Consequences on the Computer - Part 1

I guess most of us have played consequences at some point in our lessons. If you don't recognise the name, it's that activity where a student writes the first line of a story, prompted or otherwise, folds over the paper and passes it on for the next student to continue.

Consequences is good for motivating students to write, helping uncreative students develop an imagination, handwriting practice, reading practice...

To be honest, this isn't the kind of activity I was thinking of giving my Advanced teenagers today, but suddenly I wondered whether I could give it a modern twist on our class blog.

The advantage of using the blog is that it will encourage my class to check it more often, to see the next line of the story. They could even all be online at once, vying to post the next sentence before their classmates.

The disadvantage of course is that they can see the story as it develops, so there is no element of surprise at the end.

I could get around this by asking them to do it in class time, where each student will have, say, only 90 seconds to write the next line, forcing them to skim the text or just pay attention to the last line. The previously written part could actually be hidden from view until the end.

What I'd like to do most is take all the students to the computer room, give them a computer each, and have the students change computer after every line, instead of swapping papers. Fast typing in another alphabet is a useful skill for my group. If I were more familiar with twitter, that would be a third option for Consequences on the Computer.

If we do one of these activities, I'll post our results...

Report cards for teens

It's the end of the academic year in our school. Last year I used continuous assessment with my teens, so at the end of the term I hand-made little cards and wrote some personal comments inside for each teenager. The categories followed the FCE papers, since that is what the kids were studying for: Reading, Writing, Use of English, Listening and Speaking. I simply wrote my subjective comments about each student under each heading.

The goal of this was more to encourage than to provide serious feedback. I wanted my weaker students to feel that their progress had been noted and that grammar was not the be-all and end-all of language learning. I wanted to give the stronger students some tips on how to continue excelling outside the classroom.

I must admit, the idea seemed better in the teachers' room than in front of the students. I felt rather silly handing out hand-made cards....

Only this year have I noticed the effect these cards had (exam students, please note the use of inversion!). I handed out certificates a little early as some students were leaving the course before the actual end of year, and heard to my surprise, "What about those cards we had last year?"

Happy Teacher went away from class feeling that not everything she does is useless and unnoticed.

Stressed Teacher now has to go make those report cards..... :-)

Blogging with Teenagers

To encourage teenagers to continue studying as we approach the end of the academic year, our school has launched a class blog competition. As my class has long finished the coursebook and also taken their exams, I thought a blog would go down really well.

Why do I like the blog idea?

• It's a rolling activity that keeps students interested from one lesson to the next.
• It allows students to choose how much or how little they want to contribute.
• It is completely personalised writing, as students choose the topics.
• It allows free expression.
• It is a genuine interactive task because students can comment on each others' posts.
• It creates class unity.
• It allows the teacher to assess their writing informally - and the students don't even know. :-)

But... my teenagers were not amused....

"Yeah, we did that in school."

"I had a blog about three years ago, but I don't write anything now."

"What's it for?"

Yet again the old-fashioned teacher has tried to get inside the teenagers' heads and failed....

However, they livened up somewhat when I mentioned that it would be a class blog, not individual. (Hmm... so they like working together.) And they positively got excited when I gave them the first task. (I have never seen the whole class take out their notebooks and write down the homework!)

Task 1: Find a famous person, living or dead, with the same name as you and write their biography as if you were this person.

• I got two queens, a princess, a sports commentator and a painter.

Task 2: Post a painting you have strong feelings about and explain why.

• Such a variety of artistic tastes. I never realised my group thought so deeply about art!

Task 3: Read four short texts and comment on the one you find most interesting.

• I then planned a lesson based on the text that was commented on most.

Check out our beautiful blog!

Feeling sorry for PET candidates....

Well, I'm feeling sorry for some PET candidates at the moment. Luckily, not any from my school.

I was invigilating the PET exam at the weekend and was very disappointed to see how unfamiliar they were with the format of the exam. Their level of English wasn't a problem. They simply had never seen a PET exam paper before.

Some of their questions:

How do you spell accessories? (Don't they know I can't help??)

Is it a problem if I write more words than this?

What do I write in this part?

Can I write on the exam paper?

What do I do here?!

What is it that makes teachers care so little about their students? Teachers who go through the motions in the classroom but never stop to check whether the students have actually aquired the necessary knowledge?