The Incorporation of ICTs into Task-Based Language Learning

Appendix 4 -Filed notes

19th October 2010 – VISIT TO AN ART INTEGRATED SCHOOL

A small community school

The school is called Baden Elementary School and is in a rural area mainly attended by children of farmers and people who have moved to this area looking for the peace and tranquility that nature offers. Stacy, our PDS Coordinator picked us up at 8.00 and by 9.00 we were already at the entrance of the school just when the school buses were starting to flood the parking area.

At the main door we met the school principal, a very young woman who was standing greeting each of the kids who was came by name. It is a small school of 250 students which courses from pre-kindergarten (4 years old) through 6th Grade.

Art makes a difference

There are several features that i could state make the difference at Baden Elementary School. One of them and maybe the most important is that the school integrates ART: dance, music, visual arts and theater to the different curricular areas in a cross-curricular

proposal, i.e. all the contents that the state curricula states as compulsory are reviewed from the point of view of art. Every 15 days the school receives the visit of art teacher who works collaboratively sharing planning meetings with all teams of school teachers where exchange ideas on how to bring art into the sciences, mathematics, geography etc. As result, touring along the school hallways and rooms is like walking through an art gallery, where you can

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appreciate posters, sketches, collages, graphs created with different material and techniques.

Big gym balls

Special features if any? I tell you this: the older kids sit on big gym rubber balls. The director told us that students are kept swaying gently, without disturbing others downloading some energy but also helps to focus on the task.

Collaborative planningThe school also has collaborative planning proposal and were present in one of in these meetings. Every Wednesday in the module free of teachers, teachers meet to plan for different areas-Social Science, Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Language and Reading, to try to build projects that allow unified design less fragmented, taking into account the recommendations and contributions that made the expert in arts education. In the staff room there are giant balls to decide to take advantage and do a little exercise while correcting and plans

The little ones

I watched 4 kindergarten classes in the computer room, a delight! Once the teachers log into the sites, the children work directly from the web:

http://www.starfall.com/ and http://www.sesamestreet.org/. They were handed in headphones which they keep in a zip lock bag labeled with their names and

they connected them on they own and proceeded playing, listening to stories, repeating the letters of the alphabet and some rhymes etc. They looked quite

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confident with the keyboard and mouse As the activities were not directed by teachers, the young students moved along the three or four activities as they wished and once they had their headphones on, I could see they submerged completely in their own world.

18th October 2010 – FIRST VISIT TO BLAIR HIGH SCHOOL

Expectations

After getting to know about an English Language and Arts teacher at Blair who might be using a blog with her students came to my ears, I didn´t stop asking for connections so as to be able to meet her.

Stacy is the PDS coordinator who drives the Science people in the group to Blair every Monday and Wednesday, and she was the person I contacted to make the necessary arrangement.

We arrived to school at 6,30, signed in as visitor and met the English department coordinator who assigned me four visits to different groups from which I could later choose one to stick to for the rest of the semester or continue watching diverse classes as well.

Ms Conley´s class

I started with Ms Coney English class with 9th year. She has a small class of 15 students siting in a semicircular arrangement some individually and some in

pairs, but always facing the front of the classroom. The teacher starts her day greeting students after a week of absence and explains all the agenda to them.

They start working individually on the edition of a paragraph she gives them in paper and after some minutes, she corrects in white board (Promethean). Students come to the front, in turns, and circle or underline the mistakes and corrects them. After the

third student has come to the board, the teacher continues with the corrections herself until the end of the paragraph.

In the second moment of the class students work with a printed word building graphs, and work simultaneously in the interactive board completing a diagram with: the meaning of the word, part of speech, synonyms, related words and

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finally they build a sentence with the new words which had been taken from the story they are reading: “Of Mice and Men”.

In the third moment of the class, the teacher reminds students they had stopped reading in chapter three so they’ll keep on watching the moving from that scene. In the same smart board they had been working, she projects the film, which most students follow silently and showing great interest. Once the scenes projection finished, teacher announced that they had 20 minutes left to move to the computer lab and make a journal entry on the topic she had posted in her blog.

The forth and last moment of the class period was very interesting indeed; we all moved to the computer lab where students hurriedly sat in different computers which a placed in groups of 6 in round tables, Ms Coney told them to log in their blogs if they remembered their Google account, or to type in word and print them if they didn´t. She later explained to me that they had only opened the goggle a month ago so some of the students’ don´t remember their usernames or passwords.

While students were typing their postings, she explained to me her objective in having students open their blogs, was to give them an opportunity to express in a more informal context their opinion or feelings towards the novel they were reading. She also assigned each student two other classmates’ blogs to follow and made comments on them. I haven´t yet thought of incorporating blogs into my classes with this use, but I find the idea extremely viable and interesting.

Ms Conley has also created her own blog, where she posts the assignments, announcement to the class, questions to be answered later by students in their own blogs. In her blog she also has the links to all her 40students, so from there she can see how students

are dealing with their postings.

When the class was over students were already finishing the work, we exchanged emails with Ms Conley and she even talked about the idea of starting an online exchange project of some kind when I come back to Argentina.

Ms Edwards ‘class

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I moved into Ms Edwards classroom, who showed great interest when I mentioned the Fulbright program and I promised to send her the information for this year’s application. She told me she had been is Spain last year and that she had written a traveler´s blog in that occasion and she had though it would be a good idea to start training her students in the journal style, encouraging them to write for the pleasure of doing it, fostering the enjoyment of expressing feelings, discussing and commenting in writing.

She seems to have a respectful but friendly relationship with students and jokes and share funny comments with them, as well. The atmosphere in the classroom in not very similar to what I have seen during my previous school visits, there is a welcoming, casual learning atmosphere around and students respond likewise to teachers questions. She plays background music while her students are working and if they guess title, singer or nationality, they get a price! As the topic of the reading they are doing is slave she has chosen, for her different classes, music from countries related to the theme, today it was Nigerian music for example.

The moment I had been waiting for eventually came and students started with their blog´s presentations. Ms Edwards has assigned three students who are showing their blogs to the whole class and justifying, explaining or supporting the arguments they had stated in their blogs entries. The three of them sounded very confident and secure in their positions and had established deep relationships between the storyline, the characters and the topic etc. I hope to continue learning from these two enthusiastic young teachers who have decided to take a step forward and get on blogging adventure with their students.

Spirit of the school

As soon as I entered the school I could feel the Blair High School has a spirit. Students walk around the library, the hallways and the cafeteria, talking gently, having fun and talking to friends. They feel at home, you can see it in their attitude and actions. There are around 3,000 students in this school, which has the design of a small village with a Boulevard, three main streets in each floor and several Drives or Roads leading across the classrooms. The walls are painted in bright colors and everything is clean and in good condition. As the school hasn´t got a dress code, like most schools, teens

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wearing what they want give the view a colorful touch. Very serious work is done in a friendly atmosphere, and that combination is definitely one that fosters a good relationship between learning and enjoying.

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