Investigating the benefits of virtual travel for our carbon footprint.

 

Kolk, Melinda. earthdrawn.jpg. Oct-00. Pics4Learning

For a number of months now I have been taking groups of students on virtual tours to all corners of the world, and beyond! We have been learning about different countries, increasing vocabulary, improving  communication and cooperation skills and growing in autonomy. In this lesson, I wanted the learners to reflect that, although enriching, there is always an environmental price to pay when travelling. Like many others, I have recently been commenting on the continued patchy cover of environmental issues in tefl materials. As well as this, I have noticed that interest in this topic is not continued over time by many teachers. They will address some small aspect of the environment in one or two lessons, then that's it! There also seems to be a general lack of ideas about how to incorporate resources into interesting and motivating lessons. I feel that it is important to do what you can to remedy this – no matter how small. Therefore, this week I prepared resources for the students to consider the advantages and disadvantages of going on virtual tours, as opposed to real travel. I hope these might be interesting for other teachers, to help raise awareness with their students in a slightly different way.

In this virtual tour, the students will not actually travel anywhere, but rather cooperate to rank means of transport in terms of being environmentally friendly, use decoding skills in listening, complete an online carbon footprint calculator, then record a short video on Flipgrid, giving their opinions on the benefits to the environment of online tours.

For a warmer activity, and to build up and recycle vocabulary the students took part in an AnswerGarden. I made up the question, 'name as many means of transport as you can', shared the link and they had to submit as many answers as possible. I am really a big fan of AnswerGarden. Check it out here  if it is new for you. It is quick and easy to set up and the students don't have to register or login. As they enter the words, they are displayed as a word cloud, with the most frequent responses appearing larger.  After that we ranked the environmentally friendliness of the transport. This activity obviously has the potential to be extended into longer activities such as pyramid debates (where the students rank the items on their own, then in pairs, then in fours and then finally the whole group has to agree on an order). However, I just wanted to use this as a way in to the main activity.

We then watched a very short travel video from the BBC on the topic of how to reduce your carbon footprint when you fly.  As is the case with many teachers, I am thinking again about and questioning the usual sequence of  predicting, skimming, scanning etc. that has dominated both listening and reading lessons, and is still taken for granted by a great many teachers. There is ever increasing interest in this area. See for example: John Field, Richard Cauldwell, Sheila Thorne etc who talk about the benefits of using a decoding approach and focusing on bottom up skills. From my own teaching experience, I have noticed that the majority of my learners do indeed already have proficiency in top down skills from L1, which they seem to be able to transfer, and that it is a waste of time to spend a prolonged period practicing them in English. It is not really teaching them anything. In a recent TEFL Training Institute Podcast, Michael Swan was talking about these very issues, and this gave me the idea to practice decoding skills with these learners, to show them how to use their own authentic materials outside the class in a similar way., as this is not something that might automatically occur to learners. You can listen to the podcast here. Although I do agree with Michael Swan, I have noticed with other learners that they do not in fact have these skills, so you do need to be careful and not take it for granted. I tend to agree with the view taken by Newton , J. (2017). Comprehending misunderstanding. ELT Journal,71, 237-244. that it should not always be assumed that these strategies are already in place. For example learners who have not had the benefit of extensive education, those from education systems whuch are very different, younger students, and those required to develop top down skills for an exam will still need to focus on these. However, with my present group, they were already well used to skimming and scanning and predicing etc. and I wanted to be able to teach them something they could use on their own when listening to other texts, as this fits in with my philosophy of striving to increase learner autonomy. The decoding skill we used was one that I have used many times before. I asked the students to listen to short excerpts from the text and to say how many words they heard and compare with each other. They actually found this quite difficult, as is usually the case. This is why I always feel it's worthwhile spending time on bottom up skills like this, rather than excessive amounts of skim, or listen for gist, and tell your partner the main idea. (Look out for a more indepth look at decoding skills and some resources I have developed in a forthcoming blog!).

After this, we watched  the entire short video, and the students had to try and identify some tips that the speaker gave for reducing the carbon footprint whilst travelling. The learners agreed that the decoding strategy had the potential to help them in this, although they would need to practice it more.

The second main activity was a chance for the learners to work independently and complete a short online carbon footprint calculator, then compare their results in pairs.  Many such resources are available online, and I found this one to be suitable in difficulty and length for B1+, if you would like to use it.

This activity changed the pace of the lesson, as it gave the students a chance to complete some individual work by interacting with the online calculator, before speaking to their partner and comparing their results. 

For the final activity the students used Flipgrid. I am a big fan of this online tool. It is very useful for learners to connect, communicate and collaborate with each other by sharing and commenting on each other’s videos, and it is incredibly easy to set it up. See my previous blog about this here.  On this occasion, I set up the topic which I entitled 'Carbon Footprint' and wrote the question that I want the students to respond to, and as on the previous occasion, I recorded a video question prompt too. I actually always do this, as it makes it much more personal and engaging for them if they see your face and hear your voice. After this, I shared it with the students through the link. You can share it in several ways – either through a link, embedding it in a website etc., or by sharing a QR code. The students had some time to brainstorm ideas together and think about all the information we had found out earlier in the video and the online calculator  and to think of the question, 'what are the environmental benefits of going on virtual tours instead of real travel?' Using Flipgrid provided a way for me to ensure that the learners continued to think of these issues after the class. After the lesson, they were required  watch the other students' work and comment on it, using the student to student replies feature . I also told them that I would be making a mix tape of the best parts, and this was also a way of motivating them to participate. 

Not only was this virtual tour useful for recycling much of the vocabulary and bringing together many of the ideas we had encountered during the series of lessons, but it also served the very important purpose of being able to incorporate awareness raising of environmental issues into the lessons, without artificially trying to insert them, as it was a logical extension to what we had been doing before. The learners  found it useful to have the opportunity to explore the issues from several different sources and I felt that this was a good use of technology to achieve a purpose and not just as an end in itself. I would highly recommend using Flipgrid. I have always found that the attractive features such the option of adding filters, frames, text, emojis and drawings to the video is motivating and lowers the affective filter.  The learners tend to produce more fluent, confident and accurate speaking, partly as a result of feeling less intimidated than when speaking directly in front of everyone in the class and also because they can pause and record their video, to ensure that they are happy that they are submitting their best attempt. They can rehearse it several times. The learners are given a lot of control also in that they can have the camera off or have different backgrounds to protect their privacy. 

I'm sorry that this may be the last virtual tour for a while, but I'm about to embark upon the first module in my Master's Degree and will be devoting my time to that. I hope that other teachers may be inspired to try out some of my ideas and to develop some imaginative tours of their own. Please let me know if you do!