August 9, 2013

Learning about Schools around the world


I've just started a unit with a group of EFL teenage students about Education.

In order to help them learn about how different school can be in other countries (or not), I'd love to have students from different countries participate in our VOICETHREAD.

Do you have teenage students? Do you have teenagers at home who could give us a hand?

To add a video-response and participate in our project, click COMMENT and record a video message, please.



These are some questions students can answer:

- What kind of secondary school do you go to? (private / state school)
- Do you like it?
- How many students are there in your class?
- How many hours a day do you stay at school?
- What kind of subjects do you like best?
- Can you choose what subjects to take?
- Do you have to wear a uniform?
- Can you describe the sitting arrangement in your classroom? ( in a U shape, in lines, in groups)
- And the classes? Does the teacher do most of the talking or do you work mostly in groups?
- Do students stay in the same room the whole school period or do they move to different rooms according to the subject?
- Is discipline very strict?

If you have teenage students and wish to join our project, you can record the whole class using your own voicethread account and have different students come to the webcam and answer the questions (an in-class activity) or you can set it as homework and students record themselves individually. What do you think? We would love to hear from you.

3 comments:

Juliana said...

Hi, Ana! I'm interested in getting my students to take part. Just a couple of questions:
- when will you end the project?
- will your students also be recording themselves about their school?

I've never used Voicethread before but I did a quick google and saw that responses will appear on that same Voicethread page - does this mean that you could potentially have hundreds of responses on your page? :)

Ana Maria Menezes said...

Hi, Juliana. This project will probably end at the end of September. Until then we have time to help our students think about the questions, organize the activity, write texts if they want to and help them with the recording. These are the steps I followed with my own students. First, they talked to their parents and grandparents about school in the past and wrote a paragraph about it, then students exchanged what they had learned from their pants. Last class, students developed a conversation in pairs using the questions written on this post. We ended up brainstorming more questions for information they are interested in. For homework, students will write a text using the questions as a guide and I'm talking them into recording themselves on the voicethread too.
Voicethread can hold several recordings so many of us will be able to use the recordings for further discussion and listening practice.
A question now: where do you teach?

Ana Maria Menezes said...

Hi, Juliana. This project will probably end at the end of September. Until then we have time to help our students think about the questions, organize the activity, write texts if they want to and help them with the recording. These are the steps I followed with my own students. First, they talked to their parents and grandparents about school in the past and wrote a paragraph about it, then students exchanged what they had learned from their pants. Last class, students developed a conversation in pairs using the questions written on this post. We ended up brainstorming more questions for information they are interested in. For homework, students will write a text using the questions as a guide and I'm talking them into recording themselves on the voicethread too.
Voicethread can hold several recordings so many of us will be able to use the recordings for further discussion and listening practice.
A question now: where do you teach?