Implementation of ‘Les Inventions’ (SOI- HR-217)
The main reason I have chosen this LS was not because I teach French but the topic itself was very applicable, namely, my curriculum for second grade English (15, 16-year old) has this same topic and I wanted to use it. But, first I had to practice my rudimentary French and adjust everything to English.
Activities and time frame
All the activities from this LS are nicely planned with a lot of time given for preparation and presentation of students’ work. I did not have that much time, so I have shortened certain activities (because of the previous work done with Europeana site and materials, this phase was shorter and three phases of discussion, preparation and presentation were much shorter).All in all, instead of 4 hours and 45 minutes we had three 45-minute lessons with same order of activities and content.
Organization of work, online platforms
Since I had my classes online, we had it on Zoom and in breakout rooms with me logging in regularly in all the groups supervising their activities and not suggesting too much and trying to follow group dymamics (I used my form for group dynamics). The last of these three lessons was for presentation speeches when I conducted my assessment, but I also gave them the evaluation sheet I usually use for peer evaluation of presentations. The platform I used for sharing final products was our Edmodo classroom where we had our exhibition of digital posters.
Materials and task
We worked previously on Europeana materials and proper attribution, so I gave them this time freedom to use any site and materials as long as their attribution was correct and use of materials appropriate.The task was to research inventor or invention of their choice and make a digital poster with accompanying presentation speech.Since we finished a topic in connection with civil rights, I made a suggestions to the female students to research female inventors and they gladly did so. For creating the digital poster they had possibility to use any platform or application and the results were in Padlet, Genially, ppt, Word… With another class I had the same task but I put them in pairs, not in groups and that was also something students enjoyed because this class is not so proficient in English and their feedback later was that they got more aout of that kind of work.
All things considered I, as a teacher, really liked this LS because it really correlated with my English curriculum. I did have to translate it and shorten it a lot, but organizationally it was just what I wanted.The feedback students gave showed that they liked the topic, the way they worked and the freedom in choice of their topic for posters/preentations.What they emphasised as a negative side was presenting on Zoom, it was stressful for some students, so they taped themselves.
Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario:
Les Inventions created by Martinha Vieira Ferreira
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CC BY 2.5: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Flygvapenmuseum.