How to take your students on a virtual African Safari

 

Photo by >>> niedblog.de on Unsplash

My latest virtual tour is to the world-renowned Kruger National Park in South Africa. It became South Africa’s first national park in 1926 and is the largest game reserve in the country. Kruger National Park is reportedly home to 500 species of birds, as well as 100 reptiles and almost 150 mammals. In addition to taking a 4x4 safari  with the ranger, which is what we do on the virtual tour, visitors can take take a bush walk or view the park from a hot air balloon.

This session has a strong focus on learner autonomy running throughout all the activities.  We use peer teaching for vocabulary building,  a KWL graphic organizer to allow the students to take more control over their own learning and track their own progress and to decide if they have met their objectives, a quiz where the students are in charge of the questions, and finally we use an activity based on Twitter to allow for self-reflection.

To activate the students' prior knowledge and build up some new vocabulary, we start with a brainstorming activity. If you have never used AnswerGarden, it is basically an online tool that is designed to get quick and easy feedback from participants. It has an extremely simple design and does not involve the creation of an account. The question the teacher wants answers to is typed in the box and then it is created. I simply typed, 'What animals would you expect to see on a safari?’. The students get the link and then type in their answers in response to the question. The really nice feature of AnswerGarden is that the answers appear as a word cloud and this allows you to see the most common answers appearing larger and the less common ones appearing smaller. When setting up the question, the teacher has some options. They can choose different modes: brainstorm, to allow as many answers as many times as they want; classroom, to allow for as many answers as they want as long as they are different; moderate, to let the teacher moderate and block any inappropriate comment before it is displayed on the screen. The teacher can also set the character limit to 20 or 40 characters.

The students then look at the word cloud and discuss the various animals, and agree and disagree as to whether they would see these animals on a safari. They can take turns to describe the animals and a picture can be shared on the screen, by either the teacher or a student, of any description which is unclear.

For the main activity the students are each given a number and then given access to a shared Google doc,  where they will find an individual KWL chart which corresponds to their number. The KWL chart (Know, Want to know, Learned) is a graphic organizer which allows the students to complete information throughout the course of the lesson and also gives them access to the work of the other students, for purposes of discussion and collaboration and for getting new ideas.

There are many KWL type of graphic organizers available to use online. For this virtual tour I went for the simple and clear option of creating separate tables for each student on one shared Google doc.  Extremely simple, but very effective.

know	want to know	learned

 

The students are given a few minutes to complete the first column on their own with any information they know about going on a safari (for example; what animals, landscape, vegetation, travel, danger etc.) They are then encouraged to share by having a look at what their classmates have written.

For the second column, the students are put into pairs in breakout rooms. They have to think what they are expecting, or hoping to find out as a result of going on the virtual tour. They fill in their own column and get the chance to compare with their partner. This is very good for learner autonomy, as it is like the students setting their own individual aims. These aims will be different for each student. At the end they will be able to complete the third column to determine if these aims have been met and they have learned what they set out to. Items which can be included in this column are things like, 'Are the animals roaming freely?’, ‘Can you drive right up to them?’ and ‘ Is it dangerous to go on a safari?’

The students then are taken on the actual safari by the ranger, who introduces himself and gives a background to what is expected to be seen. It is a very authentic experience, as you are in the vehicle beside him, like a passenger. Here is the virtual safari we went on. The activity that the students are involved in whilst watching the excerpt from the video is a dictation followed by a listening activity to complete a quiz. They will also be involved in making up their own questions to add to the quiz, which their classmates will answer. (The whole safari is over 15 minutes long, so I used the section up until 6.45 minutes).

I am well aware that for many teachers the word, 'dictation’ may have negative connotations and be associated with old-fashioned ways of teaching with little use in communicative language teaching. You might well be wondering what place it has in a lesson that I said was going to focus on learner autonomy! However, I am firmly in favor of using different kinds of dictation, and I find it to be a useful activity in the online context. In the activity which I devised, the teacher is removed from the process entirely. The learners are each sent a question from the quiz in the private chat, so they are the only one who can see it. They take turns to dictate their question to the others and choose someone to read it out and spell any difficult words, to check they have written it correctly. They listen out for the answers during the viewing of the video and, at the end, write one additional question each in the chat box for everyone else to answer.

After the virtual tour the students work firstly on their own, and then in small groups on a breakout room to share their learning by completing the final column of the KWL chart and taking turns to listen and respond to the others in their group.

The final activity is based on Twitter, and I took my inspiration from an article I read and have  posted about on LinkedIn. You can read the article here . This activity allows the students to use self-reflection. They have to tweet about the experience . This tweet will allow the learners to reflect on what they have learned and also use some of the new vocabulary they learned. The learners can, ideally live tweet this, for an authentic experience. However, sometimes this is not desirable, and they can simply share it in the chat box or on their Google doc for the others to read.

The teacher can share on the screen ideas of what to write about, in the form of short prompts. This is good for differentiation in a mixed level class, such as I had for the virtual tour. They could respond to one or more of the prompts if they wished. This encourages them to use Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) Examples of the kind of prompts which would be suitable for a mixed-level class are:

·         What was the most surprising thing about the virtual tour, and why did it surprise you?

·         What, for you, was the most important part of your learning, and why?

·         What made you feel curious, and do you think that learning is different if you feel curious?

I really feel that the students were motivated during this virtual tour, as they were actively engaged in their own learning throughout.  They were in charge of what they wanted to find out and of assessing if they had been successful. I feel this is particularly useful in a session like this when the students are not a regular class. They are all at different levels and have different background knowledge and prior learning experiences. Structuring it in this way allows everyone to learn something of value for them by the end of the session.

The African Safari is a very good topic for a virtual tour, as it is something that very few students will ever realistically have the chance to experience in real life. The excitement of the experience made it highly motivating.