Week 5 reflexion! Project Based Learning in an "English V Memory Book"

Hello everyone once again. Here I am writing about how interesting this week was and how successful this online training has become. PBL is an important strategy where our students can develop more than one skill, where they can discover that the teaching-learning process is beyond the classroom. A PBL can be done outdoors, too. It helps students to feel autonomous and see that they do not depend on teachers to do everything they want, learn and create to.

Based on what a PBL is and according to Susan Gaer, I took a very nice example for all of you. This is my “English V Memory Book” that my teacher “Luisa Cristina” and group of classmates did in the fifth semester at the university four years ago. The idea of creating the book was to compile all the term indoor and outdoor activities such as: Own dramatic stories, a native speaker presentation, review essays, today´s news, answers to legal cases, fairy tales own versions, unit previewing and an activity back to 60´s, 70´s and 80´s. During the semester, all of us did a great job and everybody wrote funny dramatic stories and fairy tales. “Back to the 60´s, 70´s and 80´s” was A field trip in an occasion when students go somewhere outside the University to learn about a particular subject, and one of these was organized as one creative and original activity for English V students. So, on May 9^th, 2006 the class of Professor Luisa Cristina Alvarez had the opportunity to go to “Monte Libano Club”, wear costumes and share with a native speaker, in order to improve their knowledge of the language. The trip was based on the 60´s, 70´s and 80´s with the purpose of getting “a touch” from those decades and learns about them.

For the book creation, we needed an organizing tasks group, and editing group, a production crew, a designing group and a general coordinator. All the students had to participate and we developed more than four skills. I really feel blessed for having this activity and many others in my life. We also changed the lyrics of “Hips don´t lie” one of Shakira´s song (a Colombian singer) and created a new one for our professor.  It was really funny.

To conclude, I give you my example in order to compare this memory book with Project Based Learning. The results? Well, everybody learnt more than simple class knowledge. All of us communicated with that native speaker and could create a book of more than 50 pages from our own term work. It was baptized through a very nice ceremony in class and it is now part of the university English Library.

Note: I have the “English V memory book” PowerPoint presentation, I´ll try to load it in my authorstream site. Register yourself in this web page for downloading this presentation. Here I will show you some pictures.

Thanks a lot. I hope you like it and I feel very happy to share this important experience. !!

 ENGLISH V MEMORY BOOK

EDITING GROUP

PROFESSOR LUISA CRISTINA IN THE BAPTISIM OF THE BOOK

BOOK BAPTIZED

GUEST SPEAKER IN THE FIELD TRIP

MY FRIENDS AND I WEARING THE COSTUMES