So over the next month and a half I will be doing three different Podcasting projects with the gr. 9 students at my school.
Pronunciation Practice with Tongue Twisters
The first one will be very simple, using Chirbit the students are going to practice their English pronunciation with Tongue Twisters! To start in class we did a Vocal Warm Up from this website. Then individually the students listened to the tongue twisters I read into Chirbit, and then they tried to mimic my pronunciation. They will then be given one week to practice at home and asked to record again so that they can actually hear their improvement!
To watch this project unfold go to Chirbit, my user name is Istable.
Complicated Dialogues
The second one will be a bit more complicated, we haven't decided what platform we are going to use yet. At the moment the students are on the theme...wait for it....can you guess it? A group of teenagers......RELATIONSHIPS! Crazy I know...anyways...what the students are expected to do is:
One group of students will be given a situation dealing with RELATIONSHIPS, and they then have to create a dialogue based on that. After that, they will record said dialogue which will then be posted on our class Moodle (really neat website where you can create your own online courses). The other students will then have a chance to respond to these recorded dialogues (their responses will be written), answer questions based on it, including comments about whether or not it was a realistic portrayal of the situation or not. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much of that one I can post here, but we shall see...
Book Report/Digital Library
And the last one will simply be an extra thing for the students...if they want to do it, earn some extra marks if they want. The students will have to read an English book of their choosing and then write and record their book reviews. I got this idea from another website for podcasting in the EFL classroom. The idea is to have a digital ''library'' of book reviews so that students can listen to other book reports from students their age and decide what book to read. Of course before they actually get into writing the book review we are going to listen to a book review made by either myself or my husband (muhahahah he doesn't know that yet!). Then as a class/group we would have to find out what book reviews should contain and then there will be some fun peer editing (with a checklist of what to look for, probably specific to german english learner's typical problems....), then some not so fun teacher editing and finally the recording! I am really excited about this one, I hope some students choose to do it, the idea of an online ''library'' like this just makes me happy!
