The starting point has emerged from Jesus Arbués, the CoSpaces Ambassador in Catalonia, who suggested me to use
the Cube somehow in the EFL classroom. Personally, I considered it to be a great
idea because I am very into new technologies and my students are even more
digital than I am. Therefore, I linked the Cube Merge with the unit I was
teaching about cinema and as a result, I asked my students to prepare a film
report using the Cube Merge. There is an article posted in the school’s website
about the first lesson of this project:
In order to elaborate the cinematographic cube, the
students prepared a Google Drive document first with the most relevant aspects,
for instance, title and film genre, plot, characters description and their
opinion. Then, once the text is corrected, the students transferred the
important information in each of the sides of the cube using CoSpaces. In fact,
Jesus came to school so as to offer a practical workshop on the web and students
really enjoyed it. It was very useful because students realised they could also
add text in English, in this case, as well as recording their own voice. Some of
my students were already familiar with CoBlocks because they had previously
worked with Scratch in 6th Primary, so it was not very difficult for them to
develop the given task.
Besides, the project aims at fostering students’ written
and speaking skills since at the end of the teaching sequence there is a
specific section where students present their own productions.
Once the teacher has generated the QR codes for each of the students’ cubes, these are posted in
the walls as if they were in a museum exhibition. At this point, students
explain their films and finally, assessment also takes place so as to obtain
feedback by means of specific rubrics.
Last but not least, this project has been
so engaging for our students that they have also prepared material for the Open
Days at Vilatzara’s High School, in particular, aimed at Primary students.
Here
you can see some of the material created by the students themselves:
For the time being, there are some photos available in the
website of our high school and after summer, the description of this project
will be published in a digital magazine from University of Barcelona.
Ester
Magrinyà
emagriny@xtec.cat
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