Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts

Sunday, November 02, 2014

Google docs for synchronous or asynchronous collaboration


Most of us have used google docs to create and share documents with our peers. I myself have done that in several occasions. However, the mindset is always one so concerned with privacy that I had never hacked my google docs. I mean, I have always made them private and sharable with only the peers involved in a given project. That has changed after Carla Arena showed us that we could make it public and editable by anyone on the web.

Here are some screenshots to show you how you can do that. 





Once I discovered that (I mean, I kind of knew it could be done. I guess I was just concerned with privacy), I decided to try it out with my students. So, I went ahead and created an editable document for my 1B2 – English Access group. In that lesson we were working with describing people. What I did for this activity was to create a document with some pictures and some questions and fill in the blanks activities. In class I gave them a bit.do shortened url and  took them to the computer lab. They logged in and I asked them to work in twos assigning one page to each pair. Once a pair had worked on a page, I asked them to move to another page. They really liked it and I found it was a very effective way to teach and reinforce what they had learned.


Here is the doc http://bit.do/TUwy

Another activity I did that was fun was with my Teens 7. We were working on passive voice. So, I posted some pictures and wrote a model sentence with a passive voice. When we got to the computer lab, they accidentally deleted some of the images I had posted. That was good, because it gave the excuse to ask them to add their own images by copying and pasting from the web. It was really fun 
Here is the link http://bit.do/TUwm 

If you want to do it asynchronously, you can just give the link to students and they will do it from home. 
* I just removed permission to edit because I am publishing and I wanted to prevent unwanted changes to my students' original work. 

Friday, September 30, 2011

No homework today!!!



It is not that difficult to play the role of a nice teacher. Everybody knows that the word “homework” does not go with “thank you very much.” Students, however, think that homework is directly related to workbooks and that anything apart from that can cause them no harm. Here follows something that happened to me last week. My students, who had been talking about rules for two weeks, asked for “no homework.” They were really surprised and happy when I gave them a positive answer. There was just a little condition: they had to go to http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/teens6 and post one of the rules they had at home and make a comment about it. Take a look at the result. Isn’t it homework? They don’t think so! =D
By Fábio Ferreira