Web 2.0 projects in Santafesinian schools.

As its title indicates, this blog was created as a learning journal in one of the subjects in my teacher training programme – ECO: Materials design. It was in this same area that my classmates and I were asked to plan a didactic sequence for a specific imaginary course including one or more Web 2.0 resource(s) and present a model of the final outcome we would get from our students. My group and I were assigned to teach irregular verbs in the past simple. We had total freedom as regards which 2.0 programme to use, and after having fun trying different options we decided to work with Storybird.

Storybird is a visual storytelling community where you can read other authors’ stories and create your own using a wide variety of artworks from different artists. What’s more, you can choose between a picture book, with short texts and big pictures, poetry, or longform, which is more similar to a whole book. We found this page a really interesting resource for students to use their creativity and let their imagination run wild, and we planned a lesson around the topic ‘the ancient world’. You can see a model of the final outcome here; in this case it is an Egyptian legend.

The benefits of web 2.0 have been widely discussed in this blog. Now, when it comes to Santafesinian schools, to what extent can we profit from them? Even though most of the schools have a computer lab, the machines are insufficient for the number of students. Learners from other institutions have netbooks provided by ‘Conectar Igualdad’ but the building doesn’t have internet connection. This shows that most of the proposed projects or didactic sequences couldn’t be carried out at most of the schools in this province.

However, the majority of the students do have internet connection and computers at home, and if they don’t, they have smartphones with access to the Internet. What we can do is to use our lessons to teach them how to use certain resources and how to select appropriate and reliable information as well as teaching the linguistic contents. Once the students are in their houses they can advance in the project and share the outcomes in social networks or other means. In that way we will be combining face to face with online teaching, i.e., blending learning. This will be the main topic of my next post.