While I am no-longer a newbie at teaching, I am, however, always changing the way I deliver and discovering new ways to engage students. Therefore, I am always on the look out for new ideas or new ways to use an old idea.
So, the topics that I've been fixated on, besides technology, are Flip The Classroom and Task-Based assignments. These two concepts are not new, but the terms have become HOT in the past few years. Then again, everything is like fashion; it recycles.
I recently did a intro workshop on Flip The Classroom, and it's interesting to me how many people still don't understand/unaware of it. They are all language teachers, and if you are a language teacher, you already do some parts of Flip The Classroom in your classroom. Remember those activities?
I digress. I want to reflect a bit on my search and development on Task-Based assignments, as a natural companion to Flip The Classroom. Well, sort of.
So task-based assignment is nothing new. I've done it for years. However, I have not been putting too much thoughts into organizing these assignments. Since I spent so much time thinking about Flip The Classroom, I thought it's time I spend time working on this part of my curriculum.
I did some readings online and I'll post the links at the end of this post. They have all been very helpful. I got some new ideas as well. The only thing is that some of the assignments in my class are a weekly thing, instead of an option that is to be done once. For example, reading books, writing journals, and watching movies or TV programming are weekly assignments, tweeting is daily. I also make more out of each assignments. For example, the student must write a quick summary of the TV programming s/he watches, jot down one cultural observation and one new vocabulary (higher-level must also write a sentence using the vocab).
In any case, I spent some time organizing the ideas into different categories: vocabulary, reading, writing/typing, speaking, listening, culture. Since some assignments can be in more than one category, I need to think some more about how to organize them.
Here are the links that I mentioned, and I hope you find it helpful. I certainly hope I would be able to get this new task-based assignment sheets ready to go and implement them. I'll have to see how it goes and make modifications.
- The Creative Language Class's Real Work Homework post
- Mis Muciuentos's blog
- Tarea Semanal
- Dr. Bilash's blog
By the way, I actually was looking for new ideas for Day 1 activity the day I started organizing my tasks...talk about digressing. Or maybe I just have too many ideas that any one of them can take over at any time.
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