Week 7 & 8: My students reactions

As I have promised in my posts on Nicenet last week, I want to share with you my students' reactions to the blog and to the jeopardy.

Finally, at the beginning of this week, I was able to have my English classes in the IT lab. There were no problems at all, everything worked as planned.

First of all, I will tell you some words about the 9th graders and their blog. I have created a blog just for them, which I expanded and I enriched, adding a special link to the wiki, where they can find all the materials they need. If at the very beginning I was thinking about making it a space where they could find materials (for reading or listening), my initial plans changed and I made it interactive: accessing the wiki they have to work on a task every week. Their reaction was more than I had expected. In class they were very enthusiastic and interested in trying the blog and the wiki, and I saw they continue to access both of them from their computers at home. I was surprised even more to see that some of them brought their laptops in class, to be connected to these tools.

I was very curious to see my 12th graders' reaction to the jeopardy. Actually, last week I created two of them, based on grammar. As I considered the first one to be a little bit difficult for them (as it is based on metalanguage), I created another one, simpler this time: they are given the name of a verbal tense and they have to make up sentences. I tried it in class and I was delighted when their answers were sometimes identical or very similar to what I had imagined. I combined the two presentations and after having their answer on one verbal tense, I went to a slide from the fisrt jeopardy, where they were given the answer and they had to formulate a question. And we discussed in detail every single tense, we clarified some problems and everything was all right. I consider this a great revision exercise before the exam they will take next week.

Unfortunately, I couldn't take pictures as I was quite absent-minded and I left my camera at home... I promise next time I will be more attentive!