My colleague Katie Hull and I co-teach an Intermediate English class, and I think we developed and effectively used a pretty darn good lesson today.

Our students have been in the process of planning to write an Autobiographical Incident essay. So, we developed a simple “cloze” (fill-in-the-blank) passage that described the actual writing process.

Students completed the cloze. Then, we took photos of students writing and uploaded them to my Flickr account. Next, students used Fotobabble to upload their photo and record themselves reading their passage describing the process they need to use tomorrow to write a draft of their essay. They then copied and pasted the url address of their image and recording onto our class blog. We showed some back at the classroom on the computer projector, and students were also able to check them out individually while we were at the computer lab.

You can see them all, along with the assignment, at this year’s class blog.

So, in a relatively short lesson (I’d say the whole thing, including showing it in the classroom, took less than an hour), we had students practice metacognition, writing, reading comprehension, speaking and pronunciation, and listening — and they loved it!

As the year progresses, students will write their own descriptions of the writing process for upcoming essays. We thought that it would be best to keep things simple the first time around.

Even though I think this is a pretty darn good lesson, there is always room for improvement. Let me know if you have any suggestions….