Mobile Activity: Secret SMS

 

Is it possible to have students use their cell phones in class to learn languages even with no internet connection? Oh, yes, IT IS.

Yesterday afternoon, during a workshop I presented to Cultura Inglesa Uberlândia teachers, Ana Cláudia, a colleague of mine, shared a very creative activity she has tried with her students. I'll call it Secret SMS.

These are the steps we followed:

1. Ana Claúdia asked each teacher/student present for their cell phone numbers and wrote them on a whiteboard we had in class.

2. Then, she asked us to choose one of the numbers on the board to write a text message to. The message should include 2 things we did last weekend.

3. Once everyone had written the message, she gave an OK for us to send it.

4. The student who got more messages was the winner and got a candy.

5. She then explained that in class, she elicited the messages students got on their cells and wrote them on the board calling attention to verbs in the past.

VARIATION 1:

- As we don't know who sent us the message, students could then stand up, mingle and try to find the sender of the message by asking questions such as:

"Did you go to the cinema last weekend?"  "Did you eat out last weekend?""

VARIATION 2:

- Instead of writing the phone numbers on the board, the teacher could ask students to write their names and cell phone number on a slip of paper. Then, after collecting all slips with phone #s, the teacher would hand one number to each student, making sure no one got their own number. Each student would send a message to the cell phone number they got (this way all students would get a message). Again, as a follow-up, students could mingle to try to discover the sender of the message.

VARIATION 3:

- The teacher would write his cell phone number on the board and ask students to write a message (with their names) to send to the teacher using specific vocabulary, structure or topic. When teacher says OK, they all send the message. The first message the teacher receives is the winner.

Any other ideas?

PROJECT: A memorable moment

Telling other people about memorable things that happened to us in the past, in my opinion, is one of the most challenging things to do when you're learning another language. Depending on what tense you use, the person listening to your story might not understand the sequence of events you're trying to tell.

I remember very clearly the first time I tried to tell a story to some American friends of mine at a slumber party and they kept asking me so many clarifying questions that I noticed I wasn't THAT successful in telling my story.

Last week, I presented the challenge for unit 1B which was  to record yourself talking about a memorable moment in your life.

First, I asked my students to tell each other about something funny that happened to them in the past.
Then, I asked them what verb tenses they had used and it was no surprise that most of them had used ONLY the Simple Past. Well, it was clear we had to learn some more possibilities.

As some students were absent that day, I shared the GRAMMAR VIDEO CLASS below (a screencast created by me) with the whole class in our EDMODO group.

 

Then, I showed them my example recording and asked them to identify the verb tenses and the situations I talked about. After doing lots of exercises and practicing in class, at the end of the third lesson it was their turn to make their recordings.

These are some of the recordings they produced:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/1259269-my-audioboo

listen to ‘My audioboo’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘A nice surprise party’ on Audioboo

After listening to their various recordings, I wrote down the most common mistakes and brought to class so that we could discuss them.

For this specific project, the SUGGESTED TOOLS were:

• AUDIOBOO  http://audioboo.fm/
• VOCAROO http://vocaroo.com/
• CROAK.IT http://croak.it/ 

Revising GRAMMAR with screencast

Inspired by Russell Stannard's suggestion in the video shared previously in this blog, today I created a little screencast for my Intermediate students after having worked with Past Tenses. The aim is to give my students the chance to hear the explanation as many times they see fit.

Grammar Activity - Past tenses

I used this activity last week to revise Past tenses: Past Simple, Past Continuous and Past Perfect.

• I cut the hand-out into slips and gave to each st. Then, students watched the video and had to complete the sentences using one of the Past tenses mentioned. I then revised the usages of each tense.

IA 1b Grammar Activity Simpsons

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