Getting to University! Writing activity

Hi everyone,

I am Marc Font and I am going to develop an activity to foster students’ writing skills. The activity is addressed to 2nd of Batxillerat students and the topic of the unit is Getting to University! 

Teacher email: marc.font@hotmail.com 

LEARNING GOALS

1. Enable students to work autonomously.
2. Enable students to share information and work in a collaborative way.
3. Enable students to reflect on specific matters that concern their own professional future.
4. Enable students to produce written texts with comprehensible messages.
5. Enable students to use ICT resources to develop English knowledge.
6. Enable students to select specific information so as to build up argumentative essays.
7. Enable students to reflect on their own work and self-assess it.

BASIC COMPETENCES
1. Communicative competence 
 1.1 Foster communicative skills so as to be able to communicate with people and be able to ask questions, opinions and build one’s ideas.

 2. Autonomy and personal initiative competence 
 2.1 Provide students the necessary tools and encourage them to work individually and come up with original pieces of work.
 2.2 Lead students to make decisions for themselves

 3. Competence in processing information and use of ICT 
 3.1 Use ICT so as to contribute to a more conscious, effective and real learning process.

DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTIVITY 

This activity is designed to be carried out in the computers room and students will finish it at home if they need extra time to fulfill all the tasks presented. Students will work on a wiki space so as to foster writing skills and be able to work in a cooperative way. Students will work individually regarding the search of information of their own interests but information will be shared and commented by other students on the first step of the writing activity. Thus, the first step aims at, on the one hand, presenting the particular case of each student and, on the other, have an online discussion to solve doubts, give advice and exchange materials, resources and opinions to help out students struggling to make a choice. The second step aims at building up a text, according to the previous research step, so as to reflect on why they have made that choice. Also, students will have to check what information is expected to appear in an admission letter, as well as how it should be structured, what language style they have to use, etc. Finally, students will have to fill in a survey to check how useful the activity was and how clear the instructions of the tasks were. 

DESCRIPTION OF THE TOOL 

The writing activity I propose will be based on a Wiki space. On the one hand, wiki spaces are great tools so as to encourage students to write and work collaboratively with the rest of their classmates. On the other hand, Wiki spaces let students read their classmates’ pieces of work, which enable them to receive a greater amount of input and reflect, not only on their own tasks, but on other students work.

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

TO GET STARTED... Check your emailbox and find the invitation I have just sent you. Accept it and you will be nicely welcome! Once accepted, please, click here to start off! 

ONCE YOU HAVE FINISHED... Please, as soon as you finish the activity, would you be so kind to do this self-assessment survey? Click on here. Thank you very much!