Students create a mini story with LIVE TYPING

I heard about Live Typing via Alex Francisco and decided to give it a try this week. We had just practised using past tenses to tell stories (S. Past, Past Cont., Past Perf. and Past Perf Cont.)

I divided the class into two groups. I asked a volunteer to come to the keyboard in class and type a story beginning with "One day I was ..." with the group's help. The student at the keyboard typed what the other members suggested up to a full stop. Then, it was the other group's turn to continue the story. I also told them I wanted them to try to use the 4 tenses we had studied in class.

As students typed, I could notice all students were really involved with the task, giving suggestions and laughing at the various suggested sentences. As soon as they had used the 4 tenses, I typed ENLIVEN and showed the recording of the whole process to them. Once again, all eyes were stuck to the e-board, re-reading what they had just created.

Some comments I heard:
"Cool, we should do this again."
"Wow, you can see the corrections happening."

This is the mini story which came up:

LiveTyping.com

These are other ways I'll try using LIVETYPING:

• To practise a certain grammar structure. I'd ask different students to rewrite a sentence with the same beginning. "Ex: Ïf I had a lot of money ...

LiveTyping.com

• To assign written homework. I'm going to ask students to write a paragraph about their dream holiday destination and send me the link, then I intend to publish their texts in a blog so that we can read the texts in class.
• In the last 10 minutes, I'll take students to the lab and ask them to write a comment about a topic related to the lesson we're studying. Then, as soon they finish that, they grab the code and publish it in our edmodo group for others to read.