Genial.ly and speaking tasks

Hi everyone! 

This is a great presentation about India, using Genial.ly application.

First, we have chosen the topics we have to work on, in this case, and as in the instructions you have posted, our presentations using Genial.ly will be related to English speaking countries.

               This year, I’m working with children from 3 to 10, so it will be difficult to develop this type of activities using this tool. Thus, I’m going to prepare this task for children from the 3^rd cycle (in a hypothetical case). We will give children a checklist to verify all the process.

1.      Establish the topic (English Speaking Countries)

2.      Establish the groups: I use Class Dojo tool.

3.      Before we start using Genial.ly, we need to set up the information and facts we want to present (brainstorming) in the whiteboard, set the pages and take a look at the structures we need to use. In this stage we need to guide students, because they’re not autonomous enough.

4.      We introduce students to Genial.ly tool, showing the main tabs in the website, we use “presentation” templates.

5.      Students select the country for the presentation (in groups).

6.      Students start surfing the internet to find the information they need (sometimes the research will be in Spanish) and a picture for each content.

7.      Students start preparing the presentation, they select the best template and they change it as they wish.

8.      The teacher will be helping them in all the stages of the task. At this point, we are going to give a feedback about their progress (using a checklist) and taking notes. (draft)

9.      Before they present their work to the class, we will check once again the final product.

10.   They have to read and prepare the presentation.

11.   Finally, they present the product to the class.

This type of tasks would last 4 lessons (3 lessons for preparing the presentation, and 1 to perform the task). These tasks, in my opinion, would be very motivating, although it would generate some difficulties in their development.

This year, I’m using Class Dojo in my lessons, so I usually use the group generator to establish grouping. However, we can distribute students bearing in mind the difficulties they’re going to find along the tasks and autonomy.

We are going to use checklists to control the progress of the task, and cheat sheets or tip sheets to remember some of the procedures we have to develop: How to search for information in the internet, how to save pictures in our folders, how to copy and paste information…

In conclusion, I find this tool very interesting and motivating, however it will be more useful in the Secondary Education, where students have the minimum contents to develop this task in an autonomous way. Using this tool, students get a great final product, developing oral and written skills, moreover, they will improve all the key competences we have to reach in this stage.

See you!

Teacher Carmen María