Students' opinion
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Teachers' opinion
"Students were very motivated and willing to work and to participate. In my opinion, this is due to three reasons: the use of English as the main language within the classroom, the implementation of collaborative and group activities which make them feel much more comfortable, and the completely different tasks they were asked to do.
It is also important to pinpoint the fact that the activities they liked the most were those in which they were required to move around and implied some degree of physical effort, such as the running dictation and drawing in the playground.
The fact that one of the lessons was a two-hour sessions proved it very practical as the tasks could have a continuity that is difficult to achieve when you do one-hour sessions.
Amongst the most important aspects we should improve is the duration of the activities. We need to make better adjustments to our groups. Although some classes were planned two hours in a row, we felt the we were running out of time from the very beginning. Some of them were planned to last 20 minutes, and in the end they actually sent almost 30-35 minutes, for example, the activity in which they had to cut out the instructions, add a connectors and glue them. In fact, I think this is because we did not take into account the time to do the “crafts” (cut the parts out), which is time-consuming. What is more, activities such as the drawing in the playground requires a whole lesson (one hour).
The photocopies and the materials to work in group should be larger (handouts, grids to fill in, pictures for the dictogloss or the pair-up inventions), as it is very difficult for a four-people group to see the handouts if they are thought for individual work.
The overall results are very satisfactory. Students' motivation and participation in the classes were boosted. However, we felt quite a lot of time pressure. That is the reason why we should make some adjustments in the future both to make tasks more realistic (to our real students and the timing) and to adapt the materials to group size."
"Once I have finished my first experience with this GEP Project and after doing the implementation with students I think it was a challenge for all of us and the result was satisfactory. Students enjoyed during these sessions and they liked the methodology used and the activities that we had programmed.
The contents of Technology were simple and affordable for 1st ESO students so they were very motivated and receptive. Their behavior were very good and they wanted to do all the activities well.
At first, it was a little strange for all because of the lack of habit of speaking in English, but this feeling disappeared over the following sessions and everyone felt comfortable.
Before the implementation we had a lot of work thinking and preparing all the material. I consider that this part of programming is very important to get the class work going well. Materials must to be attractive for them (visual cards, coloured, well designed, easy to use…).
Working with 16 students is adequate. With a larger group it would be more complicated.
In some activities like in the reading comprehension it should be necessary more time in order to put in common the results of the different groups. Also it could be interesting in other activities to prepare some basic vocabulary previously in order to improve the results.
Working in groups and changing the members frequently using the ‘instant classroom’ application is very positive.
The activities that motivated more the student were the kinesthetic ones like run to the board or hang sentences to dry.
Some activities that were requested to prepare at home not all students had done it. For example, to watch the video of conditional sentences to do a flipped classroom so we had to review it in class.
1ESO students cannot have their mobile phones at school so it was very positive to use the computer room to do quizlet and kahoot activities.
Regarding the activity of create a memory game, there was not enough time to play with the games prepared by other groups.
After doing the activity of biographies, students were very interested in learning more about these inventors, so, in my opinion this activity could be extended in other sessions, for example creating a flipbook.
To conclude this evaluation, the overall sensation of this sessions is very positive and the students had a good time and I am sure they have learnt and understood the contents worked."
"In the subject of Visual Arts, we began to teach classes with some input and
cooperative and collaborative learning activities. The students worked well and we believe that they assimilated the contents well as the activities were dynamic, per groups, manipulative and repetitive. Some examples of activities of TASK1 (with same content) were Brainstorming, Look images at Prezi, Crossword Puzzle and Look for and explain pictures, where we worked the line, the angles and the polygons. We drew positive results for teachers and students.
In TASK2, Reading and Writing and Assessment activities, they were quite different from what students were used to, so they were activities where the result was very favorable because the students worked these aspects differently than they do in languages classes. Some examples of activities that students learned and, at the same time, enjoyed most were Dictogloss and Running Dictation.
We can’t ignore the fact of using ICT tools in GEP1 activities, some with great success such as Kahoot, where the students had a great motivation and stimulus, and Plickers, a great unknown for students and teachers, which allowed us to work using explicit, implicit and referential questions and working collaborative, too.
In conclusion, we believe that the students have learned and worked very well with most of the GEP1 activities, content and language, since a large number of them are visual, repetitive, cooperative or collaborative, manipulative and using ICT tools.
However, it should be mentioned that there has been a few activities without
implementation because of the time management since some of the other activities were a bit complex and long. Also, some students have serious difficulties in following the subject in English language but they tried to do their best. And finally, I would like to say how complicated it is for teachers to carry out dynamic activities with big groups of students like the ones we have. It would be ideal to work with class-groups of 15-18 students maximum to ensure an adequate implementation of the method."