I am currently taking a district-level, learning management system professional development, and one of our assignments dealt with creating a digital lesson demonstrating concept attainment/application/prediction (yes, very Educationese terms) which would use with our students. Rather than invent and learn a new web app tool, I decided to revise/adapt an already existing strategy to a digital setting: Word Clouds.
I am introducing a new reading with students, so I created a word cloud for students involving words which would be in this passage (see here for how to create a word cloud using MS Word). Based on the word cloud, students are to predict what they think will happen in the story which they will be reading soon.
In creating the word cloud, I found using Dark City color format was easier for students to distinguish the words. I also set the layout to Horizontal.
Directions
On a Google Form, insert your word cloud as an image/picture.
The directions are simple: ONLY using the words from the word cloud, write your FOUR sentences in ENGLISH below. Be sure to number your sentences.
Why respond in English and not in the target language? Because this is a prediction activity using vocabulary, I need for them to respond in English to demonstrate comprehension of those words. If I asked them to respond purely in the target language, I would get students who would put the Latin words together to form a sentence, but if the sentence were not to make any sense, I would not know why: did they just throw Latin words together just to complete the assignment? Did they not understand the meaning of a particular word which then impedes my comprehension of what they wrote? What if students just created a sentence which was all nouns or all verbs? By having them respond in English, I can at least tell that students are demonstrating comprehension of the given vocabulary words.
Observations
This was a very easy digital assignment for students to complete, but it still involved some degree of higher-level thinking, as it was dealing with prediction based on given information.
This was a very easy digital assignment for me to create. Probably creating the word cloud took the most time.
I enjoyed reading student responses. Many students tried to predict the entire story, but most just wrote four random sentences (which is perfectly okay!).
Students told me that they liked the assignment, because it was short!
Movie Talks are becoming more and more a staple of CI strategies which teachers are implementing in their classrooms. The premise is simple: take a very short movie or a clip from a movie (preferably one with little or no dialogue) and when showing it to students, pause it at certain points to deliver understandable messages to students (circling, discussing what is going on). Even though I had seen presentations on Movie Talks at various conferences, I deliberately held off on doing them, because quite honestly, they looked very difficult to facilitate. In addition, a Movie Talk seemed like it would take A LOT of planning, because not only would I have to find a short movie to fit my particular lesson needs, but I would also have to script it for places to pause and to ask questions/discuss. To me, it just appeared WAY too much effort for the result. However, at last summer's NTPRS conference, I got the chance to experience a Movie Talk myself as a student in a session where Alina Filepescu was teaching Romanian. She seamlessly presented a Movie Talk to us in very comprehensible Romanian and had us interacting with the movie short in the target language. More importantly though, because the movie short which she was using was incredibly compelling, I was so focused on movie short that Romanian simply was the vehicle to learn what happened next, so the learning became subconscious. As a result, this past school year, I did a few Movie Talks. Yes, I struggled with them, but I found that students really enjoyed them and that they did lead to language acquisition. As a result, I will continue to implement Movie Talks. Miriam Patrick has written up a great set of directions for implementing a Movie Talk on her blog Pomegranate Beginnings. With her permission, here is how she prepares a Movie Talk.
Set Up
Choose your video.
I chose films based on, primarily, the vocabulary I was working with. I can
edit the grammar to be whatever I want for whatever level I want, but the
vocabulary needs to be sheltered, so this was key. For this particular unit, I
was focusing on words like polypus (octopus), transcendit (climb across), and
tam/adeo/tantus...ut... (he was so.... that...). YouTube has a wide variety of
videos. All one has to do is search for Pixar Shorts, Disney Shorts, or movie
shorts.
Write Your Script.
You won't need it except for the first few times you use it, but it is good to
have it written down, especially since you will be pausing the video in key
spots. I found this to be, by far, the most time consuming of the project, but
even then, if you have chosen a video and know your end goals clearly, it did
not take more than a few minutes.
Set up support
activities. This is a great CI activity that you can use for one day or for
multiple days. You can use other activities like TPR and TPRS with this. After
we spent the first day going through this video, we then did it daily for a
while, but only once, and paired with embedded readings, PQA, and TPRS.
(taken from the blog Pomegranate Beginnings)
Back to me now. Procedure 1) Using your script, show the video but stop at the times where you wish to talk about is in the screen. 2) Circle, and ask questions about what is on the screen. 3) If you wish, ask a responsible student to serve as the "Movie Talk pauser" - this student will need a copy of the script to know when to pause.
Movie Talks can be used in a couple different ways. One way is to preteach vocabulary (which is how Miriam describes in her directions). The following is a screencast of me demonstrating how to do a Movie Talk - I would not use a screencast to do with this students, but in this, you can see how I implement circling and PQAs in Movie Talk. I did this particular Movie Talk recently at the ACL Summer Institute as part of a presentation. The Movie Talk is not very long, but you will get the idea.
Movie Talk to Preteach Vocabulary
Movie Talk as a Predictor
You can also use movie shorts to get the class to predict what they will happen when you pause the movie. This takes a bit more language control though due to the output. Last summer at Rusticatio, Justin Slocum Bailey demonstrated how to do this. As a group, we all had whiteboards, and when he paused the video, he asked us what we thought happened next. Following that, we would share them in small groups and then he asked us for examples to share with the group as a whole. After that, he would unpause the movie, pause it again at a particular point and restart the process all over again. The following is an example of this activity with the same movie clip as above. Students would not have seen this video clip prior.
So consider doing a Movie Talk.Yes, they take A LOT of planning, but in the end, it is worth it. Resources
Movie Talk database - this is a MASSIVE searchable Google database started by Jason Fritze. As it is a collaborative document, new Movie Talks can be added.
Mike Coxon explaining and demonstrating how to do a Movie Talk
Alina Filepescu demonstrating a Movie Talk in Spanish
This is a pre-reading activity which I learned from a language arts teacher at my school and then saw Carol Gaab demonstrate at NTPRS last summer. For this, you will need the Wordle website and a reading which you plan to introduce . If you are not familiar with Wordle, it is a website which will take a reading passage and then based on word frequency, it will create a word cloud, showing which words are used more often than others - the bigger the size of the word, the more frequently the word is used.
This particular activity is something which you will want to do just prior to reading a story for the first time, because students will be predicting what they think the story will be about based on the words which they see. As a result, you as the teacher will have needed to preview any new vocabulary/language structures through other prereading activities.
Instructions
Cut/paste a 5-6 sentences from the reading onto the Wordle website.
Project the word cloud onto the board and based on the words in the word cloud, ask students to predict what they think the story is going to be about. I ask students to create sentences in Latin. This is why students need to know already the vocabulary/language structures in the story.
An example:
Observations
Students really do like to predict what they think they the story will be about.
Because students have predicted the plot of the story, they have a more vested interest in what they are reading, as they are mentally comparing their version with the actual story
After reading the story, I have actually had students say, "I like my version so much better than the real one." Many times, I will make a mental note of what they thought the plot to be and will write an alternate version of the story which incorporates their plot for them to read later.
