a Simple Lesson Plan in the Use of Skype in English Language Teaching

Skill                            : Listening; Speaking

Topic                           : Discussing News Item Texts

Class condition           : a class consists of 25 students, in a multimedia laboratory, each of them faces a PC, and the PCs have internet connection.

Skype as one of media to build a social network is very sophisticated. In relationship with teaching listening and speaking, the most interesting part of using the skype is the application of group voice class. The group voice call allows the members of certain group to have a conversation at the same time, it’s like a conversation. By using this application I want to make a condition like teleconference in which there is a person becomes a source/ news reader while the students will become listeners of that news.

First, I want to give a brief explanation about news item text. I will explain the general purpose of news item texts and little bit about how to understand/ recognize the content of news item text. In this part, the group voice call gives chance to the teacher and students to have an interactive discussion. So that, while the teacher explaining the material, the students may ask question or just add opinions.

After giving brief explanation on news item text, the class will listen to news that is read and reported by a person. As the teacher, I will provide a person (it will be better if the person is the real news reader/ reporter) and ask him to report today’s news. While listening, the students have to take a note of the content of the news. After that, they may have question and answer session with the reporter.

At the end of the class, I will review about the general purpose of news item texts. The next meeting will be students’ opportunity to try to become a reporter. 

using blog in the classroom

It is a seven grade class which consists of 25-30 students. The school has already had the computer, but there are only 15 computers for those students. They are now studying about descriptive text. here, i have an idea to have an interesting teaching-learning process by using blog as the tools for their study.  This is the plan:

First of all, as a teacher i want to open the lesson by using warming up session. In the warming up session I will prepare some pictures or photos of popular artists. After that, I will ask one students to come in front. what he/ she is going to do is to one pictures among many pictures of popular artists and put in on her back.
next, the chosen student has to act like that artist. Other students who become the audience try to guest the name of the artists shown by the student in front.
Do this game 2-3 times until students get into the best mood.

After doing the warming up, let's continue with the main activity. Me, as a teacher, begin the lesson by asking question about describing people, writing some important vocabularies and information related, on the board.

In a group of three, students asked to try describing their most favorite character. Before that, teacher has already prepared the class blog used in this lesson.  By using the computer and available internet connection, teacher slowly explain to use that blog to write their descriptive text. Hopefully the are easily become familiar in using  the blog and internet, so that they can add pictures to their text and then post it on the class blog.

The next assignment is to see all texts posted in a class blog. in a class discussion, students and teacher together try to examine whether their texts are good or need to be improved.

=P