Planning lessons using the Internet

By this stage you will have found, evaluated and decided on a collection of web pages which you want to use as part of your teaching. The next area to consider is how a technology-based lesson plan will look in comparison with the sort of plans you usually produce. What will the differences be? What might go wrong, and how will you deal with it?

The first thing, of course, is to plan your session well: visit the websites you intend to use and make sure you know your way around them properly. Try to use sites which appear to have a potentially long 'shelf life' - ones made by large institutions and commercial organisations, rather than personal homepages, which have a tendency to come and go with alarming frequency.

Make a note of the particular pages you want your learners to work on - you can use the Favorites option in Internet Explorer, or Bookmarks in Firefox to log web addresses for later use - and make sure you're familiar with the content. Your ability to answer questions as they arise will add to your confidence and also inspire confidence in your learners.

Planning a web-based lesson, rather than one where the web content plays an ancillary role, is not intrinsically different from planning a more traditional one. We like to divide a typical web-based session into three parts (www): warmer, web, what next. The warmer part of the lesson is the kind of thing we all do as a matter of course, with introductory activities, interest-generating ideas, and so on. This part prepares your learners for what they are going to be doing in the web part of the lesson. Our view is that this part of the lesson is best done in the familiar environment of the normal classroom.

In the web section of the lesson, it's important to spend only as much time as you need working with the computers. We prefer to take learners to a computer room for this part rather than spend the entire class in there. This has the double advantage of allowing more groups to use the room and of keeping learners focused during their time there. It is also an opportunity for learners to stretch their legs and provides a change of pace. On the other hand, moving from the traditional classroom to a computer room does have the potential to disrupt your class, so careful planning of the logistics maybe necessary.

If you have limited access to computers, or perhaps only one computer in the classroom, you can print off the web-based materials you want to use with your learners in advance, and simply use a print version. This is, of course, not as exciting as using computers themselves, but can bring the Internet into more resource-poor environments.

Of course, there are certain teaching situations where teachers are obliged to take their learners to a computer facility for one or more lessons per week. If you do find yourself in this position, you can adapt your lesson plans to make greater use of the Internet than we are suggesting here.

You may even choose to incorporate the use of websites more consistently into the curriculum of the course you are teaching - perhaps substituting a part of the course materials you are using for websites, for example the reading texts or the listening material. However you decide to do this, it must be a transparent process for the learners, and they must be able to appreciate not only the thought processes that have gone into this decision, but also the relevance and value of the change. This can be achieved in part by helping learners to cast a critical eye over the materials they work with in class, and encouraging them to talk about what they like doing and what they don't.

It should also be born in mind that your learners will have favourite websites of their own, and it is well worth investigating whether these can be incorporated into your classroom teaching, partly as a motivator, but also as a link to their lives, interests and experiences outside the class. This again will help them to see the value of the technology applied in class.

It's worth remembering that once you put people behind computer monitors, it's easy for them to forget that you are there, and - more importantly - why they are there. So the two vital words here are time and task. Make sure your learners have a clearly-defined task to achieve and a clearly-defined time frame in which to achieve it.

Once the group has got what you intended from the computers, it's time to move them back to the classroom for the what next stage of the lesson. This part should deal with the tasks set for the web part and then proceed with more familiar follow-up activities to round off the lesson.

Movie stars is a sample lesson plan based on this structure. You can use this as a template for your own planning. It is worth noting that there is nothing intrinsically different from the more traditional coursebook approach here - perhaps the major value of this material is its intrinsic motivational element: real actors being interviewed for a real programme. This, plus the contemporary nature of most website content, make the web an ideal source of material.

Working with lower levels of language proficiency

One of the most often asked questions is if it is possible to work with lower-level classes and the Internet. The simple answer is that it is, of course, feasible but that the choice of websites will be far more limited than for higher levels.

A familiar worry for lower levels is how much of a given text the students will understand. Lower-level learners often feel they have to understand everything and this will lead to problems, if not dealt with beforehand.

Choosing the right websites can go some way towards raising their comfort levels, though you may need to have shorter lessons than the higher level one described above. Websites which are more suitable for lower levels will include:

• websites with simple, clearly presented text.

• websites with non-linguistic data which is easy to interpret (e.g. data in the form of a chart, such as a weather page).

• websites with visuals - a task can be based around the visuals only.

• ELT websites, where the content has been written, edited and prepared with this audience in mind.

Web teaching dos and don'ts

Planning carefully and adopting a structured approach to the way you use websites in the classroom should give you the confidence to try out different ways of introducing your learners to Internet content.

Most of the time you will be using websites to provide your learners with knowledge and content which they perhaps do not know, or would normally not have access to, or to supplement more traditional course materials. This can be highly motivating for them, leading to more language production and a higher stake in the success of the class.

It is worth bearing in mind that it is not necessarily the 'all-singing, all-dancing' websites - ones with a lot of animation, video, audio or other multimedia content - which will be of most interest or use in your classrooms. Don't discount simple text-based websites which might be very beneficial in your own context. Apart from anything else, they are less likely to malfunction or cause problems when you go to use them. However, having said all this, things can and sometimes do go wrong. To round off this chapter, here are a few considerations and some contingency plans:

Whenever you use technology you should always have a backup plan in place. There might be times when the websites are down, or the computers crash or, worse still, the electricity goes off. So be prepared.

Use the knowledge of other teachers and of your learners to help you with the technical side of the lesson. We often team teach with less experienced teachers, taking care of the small technical problems which occasionally arise, and leaving them free to enjoy the technology and to teach. Asking tech-sawy learners to assist takes the pressure off you and also gives them some investment in the successful outcome of the class.

If it's a lesson that involves relatively few web pages, try saving them to your computer hard disk. From Internet Explorer, choose 'File.. ."Save As...' then give the file a name and make sure the 'Web Page, complete' option is selected. This will save the web page and all its images and you'll be able to open the pages even if the connection goes down. You could even go so far as to print them out.

Unless you are working on something like an email pen pal exchange, it is rarely conducive to have learners working alone on computers. Pairs are best, but three to a computer can also work fine - just make sure that everyone gets a turn in the 'driving seat'. Pairwork and small-group work will help to encourage oral communication and break down the 'computer as barrier' effect often prevalent in technology-based classes. For the one computer classroom, use of the computer can be rotated between small groups, with the groups who are not working on the computer occupied with other stages of the same lesson, for example preparing a poster or text.

As was mentioned, try to arrange the computer room in such a way that you can easily maintain control over learner activities. An ideal layout is to have the computers around the outside walls of the class - allowing you to view what is on each screen and to help should the need arise - and a central table where learners can congregate for more communicative activities. This table will also serve as a storage place for pens, books and dictionaries, and thus help keep the computers free of clutter and easy to use.

Not all of the content that you come across with your learners will necessarily be suitable for them. The wonder of the Internet is that it caters for a wide variety of people, interests and tastes, so much so that you are almost bound to encounter what you consider to be questionable content at some point in your exploration, and the same can safely be said of your learners. We have generally found an open discussion about the kind of things the group considers acceptable in class has been enough to put an end to any further unsuitable exploration, but if you work in a context where this is likely to be a bigger issue then you may need to take more robust steps such as installing filtering software along the lines of Net Nanny (www.netnanny.com), which will limit access to a wide range of content which can be user-specified and controlled.

Lecture#4

Date: 2014-12-22; view: 1949