I´d like to share a project Camila Sousa and I have started with our Basic 1 students. As you all know, basic 1 students know nearly nothing and can hardly communicate in English. After a month of classes, we set up a Pownce account and helped each of our sts to do the same. It´s supposed to be a closed group where students communicate with their classmates and their teacher.
Each week, they´re supposed to follow a writing task after having received a model from their teacher. Our objective is to have sts start writing in English for real communication since the beginning of the course, starting off with very simple texts and hopefully by the end of the semester they´ll be writing more complex ones. We´ve discovered that students are more open to using internet for learning English when it is proposed at the beginning of the course, the enthusiasm is super. The picture above brings some example texts written by my sts during the first week of the Pownce experience.
Oh, the weekly tasks will cover structure and vocabulary students have learned that week.
What I´ve observed so far is that everyone is reading what all students are posting, they are learning from each other´s texts. They´ve been daring to use structure they haven´t seen in class yet and have been interacting not only with me (their teacher) but with each other.
