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Motivating your students this summer!

Our summer course at the British Council, Barcelona is now in full swing and involves involve kids aged 10 - 16 coming to classes Monday to Friday from 9.30am until 2pm while their mates hang out and generally do other things apart from learning English. I wonder how motivated they are!!!

Here are a few ideas for keeping them distracted from the world outside in an attempt to keep them focused on their learning…

Photo register: Take photos of all the students and create a page on a flipchart that you have open at the start of the class. As students come in, draw a circle round their picture. You can also give each student a page on the flipchart, where you record information about them (their likes, favourite band, starsign, prominent learning style, etc. which you can build up over the duration of the course. This information can be used when you want to try activities that will appeal to particular students.

Video bio: Have students make a very short (1 minute) video bio that you can post via Posterous to a virtual wall using Wallwisher. Spend time in the first class getting them to plan a mini-presentation about what they want to say about themselves, then either film them with a digital camera or they can use their mobile phones. Again, they can make more videos during the course to add more information.

Use a screen-capture tool like Jing to mark their writing. I’m a bit rubbish at marking students’ written work and I know that, more often than not, students put their marked compositions in their folders never to be seen again. As a result, I’ve been experimenting with marking their writing using screen capture, which is a tool for ‘filming’ what you’re doing on the computer and recording your voice talking. It then saves the video you’ve made and creates a weblink that you can send, or html that you can use to embed the video into a blog, wiki, etc. (a much clearer explanation can be found here).

Basically, get students to email their written work to you. Open up the email and mark it by using whatever screen capture tool you’re using and then send the video to the student. They then listen to your comments and use them to correct the piece of writing. They send an email back to you with their corrected version of the writing. I’ve found it much more motivating than the traditional method and also that students have tended to improve. It also turns a writing task into a listening task and you can check their comprehension by how well they corrected their writing. Students also seem more motivated to write, which is nice!

Get a project going on: Give students 30 minutes a day, near the end of the lesson to work on a weekly ‘project’ of their choice. Tell them to aim for giving a short presentation about their project to the class at the end of each week, but get them to give brief feedback to the rest of the class each day as it will help them to feel more comfortable about giving a presentation to the class later on. Their presentations can use PowerPoint and could tell students to present their project in a pecha kucha format, or they could use a really great tool I’ve been experimenting with called Prezi Their homework each day can be to research their project, thereby creating a real-world, motivating purpose for doing homework.

Make a friend of Facebook: Nearly all my students have a facebook page and when we go to the computer room, the first thing they do is log in to their account. In the final lesson of the year, I had a few students missing as they were studying for school exams. As most of my class were friends with each other on Facebook, it was easy to check which of the absent students were currently online(!) so I got the students who were present to chat to the absent students in English via Instant Messenger, asking them what they were doing and telling them what a great class they were missing!!

I also asked them to choose either a photo or a photo album from their account that they particularly liked or that had a story to it, and tell their partner about it. Both activities worked well and the students were happy to be using their favourite (but usually banned) social networking site!

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