Polishing up my unit for next week!

This week Mercè prepared a Find Someone Who activity that was quite funny, but I realized that they are not used to this kind of activities. Mercè got out of the class for a while, and they remained seated reading the questions and asking to the classmates besides them. I told them to ask all their classmates but they were a bit confused. “Come on, stand up, walk around the class and ask all your classmates!” Then they start moving along and the chaos began! I think they really had fun with this activity.

Next week I’ll start implementing my Curricular Unit which is about USA Cities. My intention is no working on American Geography, but on specific famous US cities that we all have heard in many movies, TV series and so on, but we don’t know exactly were are they located. And being the US a so huge country, if you think that, for instance, Seattle is located in the East Coast, you may be making a mistake of almost 5 thousand kilometers. Being also photography one of my passions, I also expect that they would be able to recognize these cities through photographies of their landmarks.
So this is my starting point. I’ve decided to work on 10 cities: Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Las Vegas, although we are also going to talk briefly about Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Salt Lake City (I want to relate these two last cities to Olympic Games, that they worked with Mercè last week).
Of course, I would use the topic of the cities to introduce listenings, readings and activities related to them. For example, in the first city that we are going to work with, Chicago, they will listen to an introductory audio file that, among other things, talks about gangsters. So I’ll use this to introduce an activity about Al Capone.

Implementing an ICT activity... Done!

Finally this last Tuesday I could implement my ICT activity! Well, at least we did it in the class, even though no one had time to finish it. The main problem of my Treasure Hunt (about Broadway) is that most of the questions (6 of 9) were based on a 9 minutes podcast. I’ve realized that they have a lot of problems for being concentrated for 9 minutes listening to an audio file in English. I must also say that the quality of the sound in the headsets was very poor (very low) and this doesn’t help.

I told them to finish the exercise at home and deliver it to me next week. I think that with their own loudspeakers or headsets in a quite environment, they could be more concentrated in the speaker.

On Wednesday we assist to a “Claustre” session as a part of our tasks outside the classroom. The teachers have to elect a representative for the school’s board. The election process was held quickly. Afterward, they were informed about the annual fire drill that will be conducted in the next month.

Finally, a teacher (we suppose that he was the person in charge of computing) explained to the others how to use the new PDA that they have received this year to manage students assistance, assessment, incidents, and so on. I personally think that this is very interesting for teachers. I don’t know if in practice this would be helpful or not, but in theory, as he explained, it could be very useful! I would like to have one of this PDA for me!!

Trying to implement an ICT activity...

On Tuesday they started their oral presentations about cities of the world. Nearly everyone brought their posters to the class, and the most of them were really great.
As supposed, they didn’t have time to finish all the presentations in one hour. The rest, more or less the half of the class, did it on Thursday. Some of the students that talked the first day did it really well; they spoke about their cities without reading, trying to be communicative. Other, of course, just read what they have written in the poster.

On Friday, we (Aaron and me) were supposed to implement our ICT activities. As the “Aula d’idiomas” only have 10 computers and in my 4th of ESO group there are 25 students, our coach reserved another class with more computer (maybe not one for every student, but more or less). We’ve planned to do both activities in the same session, half an hour for each one, starting with Aaron’s one. Now I must to admit that we committed our first time planning mistake. Apart from the excitement and the mess of being in front of a computer, a lot of time was lost for getting into the Internet and writing the Treasure hunt page successfully. I also must admit that these wizard4teachers.org addresses full of id=?/124... and so on are not really helpful!
At the end of the session they had not even started my activity, but hadn’t finished the Aaron’s Treasure Hunt about the British zoos.

So we are going to implement my ICT activity on next Tuesday, in the “Aula d’Idiomes”, with these 10 computers. We’ll divide the group in two parts and they’ll have to do the activity in half an hour. Let’s see if they can do it!

2nd week: oral presentations and exam!

The 2nd week of my practicum is already over and I’m quite pleased about it. I’ve definitely chosen the group I’m going to monitor, 4th of ESO, and even though this week I’ve been attending to all three groups, from now on I’m going to focus on mine.
So, what has been going on in 4th of ESO during this last week?

On Tuesday Mercè asked the students to do a project about a city in order to present it orally. This will count as an oral grade, so it’s important. They’ve to choose a city of the world and look for information related to it, such as the population, what is known for, facts about it, important facilities, etc. Then they’ve to create a handwritten poster and present it to the rest of the class. At first, it was supposed to be done in a week, but they were a bit reluctant to do it and try to get more time. So at last, Mercè gave them an extra week.
They had to collect all the information needed and bring it to the Thursday class in order to work in the classroom and show it to Mercè so she could correct it. Some of them did it, and other didn’t. The ones who did it, kept on working on the computers (Thursday class is done in “Aula d’idiomes”, which has some computers, a projector and so forth) and the others had some exercises to do. I think they’ve to do their presentations on next Thursday, so I’ll explain you how it develops.

On Friday they had an exam! I helped Mercè in proctoring the exam and it was quite funny because some students wanted me to help them and asked me if an answer was correct or not, just as if they were children! I had a quick glance at what some of them were writing while I paced around the classroom and I noticed that some of them were making a lot of grammar mistakes. We’ll see how it goes!

Observation task and...

During this first week we were supposed to do observation task in the classroom.... but it wasn’t that easy!!

This year our tutor teaches 4th of ESO, 1st of Batxillerat and Cicles formatius. Though she had let us choose the group we want to monitor, this first week we’ve been observing the tree groups.

Our first experience was with Cicles formatius and I must admit that after the first hour I was a bit scared because even though the group was split, they were only about 10 students, they took at least 15 minutes to “be quiet”. They spoke and made a lot of noise for the whole class. What I’ve noticed is that their level was really low, and the teacher had to speak in Catalan/Spanish most of the time. It was very difficult to get their attention. The first thing that shocked me was what a student told her just at the beginning of the class: “profe, pero si ya sabes que no te entiendo!” Wow!

The next group was 1st of Batxillerat, and fortunately, the situation was very different. Though it’s a very large group (39 students), they behaved and, in general, their level of English is not bad. They are reluctant to speak in English, but the teacher can do it most of the time and they understand her quite well. What I also noticed is that when she wanted to be sure that students understood her, she repeated what she had said in Catalan. I think that this is a good group to work with, but the problem is that it’s such a big group. My practicum mate, Aaron, is going to monitor this one because of the schedule of the Didactics class at the University.

On Tuesday, we had class with 4th of ESO. That day we had another teacher in the classroom, Kieth, a Scottish student that helps English teachers with conversation tasks one hour a week for each group. I think it’s very interesting for the students, so they have the opportunity to listen to a native English speaker. He read a text and they had to do some exercises related to it. This group is not as big as the 1st of Batxillerat (26 students), so I think it could be easier to implement some activities with them.

On Wednesday, our third day, we were supposed to start participating in the 1st of Batxillerat class but I think we did a step forward. The group was split, so some of them had to work with Kieth and the rest remained with Mercè. The problem was that Kieth didn’t arrived, so Mercè asked us to do the class with these eleven students. Wow!! We had to read aloud a text that we haven’t previously read and then they had to answer some questions related to it that obviously we haven’t answered ourselves. I felt a bit nervous when I started reading, but I must say that it was a great experience. They behaved, they listened and worked in silence and the class developed without problems. A great third day of practicum!