Lesson plans using Fodey, Listen and Write and Just Paste It

• Age group: 13- year- old.

• Language level: Intermediate.

• Objectives: At the conclusion of this lesson plan, participants will be able to identify the different types of holidays and holiday activities and expand their vocabulary on this topic.

• Language areas: Writing, speaking, listening and reading.

• Number of students: 20.

• Physical location: Private high school. The school has a big classroom with an interactive white board with a projector and a blackboard. The school also has a computer lab with enough computers for all students.

• Topic: : Travelling: types of holidays (a beach holiday, a camping holiday, backpacking, a cruise holiday, a safari holiday, a villa holidays and a sightseeing holiday) and holiday activities (visit museums, sunbath, go sightseeing, climb a mountain, go shopping, go diving and go to an amusement park).

These two lesson plans have been prepared using the WWW organization (Warmer, Web, What Next)

Warmer: 10’

This part of the lesson will take place in the classroom. The teacher will write the following questions on the blackboard:

-What types of holidays do you know?

-What types of holiday activities do you know?

-Which type of holiday/holiday activity is your favourite?

Brainstorming has many advantages, it fosters students’ participation, making them feel free to share their ideas and thoughts on the topic. Moreover, it promotes teamwork.

The brainstorming activity will be carried out using the app Stormboard in the interactive whiteboard. Stormboard is an online brainstorming app, which is very visual and easy to use. If you want to know how to use Stormboard, click here. An advantage of using this app is that it allows students to have all the ideas in the same place. They can access the brainstorm activity whenever they want. Another advantage is that students can work on any device: IOS, Android, Windows 10, Surface Hub, etc. In addition, you can connect your Google Drive account to Stormboard and then add files, collaborate on them, create new files, and run reports in Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Plus, students can co-edit files with their classmates, making it more efficient and effective. A disadvantage is that the app is not completely free, making some features available only for pro accounts.

The activity will look like the following:

Web: 15’

This part of the lesson will take place in the school’s computer lab.

Students will explore the following Genially presentation, which is an introduction to the topic of the lesson: types of holidays and holiday activities. Then, they will have to watch the following video. After watching the video, they have to answer a question on Mentimeter so the teacher can check the student's comprehension of the video.

What Next: 15’

In this last part of the lesson, students will have to write a newspaper article using Fodey.If you want to learn how to use Fodey, you can take a look at this tutorial. In their article, they have to suggest original holiday activities and what holiday activities they enjoy the most. The aim of the activity is that students can think of different activities to do, using their creativity and imagination. This website is user friendly, you don’t need to create an account, you just have to type in what you want and then you can download it. For example, if you are creating a newspaper clipping, you can type the name of the newspaper, the date, the headline and then the story. Once you’ve finished you click “generate” and you’re done! Then you can download it and print it, upload it on social media or send it by email. This website fosters an inclusive classroom since students are allowed to use the Internet to look up information, making learning more meaningful and relevant, and then creating, for example, a newspaper article, which can help SEN students to link concepts and focus on actual events.

In compliance with TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge), effective technology integration for pedagogy around specific subject matter requires developing sensitivity to the dynamic, transactional relationship between these components of knowledge situated in unique contexts: individual teachers, grade-level, school-specific factors, demographics and culture. For this reason, the inclusion of technology in this lesson plan was carefully thought through.

Warmer: 10’

This part of the lesson will take place in the classroom. The teacher will create a wordsearch using Puzzle Maker to activate the students prior knowledge about different types of holidays and holiday activities, vocabulary they have discussed in the previous lesson. If you want to know more about how to use this website, click here for a step by step guide. Also, here there is an example you can use as a model.

Activating prior knowledge is an excellent technique to scaffold the concepts from one lesson to another. It is highly recommended for all types of lessons, because it follows a continuity in the students' learning process.

Web: 20’

This part of the lesson will take place in the school’s computer lab. Students can work in pairs or groups of three. Then, students will have to access the following website called Listen and Write and listen to a woman talking about a place she visited that she really enjoyed. The main purpose of this activity is for students to work on their listening skills and acquire useful phrases to describe places. The learners have to listen and type every single word they listen. This tool only accepts right spellings for the words they type up, so it is also a great opportunity to improve their spelling skills. To access this website, students do not have to log in, unless they (or the teacher) wants to keep a record of the activities.

After they finish working on this exercise, the students will have to do a short quiz about how much they have understood of the audio. In this part, they will have to recapitulate on interesting vocabulary they have listened to, so it would be useful to make them aware of this so they can use these expressions or phrases in the next part of the lesson.

Once they complete the quiz, students will be asked to think about a place they have travelled to and describe it as much as they can using the vocabulary discussed in the last two lessons: type of holidays, holiday activities, what the place was like, its good qualities and its flaws. They will brainstorm these ideas using Just Paste It. Here, they can write down their ideas, highlight important information, use items to separate different parts of the speech, and so on and so forth. Also, they can look for information on the Internet about the place they have visited and/or look up interesting vocabulary, and directly paste the text in this tool. After they write down all their ideas, they can convert this into a PDF or a link to carry the information in their mobile devices.

All the websites provided in this part of the lesson are great tools to use in inclusive classrooms because they foster the development of different skills and each student can go at its own pace. SEN students will definitely benefit from them, so if you want to find out more reasons why they are useful, click here.

What Next: 10’

Students will go back to the classroom and/or the school’s corridor. The main purpose of this lesson would be to record themselves talking about the place they chose and using all the ideas they wrote on Just Paste It. Since they are working in pairs or groups of three, the teacher will suggest moving to a place in the classroom or corridor which is not too noisy and the audio gets properly recorded. After they finish, students will have to upload the audio to the following Padlet and share it with the rest of the class.

This lesson has been carefully planned following the SAMR Model for Technology Integration. In every single step you can find an instance of this model, for example in the Warmer section there has been substitution because instead of creating a hand-written word search, teachers can resort to a tool that directly creates the exercise for them. Also in Web, Just Past It acts as a direct tool substitute for hand-written sheets of paper - with the functional improvement of choosing different formats for the text - in compliance with augmentation. What’s more, in What’s Next, teachers resort to redefinition. The fact that students can use technology to record themselves was not conceivable in old classrooms.

Links to tutorials:

• Puzzle Maker

• Listen and write

• Just Paste It

• Padlet

REFERENCES:

• Hockly, N.,& Dudeney, G. (2007) Chapter3 “Using websites”. In How to Teach English with Technology. Essex: Pearson.

• Hockly, N.(2017) Unit 45: 10 things to know about SEN students and technology. EtPedia: Technology. pp. 159-161. Hove: Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd.

• Power School (2021) https://www.powerschool.com/resources/blog/samr-model-a-practical-guide-for-k-12-classroom-technology-integration/

• SAMR Model https://www.schoology.com/blog/samr-model-practical-guide-edtech-integration

• Mkoehler. (2012). TPACK Explained. Retrieved July 2, 2018, from http://www.tpack.org/

• Power School (2021) https://www.powerschool.com/resources/blog/samr-model-a-practical-guide-for-k-12-classroom-technology-integration/