Exploding dog and the conditional structure
Exploding dog and the conditional structure: Student access page
Portfolio page: Snagit: Instructional applications
(Brown, 2008)
Introduction:
Hello and welcome to Exploding dog and the conditional structure. Don’t worry there are not going to be any Exploding Dogs (I am an animal loving human), because it is just the name of a very creative website. I hope that you make yourself comfortable and please feel free to leave comments in the discussion section of this page.
This lesson is to be conducted over the course of 3 classroom sessions each measuring 2 hours length. The first unit will be conducted in a traditional classroom while the second and third units will be conducted in a computer lab. This is an integrated mini-course in that the students and teachers will interact with the technologies as they learn the content. The focus is to learn with technology and not from technology.
In general the idea here is to get students thinking about constructing knowledge chunks of knowledge through interacting with groups to complete a project. In order to provide provocative stimuli I chose images from the website Exploding Dog. Please follow along and feel free to leave your feedback in the discussion section of the mini-course page.
Rationale and intent:
The aims of this lesson are to give students the opportunity to focus their productive language abilities (speaking and writing) by using Snagit. Snagit is a screen capture tool that is primarily used to manipulate digital images (http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp). My reasons for choosing Snagit for this project are simple; it is easy to use and it is a software platform that forces learners to engage in multi-layered media production.
In order to successfully complete this lesson students will need to have a basic understanding of how a mouse works, what digital images are and some basic ways to manipulate them. By reviewing and participating in this lesson participants can learn more about hypermedia production as well as English language usage through constructing media.
The attitude of the EFL learner must be receptive to learning if progress is to be made. From a content focused perspective, it is the aim of this lesson to promote an attractive way to learn language by using technology. I hope to affect learning in a way that promotes en eagerness to engage the material through hypermedia production.
This lesson is designed for adults learners in corporate English as a Foreign Language classes. Although the content may seem a bit childish, I find that the bright colors and unique images facilitate creativity in the classroom no matter what the age of the learner.
Language is a celebration of community and there is no better way to learn a language than by practice. Unfortunately language learning is often stifled by stale textbook scenarios and often repetitive teacher- student interaction paradigms. In order to duplicate a business-like environment for English language exchange, this mini-course uses the software program Snag-it to promote a constructionist approach to learning the English language.
Implementation:
Planned to be implemented during the next academic term.
Reflection:
(to be added after implementation)
Unit 1: Conditional structure review and practice
Target objectives:
Activities
- The students will complete a self-guided activity / test involving the zero, first and second conditional grammar structures.
- The students will self-correct using a teacher made correction packet. For the open-ended questions the examples will be given only as suggestions.
- Students will design a short quiz in pair groups on the zero, first and second conditional grammar structure.
- Students will trade quizzes with another pair group and complete the test alone.
- Students will check their answers with their partner and submit their test to be assessed by the test designers.
- Students will receive their tests back from the designers and review their scores.
Unit 1: Self guided quiz
Unit 2: Snagit tutorial and hypermedia production
Target objectives:
Activities
- Students will analyze an image taken from the website explodingdog.com (Brown, 2008).
- The image will be given to the students at their desks. The image will be a color printout on paper.
- Students will write three conditional statements related to the image.
- Students will complete a video tutorial on creating flash popups using the program Snagit.
- Students will create a flash text popup for each of their conditional statements.
Unit 2: Hypermedia production
Unit 3: Presentation and assessment
Target objectives:
Activities
- Students will receive a peer assessment sheet.
- File:Peer assessment.doc
- The contents will be reviewed by the Teacher.
- Students will give the presentations of their Snagit projects.
- Students will assess their classmates individually and anonymously.
- Teacher will collect the assessments and review for any inappropriate comments / scores and distribute them to the presenters.
Unit 3: Presentations and evaluations
