher asks students to search interesting information about their city.
- Teacher tells students how to access the wiki teacher had created and are told to share the information they got.
- Teacher gives emphasis that everybody has to take part into this project and encourage them to use pictures, videos and other tools they are familiar with.
Part 2
1. After have described their city students are supposed to invite another friend to visit it.
2. Teacher tells them they will take part into another activity in which his/her own friend is introduced to the group.
3. Every student has to access the wiki and present his/her friend. This friend has to be a classmate.
4. When the student access the page has to identify which student had been described, tell the other who he/she is and present the new student.
5. Students are told to present a friend from the class Draw a tree on the board with twice as many branch and end points as students. For example, a simple Y structure has 4 points--in the story, this would equal four scenes. You may want to give this tree to the students as a worksheet.
6. The final product will be analyzed and corrected in class.
Comments (2)
Carla Arena said
at 12:29 pm on Nov 14, 2008
Dear girls, the topic you chose is a great option to incorporate the technological element to it. You really got the idea on how to use social media tools in order to engage students in content creation, sharing, collaboration and interaction. Way to go!
By the way, I've been giving this tip to some of your colleagues who decided to use wikis in their lessonplan.
Just a trick to PBwiki that might be really useful to you. Your students don't need to create accounts. As a teacher, you can create a class pbwiki. Then, go to settings, "users". There's an option of creating students accounts without their emails. Click there and add your students and give a password to each one of them. Ready! They're ready to start writing! Another thing you need to pay attention to is that students in the computer lab can't edit the same wiki page at the same time. They need to be on different pages. The easiest way is jus you creating the pages before the class and having them work on different wikipages.
As for your incentive to add images, videos, etc, it can encourage students to go beyond, find creative ways to ornament their wiki pages. Just one reminder. It's important that you talk to them about copyright, using their own photos, or looking for photos that are licensed. They can use Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ licenced photos and this link http://copyrightfriendly.wikispaces.com/ is a fantastic resource, as well.
Carla Arena said
at 12:29 pm on Nov 14, 2008
I thought your idea of inviting a classmate to visit the city very creative. I was just a little confused at the end how the process works. So, their classmates will visit their wiki, right? And then they will present their friend on the wiki? How? Are they going to post their classmate's profile there? And then the last part will be in class? What will the friend do while visiting the wiki? I think it's just a matter of wording to make it clear for the ones who are reading your lesson plan. A detail, only.
You might consider creating a wiki page with your own example to model for students. This really helps in the process.
All in all, you've done a great job. Thanks for taking the plunge into this digital endeavor with us! I've learned tons with you, 21st century educators!
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