A didactic sequence including Web 2.0 resources

Hello everybody! Lately, a couple of peers and me have been working on the last PW of the year that is about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. What we had to do was to create a didactic sequence, that is to say a complete class, around a topic and a grammatical item, employing one of them and then asking our students to create something also using this kind of tools.

As our job was to introduce countable and uncountable nouns used with food we decided to create a video using a very simple programme called Windows Movie Maker. It is about an apple pie recipe and in that way we began our lesson.

Then, we planned to do a brainstorming asking our students other foods or ingredients they know, and while we wrote them on the blackboard under two headlines: countable and uncountable. Another very interesting resource we included in the lesson was wordles. They are word clouds that you can make on this page http://www.wordle.net/. If you are a creative teacher you can find a thousand ways of using them. In our case, we would ask pupils to divide into groups and to create a recipe with the ingredients they could find in the word cloud, no matter how crazy it is!

After a couple of quite traditional listening activities for introducing there is /are and some quantifiers, we would ask our students to create their own recipe in the format of a video of any  food they like and then share it on Youtube in order for them to experiment with Web 2.0 tools.  This is just one example of what you can do with these technologies in the classroom as they are very versatile. Hope this sequence inspires many more and better lesson plans!