Title of the Project: “Open your mind! Great Britain spreads beyond London!”
Level: 4º ESO
Subjects: English language
Timing: Segundo trimestre del curso; Duración: dos meses
Summary of the Project: Students will search for information (location, monuments, inhabitants…) about the countries of Great Britain. They will work in teams and individually and they will use different CMCs to develop the project.
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AIMS OF THE PROJECT:
  • To help students distinguish the geographic distribution of Great Britain.
  • To make students feel curious about the geography and culture (monuments, celebrations…) of other cities or towns in the UK, different from the well-known city of London.
  • To help students to work autonomously.
  • To encourage students to work cooperatively, using English as their vehicular language.
  • To encourage students to use the CMCs to look for and transmit information.
  • To develop the students’ four skills by
    • Getting information about some British places using the web (reading skills)
    • Summing up the information found (writing skills)
    • Listening about the capitals of the United Kingdom (listening skills)
    • Making different oral presentations. (speaking and listening skills)
    • Elaborating a leaflet about a city in the United Kingdom (writing skills)

TOOLS:
The wiki will be the tool through which the teacher will propose the activities and the students will present their works; besides the wiki, both students and teacher will use other tools from the Web 2.0, such as:
  • Web-Task
  • Prezzi
  • Slideshare
  • Voicethread

ACTIVITIES:

CULTURE PAGE:
  1. Students will be divided in groups and will carry out a general Web-Task to discover the different parts of Great Britain and its main cities. They will also decide the country they are going to study and will look for the information required. (The teacher will note down each team’s selection to avoid the repetition of works)
  2. Once they have chosen the country they want to talk about, they will be sent to the

SPEAKING PAGE,
where they will find the next activity which will consist of elaborating a Voicethread where students will show and explain some pictures related to different aspects of the country they have chosen and will make questions about them (one question by each one of the members of the team). (All the students in the team must participate orally, speaking during the same time)
The rest of their partners will have to answer to at least one question in two different Voicethreads (i.e., each team will choose two different Voicethreads to answer, and each member will answer to one of the questions on the selected Voicethreads; for a better result, the teacher will assign each team the Voicethreads to answer, so that at the end of the activity, all the teams have at least two answers to their three questions).

READING PAGE:
Students will read about one of the capitals of the UK and will answer some questions related to the text. From this text they will go to the WRITING PAGE and to the STUDENTS’ WORKS PAGE.

WRITING PAGE:
Here, students will find two topics to write about which are related to the text in the Reading page. The information they need to do this activity is provided by two websites they can go on by clicking on the corresponding links.

STUDENTS’ WORKS PAGE:
When students are sent to this page from the Reading one, they will find some links to different websites where they will get the information required to make a Slideshare presentation about one of the topics proposed in this page.
At the same time, they are asked to upload their Slideshare presentations to this page.
Another activity they are asked to do is the elaboration of a leaflet to invite people to visit a city, town or village in the UK, with the exception of the capitals of the countries. As in the previous activity, students will have to show their works through the wiki.

LISTENING PAGE:
From this page, students will move to different websites where they will find some listening activities about the capitals of the four countries in the United Kingdom.

EXTRA-ACTIVITY: The students will write their opinion about the project in the blog, including suggestions to improve it. (This activity is compulsory but its contents will not be evaluated; in fact, it is an assessment tool). They will get to the blog through the Students’ Works Page.