1. The Incorporation of ICTs into Task-Based
Language Learning
Appendix 4 -Filed notes
19th October 2010 – VISIT TO AN ART INTEGRATED SCHOOL
A small community school
The school is called Baden Elementary School
and is in a rural area mainly attended by children
of farmers and people who have moved to this
area looking for the peace and tranquility that
nature offers. Stacy, our PDS Coordinator
picked us up at 8.00 and by 9.00 we were
already at the entrance of the school just when
the school buses were starting to flood the
parking area.
At the main door we met the school principal, a very young woman who was
standing greeting each of the kids who was came by name. It is a small school
of 250 students which courses from pre-kindergarten (4 years old) through 6th
Grade.
Art makes a difference
There are several features that i could
state make the difference at Baden
Elementary School. One of them and
maybe the most important is that the
school integrates ART: dance, music,
visual arts and theater to the different
curricular areas in a cross-curricular
proposal, i.e. all the contents that the state curricula states as compulsory are
reviewed from the point of view of art. Every 15 days the school receives the
visit of art teacher who works collaboratively sharing planning meetings with all
teams of school teachers where exchange ideas on how to bring art into the
sciences, mathematics, geography etc. As result, touring along the school
hallways and rooms is like walking through an art gallery, where you can
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2. appreciate posters, sketches, collages, graphs created with different material
and techniques.
Big gym balls
Special features if any? I tell you this: the
older kids sit on big gym rubber balls. The
director told us that students are kept
swaying gently, without disturbing others
downloading some energy but also helps
to focus on the task.
Collaborative planning
The school also has collaborative planning proposal and were present in one of
in these meetings. Every Wednesday in the module free of teachers, teachers
meet to plan for different areas-Social Science, Natural Sciences, Mathematics,
Language and Reading, to try to build projects that allow unified design less
fragmented, taking into account the recommendations and contributions that
made the expert in arts education. In the staff room there are giant balls to
decide to take advantage and do a little exercise while correcting and plans
The little ones
I watched 4 kindergarten classes in the computer room, a delight! Once the
teachers log into the sites, the children work directly from the web:
http://www.starfall.com/ and http://www.sesamestreet.org/. They were handed in
headphones which they keep in a zip lock bag labeled with their names and
they connected them on they own and proceeded playing, listening to stories,
repeating the letters of the alphabet and some rhymes etc. They looked quite
confident with the keyboard and mouse As the activities were not directed by
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3. teachers, the young students moved along the three or four activities as they
wished and once they had their headphones on, I could see they submerged
completely in their own world.
18th October 2010 – FIRST VISIT TO BLAIR HIGH SCHOOL
Expectations
After getting to know about an English
Language and Arts teacher at Blair who might
be using a blog with her students came to my
ears, I didn´t stop asking for connections so as
to be able to meet her.
Stacy is the PDS coordinator who drives the
Science people in the group to Blair every
Monday and Wednesday, and she was the
person I contacted to make the necessary
arrangement.
We arrived to school at 6,30, signed in as visitor and met the English
department coordinator who assigned me four visits to different groups from
which I could later choose one to stick to for the rest of the semester or continue
watching diverse classes as well.
Ms Conley´s class
I started with Ms Coney English class with 9th year. She has a small class of 15
students siting in a semicircular arrangement some individually and some in
pairs, but always facing the front of the classroom. The
teacher starts her day greeting students after a week
of absence and explains all the agenda to them.
They start working individually on the edition of a
paragraph she gives them in paper and after some
minutes, she corrects in white board (Promethean).
Students come to the front, in turns, and circle or
underline the mistakes and corrects them. After the
third student has come to the board, the teacher continues with the corrections
herself until the end of the paragraph.
In the second moment of the class students work with a printed word building
graphs, and work simultaneously in the interactive board completing a diagram
with: the meaning of the word, part of speech, synonyms, related words and
finally they build a sentence with the new words which had been taken from the
story they are reading: “Of Mice and Men”.
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4. In the third moment of the class, the teacher reminds students they had stopped
reading in chapter three so they’ll keep on watching the moving from that scene.
In the same smart board they had been working, she projects the film, which
most students follow silently and showing great interest. Once the scenes
projection finished, teacher announced that they had 20 minutes left to move to
the computer lab and make a journal entry on the topic she had posted in her
blog.
The forth and last moment of the class period was very interesting indeed; we
all moved to the computer lab where students hurriedly sat in different
computers which a placed in groups of 6 in round tables, Ms Coney told them to
log in their blogs if they remembered their Google account, or to type in word
and print them if they didn´t. She later explained to me that they had only
opened the goggle a month ago so some of the students’ don´t remember their
usernames or passwords.
While students were typing their postings, she explained to me her objective in
having students open their blogs, was to give them an opportunity to express in
a more informal context their opinion or feelings towards the novel they were
reading. She also assigned each student two other classmates’ blogs to follow
and made comments on them. I haven´t yet thought of incorporating blogs into
my classes with this use, but I find the idea extremely viable and interesting.
Ms Conley has also created
her own blog, where she
posts the assignments,
announcement to the class,
questions to be answered
later by students in their
own blogs. In her blog she
also has the links to all her
40students, so from there
she can see how students
are dealing with their postings.
When the class was over students were already finishing the work, we
exchanged emails with Ms Conley and she even talked about the idea of
starting an online exchange project of some kind when I come back to
Argentina.
Ms Edwards ‘class
I moved into Ms Edwards classroom, who showed great interest when I
mentioned the Fulbright program and I promised to send her the information for
this year’s application. She told me she had been is Spain last year and that
she had written a traveler´s blog in that occasion and she had though it would
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5. be a good idea to start training her students in the journal style, encouraging
them to write for the pleasure of doing it, fostering the enjoyment of expressing
feelings, discussing and commenting in writing.
She seems to have a respectful but friendly relationship with students and jokes
and share funny comments with them, as well. The atmosphere in the
classroom in not very similar to what I have seen during my previous school
visits, there is a welcoming, casual learning atmosphere around and students
respond likewise to teachers questions. She plays background music while her
students are working and if they guess title, singer or nationality, they get a
price! As the topic of the reading they are doing is slave she has chosen, for her
different classes, music from countries related to the theme, today it was
Nigerian music for example.
The moment I had been waiting for eventually came and students started with
their blog´s presentations. Ms Edwards has assigned three students who are
showing their blogs to the whole class and justifying, explaining or supporting
the arguments they had stated in their blogs entries. The three of them sounded
very confident and secure in their positions and had established deep
relationships between the storyline, the characters and the topic etc. I hope to
continue learning from these two enthusiastic young teachers who have
decided to take a step forward and get on blogging adventure with their
students.
Spirit of the school
As soon as I entered the school I
could feel the Blair High School has
a spirit. Students walk around the
library, the hallways and the
cafeteria, talking gently, having fun
and talking to friends. They feel at
home, you can see it in their
attitude and actions. There are
around 3,000 students in this
school, which has the design of a
small village with a Boulevard,
three main streets in each floor and several Drives or Roads leading across the
classrooms. The walls are painted in bright colors and everything is clean and in
good condition. As the school hasn´t got a dress code, like most schools, teens
wearing what they want give the view a colorful touch. Very serious work is
done in a friendly atmosphere, and that combination is definitely one that fosters
a good relationship between learning and enjoying.
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