Worditout Presentations

Working with Worditout presentations with Students from 5° year (A) at Colegio de la UNLPam

These were some of the cards created in Worditout I delivered to students to work with vocabulary about "Problems in our Community":

* Arson,

* Robbery,

* Mugging,

* Holes in the pavement

This is a picture taken from the poster students created with the definitions of the problems in our community I designed using Worditout Presentations

A challenging and rewarding experience for students who did a great work turning words and phrases into real texts with real meanings

I want to share a personal experience using an online tool called “Word it out” which is similar to Wordle during my first day as a trainee at Colegio de la UNLPam. The group of students is composed of 27 students belonging to 5° year at an advanced level.

In the first day of my practicum, I had to present the topic “Problems in our community.” So, in the first place, I decided to present a Piktochart presentation showing different pictures about problems in our community such as mugging, robbery, burglary, holes in the pavement,etc.,  and then I asked students if they could recognize the pictures and the places from which they were taken. Secondly, I asked each of the students to pick up a card from a bag containing 27 cards. These cards contained the different newspaper headlines dealing with problems in our community students would be working with. The purpose of picking up a card from the bag was to form groups, so there would be 10 groups of students working with different problems in our community. After that, students made inferences about the topic each newspaper headline would be about. Then, I decided to deliver a Worditout presentation to each group with the definition of the problem they would be working with. The students have not worked with this online tool before, so it was a novel experience for them. Some of the groups finished the activity in a few minutes, some others needed more time to accomplish the task. As the Worditout presentations only had content words some groups found difficulty in adding, for example, prepositions and articles. In this regard, I think the usefulness of this online tool resides in the way students can play with words. I think the trial and error is a “must” in this kind of activity and with this kind of resource. Indeed, this is what I told to the group working with “holes in the pavement” that after several trials and my suggestion of arranging the words in two steps: first the content words and then the functional words,  they could see how the words and phrases turned into a text.

Participation in this type of activity was very positive too. What I could observe while the groups were working with the definitions of the problems is that each member of the group seemed to be engaged and focused on the task either proposing different ways of arranging sentences or proposing to discard options and start with a new one.

As a personal reflection, it is fair to say that I had not thought before that working with Worditout presentations would be both a challenging and a rewarding activity because once students turned those collections of words into a real message they felt as if they had solved a very difficult puzzle, and that after several trials they had accomplished the task as a group.

I discovered that Worditout Presentations are a very useful tool to teach vocabulary in a pre-task activity. An advantage of this way of introducing vocabulary is that we (teachers) give students the chance to become real participants during the presentation stage, working by themselves with words and phrases to create meanings. 

As regards suitability, in my opinion, I would implement this online tool with students of intermediate and advanced levels because arranging content words without the presence of structural ones may be a harder work for those students who have not achieved a good grammatical accuracy yet.