A Wearable Motorcycle?

The Tuesday session was a bit stressful, because I wanted to talk about 3 cities, and also, due to technical planning I had to play the final PowerPoint presentation to review all the contents that we had been working on. Conclusions: too many things for a 55 minutes class! I know it! But as I considered that the presentation was more important because I’m going to use it to check out what they’ve learnt, we worked on Philadelphia, Washington DC and Las Vegas veeery quickly!

Like the first presentation, this one was also very successful. They could locate all the cities worked in class and they recognized all the photographs. Even students with more difficulties to learn English were really engaged with the presentations.

On Friday, for the last session, I prepared an exercise to work on groups based on 4 different texts. Three of them were about the Greenest American cities, and the last one had nothing to do with US cities, but I chose it because I thought that it would catch their attention. It is called A Wearable Motorcycle. As a matter of fact, it attracted my attention when I was looking for interesting readings for my students. So I decided to adapt it to their level and made them watch the video related.

The session was great, but a bit messy at the end. During the first half an hour they worked more or less concentrated and in a relative silence, but gradually they started talking and getting distracted.

I’ve noticed that working in small groups is more difficult than it could seem, because you can’t be everywhere at once. Maybe with a couple of assistants...

Do you know where is Grey’s Anatomy set?

They couldn’t tell me which recent very important political figure was senator for Illinois and live in Chicago, but obviously, they know where is set Grey’s Anatomy TV series, in Seattle, of course!

In this session I introduced a new exercise that I hadn’t planned at first. The day before I assisted to my practicum mate class, who was implementing his Didactic Unit about cinema with 1st of Batxillerat students. One of the exercises that they made was a Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana) song in which they had to fill the gaps with conditional tense verbs. It was a very successful exercise so I decided to do it myself and implement a Nirvana song at the end of my session, as I was going to explain them that grunge was a musical subgenre that emerged in Seattle during the mid-1980s. So I thought that it would be a great opportunity to play a Nirvana song, The Man who Sold the World.

As expected, the song was a very successful activity. To the point that they started suggesting me a lot of songs for other sessions. At the end, I had to tell them that I would like work with all these songs, but that this was the English class, not the Music one.

Gangsters and the Gold Rush

On Tuesday afternoon we should have started working on Chicago, but instead, as I already mentioned, I brought my laptop and made my students watch the US cities PowerPoint presentation that should have seen in the first session. They really liked it! They paid attention and were very concentrated on the projection (even made me questions like Why it’s called Golden Gate Bridge if it is red? or But the Chinatown is located in New York, isn’t it?). In the last part of the presentation, there were all the photographs mixed, and they had to recognize them according to what I had just explained, and they did it! All of them! That showed me that they had been paying attention to what I had showed and explained... Wonderful!
Then we kept on working on Chicago, the Windy City. I had prepared an activity about gangsters to work in groups of 4 students. It was a communicative activity in which they had to speak and compare their answers with other classmates, but the main problem was that because of having to play them the PowerPoint about US Cities, we had less time than planned and they didn’t have time to write the final summary agreed with the group.

On Friday we talked about San Francisco. The main activity that I had prepared was an exercise based on a audio story about the Gold Rush. I was a bit surprised, because I was sure that they would know what the gold rush was (I mean, in Catalan, la febre de l’or), but most of them didn’t know it. So I think that it was even more interesting for them because they could also learn something about history or general culture.

My first session or When I clashed with technology!

This Tuesday I’ve started implementing my Curricular Unit and I made my debut facing up to a technical hitch! I was a bit nervous because it was going to be my first experience leading a classroom. On Tuesday they have class in the “Aula d’Idiomes” which has a projector, Internet connection, loudspeakers, etc., so I had prepared two PowerPoint presentations. The first one was an introduction of my Unit in which I explained what we were going to do, which were my objectives, how I was going to assess them and so on.

I started with this PowerPoint, and the first strange thing occurred! I'd created some animations to catch their attention, like little cars moving through the US map, and I'd configured transitions effects in paragraphs and through the slides according to the speech I had planned, but most of these effects didn’t work!! I didn’t expect that, so I had to adapt my speech to the presentation.
Then I had prepared another PowerPoint file to start talking about US cities. It was a presentation with the cities that we are going to work with located in the map and full of photographs of their landmarks and characteristics points, so that they could be able to identify them.

– So, let’s start talking about US cities.... mmmm.... nope! Wait a moment.... the PowerPoint doesn’t seem to work... lets try it again... (1 minute.... 2 minutes...)
– Do you want me to ask the computer specialist that is right there? -Mercè asked me.
– Ok! (At that point I don’t know if I was nervous or furious with technology)
– Which version of PowerPoint have you used? -the computer specialist asked me.
– 2003.
– Ok, that’s the problem, many 2003 effects don’t work on PowerPoint 2000, which is the version that we’ve installed here! I’m sorry, but you must try to convert your files to PowerPoint 2000....

This is more or less a summary of what happened. So, what did I do for the remaining 25 minutes? Fortunately I had brought the activities that I had prepared for the next session about Chicago, so we started with an introductory listening about this city.
At the end it was all right, but I must admit that on Tuesday I clashed with technology!!
I felt a bit sad and annoyed because it was my first session and I had prepared and worked a lot with these two PowerPoints, but instead, the session was splitted and obviously, the next session about Chicago was also splitted.

But well, we must be flexible, isn’t it?