Suggestions To Ham to Improve His School Life - Apptivity

App - SocketPuppet

Learning Goal: Engage students into problem-solving situation, in which they are supposed to use the target language from the lesson to help solve “Ham’s problems”. By the end of this class, students will be able to use have to + verb to talk about obligations.

Procedures

Stage 1: contextualizing

• Show students a PPT slide which contains pictures of Ham, a teenage boy. (PPT slide attached) Tell them Ham has a problem that you’ll tell them about soon.

• Give them some time to think about the pictures while you forward the illustrations on the slides.

• Ask them to talk to a partner and say what happened in the story. Give them some time and elicit possible answers.

• After eliciting, tell the “real story” (an adaptation of a story in the book The Art of Changing the Brain). Since he was young, Ham has liked to watch educational programs on TV. His parents, both of them teachers, valued learning. However, he struggled in class and his grades were poor. He was very inactive in class. His grades got worse and worse until he finally dropped out of school. Now, he is a mechanic in SIA.  He has realized he needs and wants something better for his life.

Dani Lyra - Ham's Story-1-1

More PowerPoint presentations from Daniela

Story from The Art of Changing the Brain

James E. Zull

• Tell students they need to help Ham go back to school. To do so, they have to come up with sentences using have to and don’t have to, and solutions on how to improve Ham’s school life and attitude towards school.
• Teacher writes on the board 3 or 4 examples provided by students to be used as a model.

Stage 2: hands-on

• Teacher tells students they will record a dialogue in Socket Puppet app. Show them a sample.
• Deliver instructions and check understanding. Project socket Puppet and go over  features in  the app. Hand iPads out.
• Have students open the iPads and start working. (Teacher monitors)

• Students watch some of the videos and select the best or most common suggestions.
• Connecting:
  Students email their work to their parents and to the teacher to let them know they’re able to solve problems from everyday life. The final digital production is often very funny because the app reproduces voices at a different tone, so students and parents might have lots of fun watching the videos. They will surely know that at Thomas we have fun studying!
  
  
  
  

Movie Activity to Raise Learning Awareness

One of the great challenges of teaching online is the effort tutors have to make to humanize connections to reach and inspire the person on the other side of the computer screen. In my experience, students who take online courses need to be told that the course is not just the content on the LMS, and that there is a teacher who cares and wants to interact with them. I am lucky because at Casa Thomas Jefferson we are always inspired by Carla Arena to keep changing gears and finding ways to be inspired, for the attitude of the educator has a great impact in the online learning environment. My face to face students like movies, and need to be told about learning strategies, so I can assume that my online ones do too, right? Here goes an activity to raise learning strategies awareness for my clicks away students.

Learning A Language on Prezi