Tour Builder Project is Over!

A month ago I set off on a journey in project-based learning. I chose Tour Builder as a starting point, as I see it now, quite on a whim. But I stuck to it and tried to get as much experience from it as possible.
In this post I'm going to describe the process of working on it , what I learnt and where I failed.
 I'm going to briefly describe the stages and draw some conclusions in the end.

To be honest, when I started with my own tour and a tutorial I didn't see where it was going. Ok, I had some ideas, which I posted here, but nothing was thought through (bad teacher!).  At first, I thought Ss will just make their own projects. But the logic of project based learning demanded some feedback and collaboration. That's how steps 5 and 6 were born. All the time I was curious to know what my students think of the project and, of course, I asked them for little feedback in the end (step 7)

Aim: To engage students in project work through digital storytelling
Level: Intermediate
What students need: access to Internet and personal computers
Time: class time was devoted to instructions and clarifications. Ss worked mostly at home. With reasonable deadlines for the assignments it took about a month.

Step 1. Introduction
On the first lesson this year I shared with my students that I would like them to be more autonomous learners this year. We discussed different ways to become one and I brought up project work. They seemed excited and experienced having done it in school work.

Step 2. Example
I created my own tour, shared it with them and asked simple comprehension questions such as

1.When did I go to Belgrade?

2.How did I get to Montenegro?

3.Who did I hang out with in Nurma?

This familiarized them with the tool and showed what kind of information it can include. Then we discussed answers in class and I explained that I would like them to do a similar project about their summer.


Step 3. Theory
I asked Ss to watch the video tutorial on how to make a tour and again asked them to answer some questions.

We discussed it the next lesson and I tried to ensure they understand the mechanics of the web tool.

Step 4. Creation of the tour.
I gave my students a week to create a tour about their summer. It had some formal requirements such as

1. There should be at least 10 slides
2. There should be at least 1 picture for a slide (doesn't have to be a personal picture)
3. There should be at least 4 sentences in English (don't forget to use Past Tenses)

example of student's tour

I wrote a detailed feedback to each work. That included both my impressions and language correction.

example of feedback

Step 5. Peer feedback.
Each student randomly got a project of their peer and had to write their feedback. I asked them to include a summary of the summer and also their personal impressions.

example of peer feedback

After I got the writings back, I checked them and located some common mistakes. I compiled a list of incorrect sentences (anonymous) and gave it to my Ss for correction.

Step 6. Creation of a collaborative map.

The final task came out quite spontaneously by me asking : What else can they do with it preferably together? Their task was to create the class' tour of the summer, put it together and present it to me. Again there were some formal requirements such as

• You tour should include 2 locations from every person in the class.
• Each slide should have at least one photo and 4 sentences of description.
• The places should be coordinated according to time scale.

To help my Ss with group work I devised four roles - two people for one role - and we assigned them in the class. The roles in the group were:

The web-designers. People who will put everything together using his/her gmail account.

The time-masters. People who will time-coordinate all of the locations.

The editors. People who will check and edit all of the sentences.

The gatherers. People who will gather information from everyone.

I mentioned that the preferred language of communication was English. However, I didn't intend to force it or control it in any way. In the end, 3 out of 8 students admitted using English in their written communication (which made me happy).
By this point I decided to let go of the control and make them take more responsibility of their work. It didn't turn out ideally but I think it was necessary at this point: group work implies collaboration between students not always through the teacher.

screenshot of the group project

Step 7. Reflection
In the end, I asked my students to answer couple of questions. I was dying to know what they think of it and whether they feel it helped their English. Everyone agreed that it was useful but couldn't really specify how. These are some examples:

What I would  change

• I would try to make the final presentation on a digital device during class time. I think it will make the end of the project more accentuated. As well as being an excellent opportunity for Ss to practice public speaking, it automatically makes their personal stories more interactive as they can engage in genuine discussion.
• Grading. This aspect is definitely not a strong point of this project. I tried to avoid rigid 2 to 5 system and introduced rubrics. For every stage of the project students could get 10 points and overall there were 4 stages. In the end I converted the final score into percent. Still I questioned whether the grades were appropriate.
• The group work didn't go as smoothly as I hoped. There were definitely some problems in communication during step 6. Some people got more done than others, there were some mistakes and bugs and it wasn't clear who was responsible for them. I'm still asking myself if I could have foreseen and prevented those, but I also understand that sometimes group dynamics is difficult to predict and you have to lay some responsibility on students' shoulders. I made sure to discuss the specifics of group work with my students and some of them seem to agree with me.
• Grammar activities. I was surprised to see quite a few grammar mistakes in my students' projects. Most of them had to do with past tenses which could have been avoided for they are strong Intermediate students. If I did it again, I would include short preparatory activity that focuses on Past Tenses and their use. At this point, it would also made sense to revise the idea of proofreading.
• Couple of weeks in the project I started feeling that my Ss are doing something completely useless, something that will not be of any relevance to their lives. I still think it is partly true. In the future, I will try to carefully select the tasks to match Ss reality. Nonetheless, a week after the end of the project I see it differently. I see that students shared their stories through the medium of digital web tools, they tried working in groups and hopefully understood something about collaborative work.

Despite these concerns, I'm happy I stuck to it. It taught me the whole lot about projects, teaching, google maps and my students.

I would be glad to hear any feedback and suggestions from experienced PBL educators!