We had extreme lag and sound issues at the beginning of this session, which cost us a lot of time. Students kept crashing, logging off and back in. I started out with 4, then 6 students and at the end I had around ten, including three new students, who appeared in the second half of the session. Two of the new students participated immediately, the third just observed and didn’t talk. After the lesson, I had a private chat with him and he told me this was all new to him and he would join the class.
Adept lesson plan
The loss of time meant I had to adept the lesson a bit. I did this in the following way:
- Instead of having students work in groups and come up with definitions and quiz each other, I gave the definitions and students wrote answers into local chat.
- Instead of eliciting how to describe rooms, I simply showed the notecard and went through it quickly. This was OK because it was not a new concept and students did use the language correctly in the following activity.
- I left out the recapping of the lesson.
The first two points led to more teacher talking time (TTT) than planned.
What else wasn’t so good
I wanted to introduce a bit of competition into the building exploring activity. As there were only few students at the beginning of the lesson, I decided to have two teams – the boys and the girls. Interestingly enough, the girls worked together fine and did the task without asking many questions but the boys seemed to work alone, didn’t know what to do and had a lot of questions. I don’t know whether this is a gender issue or partly due to the fact that the girls’ English is a bit better than most of the boys’.
Unfortunately, I could not monitor the activity as I had planned because at that time new students arrived (some who were late and some completely new). So, I quickly explained the task and send them off. At the same time, I also received several IMs and had to reply and ward them off (they were not student IMs). I think receiving IMs during a lesson is one of the most distracting things for a teacher.
What went well
First of all, the students and I had a lot of fun during this lesson and everybody participated very activly. Which again proves that lessons in SL need to be dynamic and interactive. Students do not enjoy sitting and listening to a lecturer for an hour in Real Life, less so in Second Life.
In this session, students had to walk a lot and explore a large building and find different kinds of rooms and furniture. All students accomplished the tasks and I had the chance to clarify some words and talk about some differences (e.g. reception/lobby; meeting/conference room, toilet/bathroom). Students had no problems knowing which rooms I was defining.
Students had to work as a team in two of the tasks and I told them to really work together and share the work. It was great to see that they did and used language to negotiate (e. g. “so you have the first floor and i will get the second ok?”)
The last activity was to look at six pictures of very different living rooms and decided which they liked and why. It was a good idea to set these up as separate picture boards in the garden so that students could walk around and did not have to sit and look at a board with many pictures on it (which would have cost much less money to upload).
Students had fun talking about their favourite rooms and they used the language for stating their opinion, agreeing and disagreeing politely. They participated so actively at this stage because they really had to say something and had choice (of picture/room).
Nationality of students:
Turkish, Egyptian, Qatari, Saudi Arabian, Indian
As the course was mainly announced through IOL’s website and group notices, most students are from the Middle East. IOL has many American members as well, but they speak English so we intentionally planned the lessons for a time that would be convenient for Turkish and Middle Eastern students.
Conclusion
It was good that my lesson plan was flexible enough to make up for the lost time. It is very important to plan dynamic, interactive lessons in which students have to move a lot. Giving students choice makes them participate more actively. I think 8 – 10 students is a good number. Because of this and because we had two lessons already, I have announced that I won’t accept more students into this course.
Update, 17 July 2008
Student feedback
Very positive. They all enjoyed every activity, learned new words, most of them say they had enough opportunity to speak. One student would like to speak more and write more. This is interesting. It’s probably a students who needs English for their studies or job (the survey is anonymous, so I can only guess). Another student would like to have more conversation in class and speak after class. I have already planned more student talking time (storytelling, discussions, interviews, etc.) for future classes. I also suggested students meets before or after the lesson and chat with each other. In Lesson 3, we will also be looking at ways of how students can improve their English outside class (this discussion will continue in Moodle and I will, then, give them an article where 100 different ways are listed in detail.