High Impact Practices in the Virtual EFL Classroom

Video projects
By Melissa Martínez

​Edited by Uruguay Educa.

December 2020

I am sharing how the ​thematic unit Places was rounded up. The Present Perfect Tense
was introduced and this project created a “natural” context to use it.
The project instructions were pretty open: “​Imagine that you are on holidays or talk about
your last holidays; use as much present perfect as possible. You have to talk no less than
2 minutes and no more than 3 minutes. Use some pictures to illustrate your speech. It can
be presented as a video, audio + images, audio + ppt or in the format it suits you the best
taking into account that it must have your voice speaking and illustrative images.​”
The students were informed about the project and its characteristics about one month
earlier in a booklet. They used ​Vimeo​, ​Powtoon​, ​Genial.ly​, ​Tik Tok​ among other tools.
The project was divided in four weeks.
● Week one​: presentation of the present perfect and some practising.
● Week two​: practising.
● Week three​: project’s script draft (written draft). Once students presented the
written draft they were allowed to send as many practising audios as they
wanted. It is essential to make students aware of the importance of practising the
speech after feedback is given.
● Week four: ​project’s presentation.

The link to​ ​Natural Readers’ website​ ​was shared in a WhatsApp group to help students
improve their pronunciation independently.
To ensure positive results of this kind of practices, the teacher must take into consideration
several points such as:
- ​Information:​ students must have done some research and found all the
necessary information (characteristics, dates, delivery, steps, etc.) for the
project.

- ​Background knowledge​: the teacher must have taught the grammar tenses,
vocabulary and other important information the student will need.

- ​Students’ preferences​: the instructions must be as open as possible within a

specific frame. in this project, the students choose place and activities
according to their interests and preferences. As a result, the presentation will
not be as dull as watching 30 videos talking about the same place with similar
pictures.

- ​Scaffolding​: the teacher should organize the different stages of the project, the
students will feel more confident, and may not feel ridiculous speaking in
public.
 - ​Evaluation​: Use rubrics and clarify to the students what will be marked and
what not, for example, “I won’t take into account the good use of the program
(I’m not the ICT teacher) you use to record and edit the video, I will take into
account what you say, how you say it and that the pictures are according to
your speech”.

To conclude, a class project can have a high impact on the students’ learning process if
we, as teachers, involve them, allow them to be themselves by choosing several
components of the project and by giving them the tools they need.
We must also walk beside them all along the process.

To watch one of the videos created by students​ ​click here​.