Anna Bukhtoyarova | 5 Oktober, 2014 - 20:26
On Thursday, the 2nd of October Learning Lab guest researchers Mikhail Bukhtoyarov and Anna Bukhtoyarova were invited to teach five lessons at Realschule Sundern, Northern Rhine-Westphalia. The visit was organized by a local innovative teacher Reinhard Marx. They have been long time partners for different educational projects through the self-organizing learning community “Hello Little World Skypers” that unites more than 200 school and college teachers from all over the world.
The topics of the lessons were related to Russia and especially Siberia. During one of the lessons for a class of 9th graders the teachers asked students to work in groups and use their smartphones for one of the tasks. The groups had to compete to come up with as many questions in English on Siberia as they could for 10 minutes. They had to open the link provided by the teacher and type their questions on the online board Padlet that was projected on the class smartboard.
Though the students had never done it before and were not prepared for this type of activity in advance, the group competition went surprisingly well. Everybody was actively engaged. The students were using information from the teachers’ presentation. Afterwards they were very interested in the answers. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept worked quite effectively.
These students are usually not allowed to use any of their own devices in class and most likely did not have previous experience in using their smartphones for this type of activity. But it turned out that they are ready for productive collaboration with technologies applying their language skills and creativity.
More information on the visit can be found on Reinhard Marx’s blog.