EFL Ideas
I’ve been tossing around a few ideas for next year’s EFL classes:
A Weekly Podcast: I just listened to Dave Winer’s Nov. 1st podcast this morning as he rambled on about this and that and I realized that it would valuable to produce a short 10-15 min weekly broadcast designed specifically for my students; one in which I could speak naturally about extensions on the various themes and topics covered in class while introducing relevant phrases and recycling vocabulary, not to mention current events, music, and movies. Not only could I present a link to the Mp3 file on the web, but I could also email it to their cell phones if they so wished. Now, if I only had an iPod…
Moblog/Flickr: Themed Photo Writing - I started thinking about this after reading one of Rudolf’s posts several weeks ago. Students could come up with a list of themes relevant to their lives, say ‘love’, ’stress’, ‘relaxation’, ‘anger’, etc., and then be asked to capture these themes with photos, share them on a blog, and then write and comment on them. Also, the same photos could be uploaded to Flickr and tagged, so that students could find other people from around the world who have taken similar photos on the same theme and start some kind of discussion. Since almost all of my students have phones with cameras, this could be a fun way to learn the language. It might work well in a poetry class, too.
Wiki Collaborative Projects: Students form groups of four to six at the beginning of the term, choose a topic that they want to learn more about, and them embark upon a semester-long research project to produce an online document, complete with photos and links to other resources, educating the public about their chosen topic. For EFL classes, it would be of benefit for the students to choose a topic related to a specific aspect their native culture, so that people from abroad could learn something new. Another alternative is to have them create collaborative short stories that either express themes or original ideas. Not only could the authenticity of such projects motivate students to express their ideas well in the target language, but it would also expose them to the resources available on the internet and teach them how they can contribute to the knowledge available. Furthermore, the collaboration teaches them important social skills of negotiation and cooperation.