A few years ago I blogged about students using Super Hero Comic Book Maker to conduct interviews in French on iPads. Wanting students to create a similar product to practice asking and answering information questions, but do so using their laptops instead of iPads, I turned to PowerPoint this year. I am guessing this same type of project can be done in Google Slides, but not being in a Google school, I cannot offer any guidance on how to do that. I call this a pre-interpersonal speaking task because it is not spontaneous like true interpersonal communication, but it mimics it.
Students started by teaming up with a partner. One partner created a new PowerPoint document and shared it with their partner, giving them editing privileges. Once both partners were able to edit the PowerPoint on their respective devices, they each chose an emoji to represent them. Why emojis? Well, for one, they are fun, but they are also easy to access and don’t have the same copyright restrictions most images found on the internet have. On the first slide, the emoji on the right makes a statement about something they do on a regular basis (the dialogue is written in speech bubbles). On the subsequent four slides, the emoji on the left asks four information questions (who, what, why, etc.) and the emoji on the right answers them. Then, optionally, they can both say good-bye on the final slide.
Next comes the speaking part. Students use the recording tool in PowerPoint to record the dialogue on each slide. When the slideshow is played from the beginning, it plays like a little video. When selecting interviews to put into the video below, I was actually able to export them as a video and combine them all.
The great thing about PowerPoint is that it is a tool my students are already pretty familiar with, so that takes most of the learning curve out of it and allows them to focus on the project itself.
What tools have you used for speaking tasks? What did you like best?
Liked this post? Sign up below to receive future posts by email!
