Creating a poster for the Earbud !! Task Based learning

Sometimes you are given the most basic of material in which to create lesson and this exactly what happened today. The CDU of the school had provided us with a simple video and reading about a piece of technology and as the “earbud pilot”. My initial reaction was horror !!! What are they trying to do ??? There are no questions no activities prepared what exactly are they wanting us to do ??? Don’t they realize that we already don’t have enough time as it is….

Then I decided to think outside the box after spending bit of time reading about Task based learning and the communicative teaching method I thought to myself what could be better than to make this into a task where students would have to use the prior knowledge to create something creative and interesting and hopefully a little fun.

Anyway the idea is as follows;

Firstly students will spend a little bit of time reading an article and watching about the pilot ear-bud after which they will then spend sometime working in pairs and research some pre-designed questions which will help them to generate ideas.

  1. What is the Pilot Earbud?
  2. What problems does it solve?
  3. What kind of technology does it use?
  4. What languages does it translate?
  5. How does it work?

Once they have researched the questions they will then need to use their creative juices to create an advertising video to promote the product using their iPads, iMovie and any other presentation tools.

As a task it utilizes numerous skills that are beneficial for the students. These include research, reading, listening, speaking and of course the mechanics of the language itself. But best of all students are required to utilize 21st century skills be creative and think outside the box.

Giving so much freedom to a class is always difficult but lets just see how things go