Overall objective: Become familiar with city lifestyles and transportation in Indonesia.
Write a very short story in target language.
Experiment and explore using prior knowledge.
I scaffolded this project by breaking it into three parts.
Bagian 1 - Peta
Learning Objective: Familiarisation with basic vocabulary.
REFLECTION
- Make it more explicit what was expected on their maps.
- Make this a short one-period assessment where students are expected to study - rather than a take-home assessment.
- Create more activities based on their maps, such as directions, etc.
- Integrate more kinaesthetic activities, such as this.
BAGIAN 2 - KEBUDAYAAN
Students write a comprehension quiz based on their essay.
Learning Objective: Gain background and cultural knowledge about cities in Indonesia.
REFLECTION
- Have students undertake this task before creating their map, so that they have a stronger concept of city life.
- Highlight similarities and differences in lifestyle of cities for intercultural learning.
- I would like to consider more ways for students to gain 'in-depth' knowledge (beneath the iceberg!) about their city, however I am unsure how to do this.
Bagian 3 - Choose Your Own Adventure task
Task: Students create a digital narrative using Keynote presentation. Inspired by "Choose Your Own Adventure" books - an interactive gamebook where the reader is able to participate and make choices in the story to influence the plot and final outcomes.
Pre-teaching:
Comprehension exercise. Answer the questions by exploring the sample CYOA site.
REFLECTION
- Comprehension questions difficult for most students, because of "flipping between" windows on computer. Print out questions in bigger font and questions about the "how" of the story would be useful for students to understand the structure of CYOA.
- Majority of student highly engaged and excited about "creative" element of their stories, however would often attempt very difficult language in order to complete the task, and eventually became frustrated.
- Weak students felt daunted by task even before starting - I needed to break down the task even more, and scaffold more. I quickly created a quick sample vocabulary list for them to create their story, which greatly assisted students in undertaking task. However, weaker students needed further scaffolding in how they were to produce their work.
- Students who had strong independent learning skills were excited, and felt very challenged. They felt they were able to learn alot of new vocabulary and language structures by undertaking a writing project. With some feedback, they drew connections in language patterns, focused on using simple language within their scope and explored new language items on their own. Their final product was of high calibre, and they were very task proud.
Sample of a very high ability work.
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