I love the idea of small talks where students present something to their classmates and in a way they learn how to present, how to talk in front of a crowd.
We use a topic based coursebook in that way students focus on a different topic in each unit. This year I told my students that they would prepare a small presentation at the beginning of each lesson.These presentations should be a kind of introduction to the new unit. They chose the units they would present at the beginning of the year. We talked about how to prepare presentations, power points what to include on the slides, how to express themselves, etc.
As you may guess, the first presentations were not very sucessful. Lots of copying and pasting with beautiful images from the web and they read the slides instead of telling them to us.
Then we talked about plagiarism and I repeated many times that there was no need to write sentences but they should have notes on their slides. I also suggested that they could use the web 2.0 tools I taught them.
After a few units, I realised the presentations became better but at the end of each presentation I repeated what my expectations were.
And yesterday a student presented about talk shows. She used a glogster instead of power point and in the end we watched an animation she created with GoAnimate. It was brilliant and the other students also enjoyed listening to her. She never read, she talked. She was creative and I really felt very proud.
I think from now on the others will do their best to be as good as her.
GoAnimate.com: esayan show by selin236
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!
Dear Eva,
Did you use a rubric to evaluate them? I find that by giving the students the rubric before hand and going over it with them helps to solve the problems you described. Only when they understand exactly what you want and how you want it can they give it to you! To see that plagiarism, copying pictures and reading off slides (etc) will actually cost them points off their grade really “motivates” my kids not to make those kinds of mistakes.
:-)CoffeeAddict
Dear Karin,
Thanks for dropping by. Yes, I use rubrics for presentations, for writing, for anything but it takes time to make students understand what you really want. It is sometimes a constant struggle but I never give up 🙂
Eva
Eva,
wow! this is great stuff and I think you should be over the moon proud. It is a great thing to get students thinking about their own learning. Also, I can vouch that presenting/teaching is the way to get students acquiring language and not just learning it (but they need support).
I was going to write about rubrics this week – saw a great rubric about blogging but it was only for the teacher! Too dense language. I really think rubrics should be made with students and be very explicit and simple in their language. Or even in their L1. It should n’t be a teacher driven thing that we witness so often. Teacher writes it up in dense language, students nod and pretend to understand and then we all “play school”. I think you’d probably agree…
What’s the next step – filming them with a FLIP? Then I bet they’d get motivated!
David
hi David,
glad you loved it. You’re right rubrics are great help but students learn by seeing examples and doing so it takes a lot of time somrtimes to go where you aimed to be and when those kids are not used to things like that it is often more difficult but when you see the result it is great.
I encourage them to use the things they learn in English lessons and amaze their teachers. In may they will present their projects to the us and Selin said she will prepare another animation for that.
I don’t know what the next step will be for them but I’ll let you know:)
Eva
Eva, following your lead, I had my students present their learning styles to each other on their blogs. I invited them to use glogs, they had just worked on them previously in a collaborative project. Since I work with adults, the fear of doing something unknown on the computer is an issue in my group, that is why it has taken so long to follow your example. But what results! I am so pleased!
As for grading, yes it is an issue, but we do not have to be grading everything they do. Sometimes they should just present…for fun!
Ellen
Dear Ellen, Thanks a lot for letting me know about your students’ experience. :))))
Eva