Assignment 3: Google Apps Lesson

Lesson topic: Making recipes

Lesson time: 30-60 minutes

Target: high beginner students in a Korean university conversation class

N.B. This lesson will serve as the culmination of a unit on cooking in a conversation class. The vocabulary focus has been on food and verbs associated with cooking and the grammar has focused on imperatives.

Procedures

Warm-up (3-5 minutes)

1.       Groups discuss the following questions.

o    "What is your favorite home-cooked food?"

o    "What ingredients are in it?"

o    "How do you make it?"

Preparation Activity (5-10 minutes)

1.       Teacher elicits list of cooking verbs (previously studied) and writes them on the board and confirms understanding.

2.      Teacher elicits students' favorite ingredients and writes them on the board.

3.      One at a time, groups choose an ingredient they like.

4.      Continue until each group has 3 ingredients.

Main Activity (20 -30 minutes)

1.       As a group, students go to http://goo.gl/YnzycH (Cookin' With Google custom search) on their phone or tablet and enter their ingredients into the search.

2.      Group decides upon a recipe they would like to make and writes the necessary ingredients, equipment, and procedures on a piece of note paper.

3.      As a group, students go to http://goo.gl/Um4G48 (Google Docs form) on a phone or tablet and write their recipe into the form.

If Time Remains/Homework

1.       Students follow link to view other responses.

2.      Browse other groups' recipes and choose the most delicious sounding one.

Possible Follow-up

1.       Since there are no cooking facilities available, student or volunteer teacher could make the food and bring it to class next time.

Lesson review/analysis

How will you use this resource to meet the needs of your instructional purposes?

The aims of my lesson are to have students use vocabulary related to food and cooking and to form imperative sentences. They will do this first, by brainstorming what they already know and then by using Google to search for authentic materials related to this. They will then use Google Docs to recreate their ideas in sentence form using correct verb inflections.

Why is this topic, information or content appropriate for the lesson you to create? (e.g., level of authenticity, relevance to target language, interest level, and motivation)?

This topic is in the textbook and so is very relevant to the class. It uses authentic recipes written by people on cooking websites. I believe the authenticity will motivate students as will the topic itself. Cooking is very trendy in Korea recently and cooking shows are very popular on television.

What directions or tech support will you provide students before the lesson to focus learning and adapt this resource for your instructional resources?

I will instruct the students to bring notebooks or tablets with them to class in order to make reading in a group easier though phones will suffice as well. I will teach them to use the Google Docs form interface, perhaps by showing it to them before class or printing a sample for them to work with during class if they need help outlining their ideas.

What are the potential problems, either language based or technical, that you may need to troubleshoot or prepare for?

It may be difficult for groups to work together using a small interface like on a phone. I will encourage them to bring computers or tablets if they have them. (We don't have a computer lab available to us or I would use that instead.) The students could potentially also run into difficult language on the cooking websites that they are not able to understand. In that case, I will either help explain things in class, or encourage them to use a dictionary for help, or I'll help them choose another recipe.