Our Educational Message

Hi, and welcome to our blog. This space is designed to share ideas and methodologies that we use to teach Turkish teenagers. In particular, there is a strong focus on ICT-ELT, which means if you like visual and technological support for your style of teaching, this blog is for you. My colleague, Brentson Ramsey, has been working alongside me for three years. He is also a big proponent of the ICT-ELT Paradigm, which means he will also be posting from his own teaching perspective on the blog.

2010 was the beginning of this new journey, and although there is no definitive ICT-ELT road map available for everyone to follow, it is exciting to explore the technological means to make teaching more fun and affective for students. Our main message is for teachers to ADOPT & ADAPT the paradigm shift for their own needs, and remember that
ICT-ELT is a TOOL, NOT a SOLUTION.

Thursday 14 March 2013

Making an I-MOVIE & Focusing on the PROCESS



Today’s offering of ICT-ELT project work comes in the form of Apple’s owwwsummm(!) ipad, imovie,collaborative group work, the process  and the ability to work through a task (which, of course, our students find very difficult to do in ALL year groups and subject areas).
So, allow me to explain the project we assigned yesterday as part of our new:


                                    INNOVATION ZONE: 

We saw an oppportunity for the project quite literally by accident three days ago.  Thankfully, due to our connection and reliance on
                                                                                      
                                   COMMON CURRICULUM,

1.    We juggled things around a bit, and prepared the project. 
2.    First of all, we reminded the students that the main theme of the book we are reading is on bullying.
3.    Then we told them that since there is no movie of the book from Hollywood, they would be making a trailer for a film based on various parts of the book (of our choosing). 
4.    Next, they were put in groups and assigned the sections.  We further gave them a STORYBOARD TEMPLATE and a CHECKLIST for working too during the photo project.  This process is what we focused on for the objectives and purpose of the activity.  The students were obviously informed several times of this and it was also posted on the Arcelik smart board for all to see during the 90 minutes they were involved doing the collaborative group work. 
5.    Once the students had prepared the storyboard, they had to go off and take the photos around school. 
6.    On their return to class, they had to write up their checklist, re-label their photographs for sending to hisarhazirlik@gmail (our class gmail account). 
7.    Then Brentson and I turned their storyboards into imovie trailers on our ipads.

You can see the trailers if you click on the link below.  It is interesting to see that the trailers are not coherent, nor are they cohesive.  We know that this is down to them NOT following through properly on the objectives and rushing to get to the trailer itself.  That is why we are doing a reflective session in class today to let them see the huge importance of that, and the students will be required to complete the following REFLECTIVE GROUP QUESTIONNAIRE to see who did and who did not fulfill their roles adequately.



After speaking to the students this afternoon, and showing them the errors of their ways, they reflected and sent us google docs that highlight their own ideas about how they can improve their performance by themselves for next time.  This part of the process is so important as they try to move forward.


STUDENTS' SELF-HELP RESPONSES collated from GoogleDocs


We have to be more organized and planned. 
We have to work more carefully as a group. 
We were a disorganised chaos; next time we will turn it into an organized chaos.
We should spend more time on choosing photos. 
We will listen to the introductions carefully next time. 
We will make the transitions better. 
We will put all the group members photos next time. 
We should give different roles to our group members.
Some members didn’t participate very much. 
Also, we could organize it better and think more about it. 
We could summarize it and look at it again, so we could see our faults again. 
When we are taking the pictures, we have to be more realistic and dramatic because it is a very serious subject. 
The transitions could be better and shorter because they were hard to read and hard to  catch. 
Some pictures were meaningless and they could be better. 
Furthermore, we had a technical problem, so we could fix that.
I think we could do it much better by not changing the photos or the sentences. 
I think we could do it much better by making much better organization.
We could act more like a team.
We could be much faster and neater when we are doing our work.
I could have tried to help my team, but I didn’t do it so much.
My teammates could help me more.
We could have said sorry to our teachers because of these acts.
Some pictures were mixed, so we should be more organized.
Some transitions and photos were disconnected. We should relate them to each other.
Our project took a long time, so we should work more quickly.
We can take more interesting photos.
We can choose the characters more appropriately.
We should give the responsibilities more carefully to each other.
We can change our transitions. 
We can write more meaningful transitions. 
We can take more serious pictures. 
We laughed in some pictures and one picture was missing. 
We can take more meaningful pictures. 
Some pictures were hard to understand. 

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