Time Toast. INSPIRING FEMALE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

Imagen de Johnhain en Pixabay. Licencia Pixabay

On the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November, 25th, I decided to prepare a special activity with my students.
They had to create a timeline with Time Toast about the most inspiring female characters in literature.
These are the learning objectives I wanted to reach:

• I wanted students to familiarize and get to manage a new tool which can help them in their learning process.
• To be familiar with important literary works throughout history.
• Improving reading skills.
• Promoting collaborative work.
• Practice the new language activity of Mediation.
• Integrating different language activities (Comprenhension of Writing Texts, Mediation and Oral Text Production) into a single task.

I think that using tools like this in the classroom is quite motivating. It is a quite intuitive and easy to use device. Most of my students are used to handling technological instruments, and they show an open mind to know new ones. For this reason, they quickly became aware of the possibilities Time Toast could offer. It is also a quite visual instrument whose results are quicly appreciated.

As for the different moments in the development of the activities, I scheduled the activity for a week, so that we could see and comment the final result on November 25th, to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
First, I introduced Time Toast to the students providing some brief and specific hints to use it. The students were divided into groups of three and they were given a link where they could find information about a relevant literary female character. Therefore, they read the article (Written text comprehension)
The first thing they should do is preparing a good summary of the given article. In this way, they practiced Mediation, a new language activity which has been introduced in the Official School of Languages new curriculum. After this, they had to prepare an outline for the oral activity: they record a video (Oral Text Production) where they speak about the female character they were assigned.

The hardest part of the task was deciding the roles within the groups, especially the person who was going to do the oral activity. Some groups eventually decided that the three members in the group were going to speak.
The students were quite satisfied with the final product and they are eager to use this tool in any other moment, since they didn't find a special difficulty in managing it.
For this reason, I think that next time I use it, I'll give them more freedom to choose the topic and organize the time line themselves; they could search for the information on the net, find appropriate visual material to reinforce the different events and even organize how to do the task themselves.

Finally, my reflection about the use of Time Toast is quite positive. It is an effective way of integrating different language activities in one activity, and it allows to grade the task in different stages which coincide with the skills the students develop along the whole activity.
It has helped me to reinforce a collaborative work among students and they have learnt to share opinions and include different and valuable insights  to enhance their performance.
Finally, it has allowed me to arise students' curiosity for fictional characters who have a decisive role in literary works which are now closer to their interests and probably some of them will decide to read the novels we have mentioned in class.

Here you have my timeline:
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/2147753