stay

As I’ve previously posted, I’ve been energized to try-out a fair amount of Web 2.0 tools this year with my English Language Learners. I’ve been wanting to do a number of these projects for years, but the Internet filter our District had been using made often made doing it quite difficult — if not impossible.

You can see what I’ve been doing in just the first three two-and-a-half months here and here.

Today, we tried another experiment that seemed to go well.

I’ve had a “Best” list titled The Best Sites Where Students Can Plan Virtual Trips. On it, you can find a number of sites where users can learn about different cities around the world and then plan trips there, which they can then save online. I’ve had students use some of them in the past and then they would describe why they picked the places they did, but, until this year, the District blocked the site that I consider the best to use for this purpose — Stay.com. It’s very easy and accessible to use.

Fortunately, this year it’s unblocked, and today students created virtual trips to Paris (we’re just finishing up our unit on France — on Thursday we make videos of students asking questions to our sister classes in that country!).

I had students pick at least six places they wanted to visit and write one sentence each about why they wanted to visit them. Tomorrow, students will review what they classmates wrote and write their own comments.

You can see several of them at our class blog, and I’ll share a few examples here:

Kou’s Guide

A.Jay’s Guide

Selina’s Guide

Lee’s Guide