Genially

 

Hi everyone,

Today we are working on a very useful tool for students, Genially. Due to the fact that I’m teaching English to adults, working with Genially motivates them to learn in an easy way and on its own pace.

Now, we are learning about the United States of America, an English speaking country, so I asked my students to create a project using this tool as a final task. Basically, they have to work on writing and speaking skills.

Firstly, we watched a video in the class about the United States and its basic characteristics (location in the map, inhabitants, number of states, presidents…). I explained the final task to the students and I asked them to work in groups of three. They chose their partners on their own. They had to look for information on the Internet and make a draft about what they were going to talk about. I corrected them and gave some guidance. After this, I showed them the tool “Genially” and explained how it works.

Students decided the task each one had to carry out and agreed how the presentation was going to be shown.

They could use different extra materials such as text books, videos, other Genially presentations…

Finally, presentations were exhibited and at the end, they discussed about all of them, making their own self-assessment about their projects, difficulties they found, interest and motivation degree. We also chatted about possible changes for future projects.

You can see an example of a project here:

https://view.genial.ly/5fc7e696523e3f0ce620e4db/presentation-the-usa

To summarise, this tool helped my students to work in an autonomous way and has encouraged them to the acquisition of meaningful learning. In addition, using Genially in the class has motivated them and made them participate successfully. Next time, I would change the way of selecting the groups of students in order to have mixed-ability groups and achieve better results.