CAE Project - Presentations

Stages in Project Work

Speculation

One of the units of Objective Advanced, the book we have been using at ARCI, is about speeches. It begins with a reading exercise of an extract of Martin Luther King’s famous speech “I Have a Dream.” 

As a follow-up, the book suggests an activity that consists of a debate on a current issue in teams and a presentation of the teams’ conclusions.

Issues

Designing Project Activities

I felt the debate needed some scaffolding and students needed information as well as specific vocabulary about their chosen issues.

That is why, after organizing themselves in teams of 4/5 students and deciding what issue they would address (it could be one of the issues suggested by the book or one of their own), I gave them a week’s time to browse the web to complete this worksheet: 

After the discussion, the book suggests that teams report back to the rest of the class through a presentation by an appointed spokesperson.

Conducting Project Activities 

However, I felt that the information discussed could be further processed and made into a multimedia presentation in which all the members of the team had a chance to contribute.

That’s why I invited each team to prepare a presentation about their issue along the following guidelines:

• length: 8 – 10 minutes
• use of multimedia resources: beamer, powerpoint, youtube (or any other) videos, music, photographs, etc.
• participation of all the members of the team

We set dates for the different presentations and I encouraged them to do their best as they would be evaluated by their peers.

Project Outcomes 

Watch part of the presentations in the following video.

Evaluation

During the presentations, the rest of the class had to complete the following summary and assessment grid:

The purpose of the summary and the evaluation was to make sure the class would profit from the presentations and not just listen passively. As well as this, the score system turned the whole activity into a competition, which hopefully would motivate students even further. 

After the discussion, we held a humble awards ceremony during which I revealed the results of their assessment.

Summary

The whole project took about a month:

Teacher:  Mariana De Biassi

Class: CAE B

Comic Strip

How we came about the idea of a comic strip... 

Back in April I invited my students to prepare something to celebrate World Book Day.One of the ideas was writing a review of their favourite book  to be uploaded in our Virtual Classroom. We had dealt with reviews the previous year and there are several avid readers in our class, so I thought that sharing information about their fave reads would really appeal to them.

I also suggested designing a comic strip where books in a library talked to each other, knowing there is a student who loves both reading and drawing. She was the one who prepared the artwork for the book Discovering Argentina, which the class sent to participate in Macmillans Cultural Reader Competition in 2013. The outcome of all this was first Raúl’s work, which was actually a mix. He wrote a composition where characters from some of his favourite books  interact with each other in the library. 

Then Carolina came in and offered to adapt the composition to a different format: a comic strip. We had some discussions as to how the work could be best adapted so that it could appeal to a wider audience, and that’s why some new characters were introduced and others dropped.

We decided that the aim of the strip was to encourage people to go to the library and read.  That’s why the poem Library Poem by Julia Donaldson is included. Here we would like to acknowledge ARCI teacher Laura Lupo,  who prepared a wonderful contribution for Multimedia called The Magical Power of Books. My students read that poem when they attended MM some months ago.

We humbly hope this work will help ‘make sure the library will still be here tomorrow’.

Teacher:  Alicia Zuliani

Class: Post FCE

CAE BCR - PROJECT

Cambridge CAE BCR is a group of adults studying with ARCI at “Bolsa de Comercio de Rosario”.

This year we have done some project work on the use of new media like mobile phones, the Internet and social networks. To carry out the work, we made use of the tools that the new technologies provide. We worked collaboratively both in class and at home through the Internet using several online tools like Google docs and forms to create a survey and write reports on the survey results, as well as some essays regarding the use of the new media for everyday communication.

To collect ideas for the project, I provided my students with some relevant input that would trigger discussion among them. Hover over the following image and then on the icons to access the videos, articles and discussion forums they were presented with:

First of all, my students conducted a survey on the use of the new media in the workplace and at home. Here is the survey they created collaboratively by using Google docs for the first draft and Google forms for the final version.

The students worked in groups to present and analyse the results of the survey in reports. Finally, they dicussed and compared the information they collected and the ideas presented in the input materials, and they worked collaboratively to write three different types of essays. All this collaborative work was done online on Google docs partly in class and partly at home and required a lot of hard work including feedback analysis and editing. 

Here’s the result of this process and my students’ time and effort:

Report 1

Report 2 




For and Against Essay



Opinion Essay



Essay suggesting solutions to a problem 1

Essay suggesting solutions to a problem 2

Both my students and I enjoyed doing this project work because the topic was appealing and very up-to-date, the tools we used were different from those used in traditional classes, the activities were meaningful and the work was collaborative, which means we shared the effort, as well as the sense of achievement and satisfaction of having accomplished the task by using English and the new media tools.

Teacher:  Gabriela Cuscione

Class: CAE BCR

What ARCI students can do at CEFR level B2

What is the CEFR?

Teacher: Elisa Castañeda
Class: FCE "D" 

Father in Disguise: Reviews

Teacher: Patricia Zorio
Class: FCE "L" 

Inside Cultura's Library

What feelings does a library evoke? Read on and find out 

what one of our Post First Certificate students has to say 

about it...

INSIDE   CULTURA'S   LIBRARY

In the evening of April 22 when  quiet shadows fall all  over the library, some weird whispers can be heard among the shelves:

Alice in Wonderland (by Lewis Carroll):   What a dark hole this is! What silence! Aren´t there any kids?  Nobody playing?  Nobody laughing?  Nobody reading? Where is the Rabbit?  Where is the Queen?  Poor librarian so lonely!

The Piano: It seems I am untouchable! Nobody plays  me…? (starts sobbing)  Is this my karma?

Mrs. Dalloway (by Virginia Woolf):   Don't cry P., or what should I do?  Not  so many people have understood me, have they?  To commit suicide was one of my choices, ha!  ha! … but, haven´t I given the most charming flowers to everybody and the coolest parties in London?

The Myth of Sisyphus (by Albert Camus):  You´re  right, “The only  real issue treated by Philosophy is suicide!”.      

                                                        

A Woman of No Importance  (by Oscar Wilde): (feeling bored)  I told you long ago: “Talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored you and at the end of your first season you will have  the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact”.

The Great Gatsby (by F. S. Fitzgerald):  Women?  Yes, excellent to betray you. With them everything turns out to be sad in the end… Swill  two double bourbons and carry on!  And enjoy Paris,  which will  keep you happy and gay.

Breakfast at Tiffany's (by Truman Capote): (interrupting):  I'm sorry, but  two dry Martinis are much better! 

September (by  Rosamund Pilcher) and The Touch (by Colleen McCullough): (in unison)  What are you saying?!!  You will  suffer, we know, but LOVE always wins in the end. There is no money, no power that could defeat it: LOVE, LOVE, LOVE…(they start singing):

Love is in the air

everywhere  I look around

Love is in the air

every sight and every sound

and I don´t know if I´m being foolish

don´t know if I´m being wise

but it´s something that I must believe in

and it´s there when I look in your eyes

Love is in the air

in the whisper of the trees

Love is in the air

in the thunder of the sea

and I don´t know if I´m dreaming

don´t know if I feel safe

but is something that I must believe in

and it´s  there when you call out my name

Love is in the air, Love is in the air

Oh Oh Ooh…

(Most of the books dance with joy, a very enthusiastic one  is:)

A Christmas Caroll (by Charles Dickens):  Right! That is what I meant! They´ve misunderstood my advice: I don´t long for expensive lavish luxurious Christmas as they are used to  in the XXI Century, Good Heavens! My humble goal  “was people opening their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys”.

Alice in Wonderland:  What can we do now? How can we strive to  keep liveliness here? (thinking)…Maybe some words from Old Georgie…

The Other, Myself (by Jorge Luis Borges):  I don´t know, forgive my ignorance…but I remember that

It is said that Ulises, sick of portents

cried with love  on seeing his Ithaca

green and humble.  Art is that Ithaca

of green eternity, not of portents.

                                                    THE END

 These books among others, for better or for worse, have shaped me.

By Raul Antonio Coll

Post First Certificate

Come and visit our library, borrow a book, dicover new

 worlds...

Teacher: Alicia Zuliani
Class: Post First Certificate "A"

Book Walk

In today’s globalised individualistic world, sharing is a form of solidarity that can make us experience a feeling of globalised empathy and belonging. And at ARCI we did start enjoying the experience last Wednesday, April 23rd, on World Book Day! 

We celebrated it with a BookWalk. A Book what? A BookWalk! Based on the worldwide movement known as Bookcrossing, we coined the motto: 

bring, read and release a book. 

Students, teachers, and other staff members were invited to bring a book- either in Spanish or English- for about a week before April 23rd. Then, on the Big Day over 70 books were displayed on ARCI’s premises: on the main staircases, tables, chairs, windowsills, for everybody to hunt the one they liked, take it home to read, and later release it in our institute for somebody else to be able to enjoy it, again.

The BookWalk has only just started!

Let’s make books WALK

 
from classroom to classroom,

                       from teacher to teacher,

                                           from student to teacher!!!

Teacher: Claudia Saldaño