6.5- Interaction

 After having a look at my two mates’ blogs and reading the different activities they have carried out in their class, I was surprised by the activity that Lucia, in her blog (English Explorers - Link to her blog ), shares. The activity is accomplished by using TimeToast. I have already used this tool in one of the activities that we had to do in the course, but, I didn’t carry it out in the way Lucia shares she has done it.

Lucía used TimeToast as a help for the book that they read in class “The Gruffalo”. That caught my attention since we also have a reading time every week in our class, and sometimes, students find it boring and they get lost in the middle of the session. This is one of the reasons why when I read Lucia’s post I thought that it could be interesting for me to try to do the same with the next reading we had. In this case, the topic chosen was inventions since the text we are dealing with is related to this. We are collaborating with the history department so we have to investigate and read about history and inventions from 1400s onwards. 

The process I followed was more or less the same as Lucía but I skipped the part of getting familiarised with the tool since my students already knew how it worked. So, they were told that they had to include all the inventions mentioned in the reading ordered in the timeline. They were told to work in groups of 3. In class, they were also told to assess their mates’ timelines. Thus, we put into practice peer-assessment. 

 

One thing that I would change for next time is to do as Lucia did, allow them to choose the topic. Some of them didn’t enjoy working with inventions, but I think that this is difficult since it was the topic that we had to deal with, so nothing could be done to change it. Anyway, I think that using Time Toast only has benefits for them, since it helps them to get a broader perspective of the historic events that happened and the inventions that took place at that time. Furthermore, by working in groups, they work collaboratively and, also, by reading they put into practice their reading comprehension skills in the foreign language. I am going to attached a picture with an example of the result of the different timelines accomplished.



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