”A wiki is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor.” http://en.wikipedia.org
Why not share a popular native young adult literature, a novel of an existing mother tongue e-book with your twin town students, a book not yet been official translated into English, at http://www.wikispaces.com/
First, the students of course have to contact the author's publisher in question, talk and go lobbying about their idea. And if the house of the publisher agree of what the students have in mind, whether it is permissible, they'll start it all up. Of course, publisher and author thinks it is a brilliant idea!
Students will then work in small groups with a selected beloved native novel. On their wiki page they present a mini-version of the book, with title, back cover texts and other available basic tag informations, in the same way the book is presented, if possible, in its mother tongue edition.
They use a wiki page, partly to refine their translation over time, but also to enable individual work, one by one, no matter where someone else is, but still in group as they developing and editing the same webpage. They are thus not restricted to a statically agreement on a text, or being physically together, but writing can last continuously (even when the work is actually completed), and not inhibited by someone being physically absent.
The point of a shared wiki is that students write the text as if they were one person, which means they need to agree on the evolution of the text. Students with a developed command of language can serve as mentors, they are in the zone of proximal development. A zone of knowledge pupils one step behind can reach with the help of those with a more developed knowledge Lev Vygotsky says, in order to make progress (Dysthe, 1993).*
The students select a key event in the novel, as to serve as a mini version of it, involving the main characters. The selected text section is then translated into English, let's say about 1000 words.
The Twin Town pupils take part of the presentation of the novel at the wiki page where they have the opportunity to make comments and put all kinds of written questions about the story, the characters, the author, or other details - perhaps culture specific. The students who authored the page respond comments and questions in their turn; the cooperation has thus begun and can last as long as there is interesting topics to elaborate on. Of course the students have announced publisher and author the link to the wiki page where they (and public) can follow what the students discuss and reflect upon, perhaps publisher and author participate themselves in the conversations.
*Dysthe, Olga (1993). Writing and talking to learn: a theory-based, interpretive study in three classrooms in the USA and Norway. Tromsø: Univ.
2 - COLLABORATING and discussing a NOVEL in TWEETS
”Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as 'tweets'”.
Twitter and its tweets can be used as a digital bulletin board at school for various notes on reading literature. For example, in the following manner:
In class there is wireless access to the Internet; the teacher has displayed the e-book on a smart board; every student has an own laptop on which they also can read the selected e-book; each one of the pupils have a school private Twitter account.
The teacher initiates the lesson by presenting the novel the students just are about to read on their own screens, such as Oliver Twist. He talks about the initial action of the book and explains the main characters projecting book covers on the smart board. The teacher also reads the title and the abstracts out loud to the students. He asks them to reflect orally and spontaneously about the covers, title, abstracts, and other layouts.
Then he gives the students the task to note a tweet about what they've just verbally commented, on aspects such as the layout. He asks the students to begin the tweet with a mutual hashtag, such as
#97bOlivertwistL (#NamneoftheclassTitleLayout). Teacher and students then locate the tweets on their own computers by using the common hashtag. All tweets will in this way be accessible to all. The teacher projects the list of all tweets on the the smart board. On the basis of the student's examples he can reflect once again with the students about the book covers, read out some tweets loud, and ask about additional reflections.
Then he gives the students the task to read the first chapter on the their own lap top screens. Each pupil will then receive further information on what to tweet, all kinds of reflections, and then put a hashtag for each specific log according to the teacher's instructions. A hashtagged tweet could be a quotation referring to a page that extremely briefly summarize the contents of a chapter, a phrase that will serve as its title.
A hashtag for that task could be "#97bOlivertwistC1Pn" (# NamneoftheclassTitleChapter1Page).
It contains 19 characters of a maximum of 140; to save space you do not specify the edition of the novel but just the page you referring to (P9 = page 9). A student then might decide tweeting the following: "#97bOlivertwistC1P9 He says he want some more" (45 characters).
The teacher has determined in advance how each specific hashtag exactly should be written, and pretested it on the Twitter to be sure that it is unique and not used by anyone else. Teacher and students are looking up tweets using the hashtag (the specific content) they wish to continue working with, by projecting the research on the smart board and computers.
On the basis of the numerous examples of tweets the teacher then can talk to the students and reflect upon the content of the chapters, based on the general themes or the traits of the characters. Students then using the tweets as a basis when they summarize and reflect upon the content of the novel or the characters, in their blogs or shared wikis. If the teacher wants to read an individual student's gathered tweets he looks them out targing a Twitter search on the student's username, @studentaliases, the more unique the narrower results.
Twitter, Inc.1355 Market St, Suite 900. San Francisco, CA 94103. USA (2012), viewed 15 december 2012, <https://twitter.com/>
3 - YOUTUBE CLIP REMAKES
I have discovered that Youtube.com is a really excellent source in doing remakes and/or paraphrases of existing short films (approx. 1-5 min.), such as commercials (but all categories are useful) in the service of language teaching. When I ve had access to a smart board, I've been able to teach 25 students simultaneously in scriptwriting! In advance I've picked out a short film, as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdQTR8FNjpo?, and decided how to split the piece into scenes. Then, I've used a simple storyboard template and imitated others existing, such as eslstudentpublications.com/storyboards/ or printablepaper.net/category/storyboard.
The ”Seven Samurai Steps” of doing a remake of a Youtube clip:
1 - KAMBEI -Teacher and students watch the short film in full, and express and communicate their ideas about it, any kind of spontaneous comments.
2 - KATSUSHIRO - The teacher plays the movie from the beginning and pauses it at each key scene, one by one (approx. 15 scenes). Meanwhile the teacher verbally explains and names the panoramic view, details and objects in every single key scene the students draw them in their storyboards.
3 - GOROBEI - Every separate key scene containing speech is playing. Teachers and students identify what's being said and mimic the actors' pronunciation in chorus, a couple of times. The teacher presents and displays, after an authentic model, as above, how speech / dialogue should be written in a script. He writes down the replicas of the key scenes on the smart board, below the images, and the students duplicate the lines in their storyboards.
4 - SCHIHIROJI - Using their completed storyboards students may then, scene by scene a) practice lines that occur, monologues/dialogues, sitting opposite one another b) brainstorm on some new and increased content, such as changing the subject of the commercial (if it concerns that kind) or/and figure out, add and test new replicas c) and finally decide what new props and new lines there are to be included, and correct the script.
5 - HEIKHACHI - Then students, either a) find any authentic shooting location and on the spot practice the final script, first without camera, then capture it with a DV-device, or b) complete it as an animated film, i.e. shoot all the scenes of the storyboard (which first is enlarged to A3).
6 - KYUZO - Finally, the students take place in front of their computer for the post-production process using a video editing software, such as Windows Movie Maker, iMovie or similar. They upload the raw footage, edit it and cut it down to the length of time they want. They are able to add rerecordings of dialogues, voice-overs, music and other sound effects and so forth.
7 - KIKUCHIYO - The students upload the video on Youtube and thus makes it accessible to an audience of millions of people, as this one, Wasa Commercials, I produced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zdmQ9yHR9I
They could invite film enthusiasts to a festival in the assembly hall of the school (250 seats), in whose ceiling there is a video projector to which an Internet connected computer is available. Of course, it'll be handed out all sorts of film awards, a panel of invited experts will agree in advance what categories should be honored, modeled on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/83rd_Academy_Awards?
4 - "MAY I HAVE ANOTHER HOT DOG, PLEASE?"
Listening to a 5 year old boy talking mumbo jumbo English by his computer, or just watch him act and communicate in front of it, is a very intellectually stimulating exercise indeed.
A child at that age is generally in the process of learning how to read and write, in the beginning of her conquering literacy; processing the transition from orality to literacy; how writing as a technology must be laboriously learned, from the world of sound to the world of sight.
Learning how to read and write is globalized today, thanks to the ICT possibilities; foreign languages support the native language in children's reading comprehension - a prospect that just 10 years ago was limited to kids with bilingual parents or kids attending bilingual education.
Fragmentary kitchen notes on transient observations of the ICT's potential impact on a child's development in bilingual literacy:
Q. When my 5 year old son's imitating/sharing a Lego Star Wars-Youtube clip conversation he's watching (and listening to!) his pronunciation is English but what he says doesn't make any sense, well, once a while he drops adequate phrases like "Star Wars...".
W. He showed me a small Lego poster of HERO FACTORY and asked me (in Swedish) "Dad, does it say here (reading in English - a skill he often says he isn't able too in swedish... - with his index finger pointing out the reading direction) 'HERO FACTORY'?"
I don't remember if I answered his question, maybe I just nodded (or maybe my Vygotskian presence was enough) during my process in thinking of the history of the development of reading and writing. I think anyway he announced "YES" (in English - he often does...) and went back to his computer keyboard knowing what to type (a skill he often says he isn't able too...) in the address bar of Google Chrome...
E. The word he uses to express ”space bar” on the computer keyboard is not the swedish expression ”mellanslag” but the English ”space bar” (with an English pronunciation).
R. It happens that he asks me about how certain words are pronounced and written in English so that he'll be able to navigate and find the right online game he's looking for; he often needs the first letter of a word - he says - to find the right link or button on the screen.
T. He has understood the meaning of the text button "Play again" when it pops up in the end of a short online game or similar
Y. When a voice over proclaims ”GAME OVER” he translates the phrase into swedish and says it means that a game is over and finished.
U. "Dad! What does 'I hate you' means?"; once a while he wants to understand certain phrases he's capturing during a session in front of the computer. This is one I remember.
I. At the lunch table one day, 10 meters from nearest computer, he wants another hot dog and ask me how to say it in English. "Well," I said, "why not try 'May I have another hot dog, please?'
