Be Innovative Without Going Crazy

        Sometimes teachers believe that being innovative in the classroom involves a lot of materials’ preparation and it is extremely time consuming. This might be true on some occasions, but there are ways to include elements to make it more appealing for the students without having to spend a lot of time on it. 

      Recently, we found ourselves in the task of making a short didactic sequence in which technology should be present. We planned it for a 4^th year of secondary school in which we were supposed to teach Past Simple.  Taking into consideration that in the majority of Argentina’s schools it’s quite difficult to have an Internet connection, we decided to make an activity that doesn’t require it. In our country, the majority of students have netbooks provided by the government, which is an excellent resource not to be left aside. So we thought of an activity that could include the netbooks without necessarily requiring internet connection in the classroom.  Our proposal then, was to introduce the Past Simple tense to the students and giving them the task of thinking (and later writing) about a fictitious holiday of a celebrity. We introduced this project showing the students a short video describing the last holiday of Lady Gaga. The video shows some images and a short text in Past Simple under each picture. At this point, the most important thing is to keep the celebrity’s identity in secret, so students will guess who the celebrity is by reading the subtitles and watching the images. You can take a look at our video below!

       This video shows exactly what we want students to make later and also, we used it for showing them some specific points as regards grammar and vocabulary. The making of this video only took us 15 minutes, not more than that, and it helped us both: to introduce the topic and the final task and to guide students how to produce their own videos.
      Taking into account the T- PACK reflections, we decided to make the video using Windows Movie Maker. We selected this video editor because it has all the tools we needed, it fits perfectly with the final task and it is very simple to use. Besides, most of students have it and it doesn’t require an Internet connection.

During this lesson, students worked in groups and then shared their videos to the rest of their classmates who had to guess who the celebrities in each video were.

In terms of SAMR, by replacing the traditional use of pen and paper with the new technology, we are gaining the opportunity to introduce innovative strategies in the classroom, and at the same time we are encouraging students to learn and to participate in their own learning in a different way. As you can see, just with a short video we are providing the students with the opportunity of being creative, learn in a more motivating and entertaining way and also playing a guessing game. It’s not necessary to spend a lot of time to be innovative and allow students to be engaged as well.

Here you’ll find information about Windows Movie Maker and also you’ll be able to download it: http://windows.microsoft.com/es-ar/windows-live/movie-maker