Monday, February 18, 2013

Technology & Innovation: A follow-up

Last week's lesson (okay, two weeks ago... last week I was off enjoying a ski vacation in fancy-pants Megeve) focused on using the futures and language of probability using a cool infographic grace à the BBC.

This week I was at a loss for what to do to follow up with this previous lesson, and then I got it. My professional adult ESL students here in France have been requesting the use of more articles and current events in our lessons, and on the front page of Yahoo! there was an article speculating on what Apple's next product would be.  Because the article uses a lot of useful adjectives and appears to pitch the concept of a wearable computer to mass market, I thought it would be appropriate to use it not only to continue last week's discussion about the future and what is or isn't possible, but also to go back to our lessons about pitches. Which idea convinced you? Which feature do you think is most useful? Do you agree/disagree? What is your opinion? A lot of interesting and thought-provoking conversation followed, pulling out a number of useful vocabulary words.

Then, to practice comparing and contrasting, we watched the Google glasses project video on Youtube. We compared the two ideas and practiced talking about which product we preferred, what the similarities and differences were, the risks and the danger, and our overall opinions about the future of smartphone technology.

Overall, I have to say that this lesson was the perfect transition after the previous lesson's infographic. I'm really happy with the participation I had and with the fluency of my students. These were pre-intermediate and intermediate level students but I plan on doing the exact same lesson with my upper-intermediate and advanced students in the days to come.

When I'm lesson planning, I always think about what I want my end result to be and what I want my students to be able to "do". I think about my lesson plans in segments of "can-do", ending with a skill that is immediately applicable to the needs of the learner. My next challenge for myself is "what to do next?"

Any ideas? How would you follow up these two lessons integrating current events, infographics, and videos?

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