With the autumn rains come project ideas for children and teenagers – I want to share some ideas I gathered this summer (oh, it seems such a long time ago!).
I wrote about an absolutely smashing book I read from Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers, but it’s not the only one. “Language Learning with Digital Video” by Ben Goldstein and Paul Driver, surprisingly, doesn’t focus on funny youtube videos with cats and ideas how a teacher can use them in the classroom, but it includes two parts – video exploitation (still, no cats) and video creation.
Video exploitation
The chapters included in this part cover video and text, narrative, persuasion, music and topic. Some of the activities are very useful especially for fresh teachers who still struggle with time management and for those teachers who don’t feel comfortable around digital stuff and want to try it out step by step.
I really like Be the commentator activity because commenting sports events is something that we usually do in our native tongue and doing it in English may be real fun (also, it’s my soft spot as I’d like to be a footy commentator, but there are no women pundits in Poland, shame!). The variation is Penalty shoot-out and I believe it may be hilarious to watch some famous matches again just to give a good comment (just not the Champions League 2008 final, thank you very much).
There are also some interesting activities focused on advertising guidelines, where students are looking for the commercials using particular categories (humour, emotional pull, call to action etc.), which may lead to a lesson about ethics of advertisements.
Naturally, there are far more activities connected karaoke, videoke, film trailers, mash-ups etc., so everyone can find something suitable.
Video creation
The title sounds promising and the chapter is indeed full of useful techie stuff (how to make/where to buy a green screen), however, when it comes to software I’m afraid authors focused only on Windows (and Windows Movie Maker isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, that’s for sure) and Apple (seriously, guys).
The activities are divided into four chapters – straightforward, medium, challenging and elaborate. Again, some of them are quite easy, others are more complex, some are relatively short, others are way too long for my 120hrs course (2-3 hours in class + work outside the classroom).
The activity I’m definitely going to try is staging and recording political speech, young adults are quite into politics and that would be a nice idea to have a project lesson on preparing candidates, speeches, proper recording environment etc. Similarly with recording the news and/or weather forecast.
The activity I liked best, though, is The Invader, where students play the roles of alien infiltrating the local population in order to collect data useful for preparing an imminent full-scale invasion (exterminate! exterminate!). They are supposed to walk around the school grounds (I’m lucky to have my school literally at the town square) filming some objects and trying to identify them and their role to impact their plans for invasion.
I hope you’ll have a look at the book as I’m sure you’ll find something for yourself. Enjoy!
Oh, and just to make things clear, I am not sponsored by Cambridge University Press – unfortunately 😉
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That is Evil! 