Case Study 2.3

Vicky Saumell is the co-ordinator of the EFL Department at Instituto San Francisco de Asis, a private school in Argetina, Buenos Aires. An amount of 800 students of different levels  have three hours of English a week.
When reviewing how English was taught at the school, she felt the students were not offered the best option for learning because teachers were relying too much on the coursebook to drive the English curriculum. When teachers do this, they run the risk of forcing students to work on something that does not reflect their personal interests or that is not completely suitable for them.
Therefore, the departement decided to adopt a "Project-based learning focus" and abandoned the coursebooks to design their own curriculum and materials. This projects were welcomed with enthusiasm because they provided interesting and attractive ideas and offered a creative output, which resulted in increased motivation for teachers and students!
This approach is extremely successful because it is directed at students' interests and knowledge to better engage them in the learning process.

Context: During one of her last projects, Vicky used "digital storytelling" with three classes of twenty learners aged 17. The idea of these kind of projects is to combine the art of telling stories with a variety of digital multimedia.
If we analyse this case from the point of view of the TPCK Model, we can identify the use of technology in the creation of wikis to keep record of the projects being done and to upload the final products of each of them, the different tools for digital storytelling, Windows Movie Maker, soundtrack recorder, animated cartoons from Zimmer Twins software.
As regards, the element of Pedagogy, the idea of one of these projects was for students to work in groups, choose famous paintings and write a narrative that linked the stories together and finally, through Windows Movie Maker, they had to create an animated slideshows and record a soundtrack saying what they liked about the graffitti.
In another project, students had to recreate part of the story of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream using different tools.
The Content of these projects has to do with developing digital literacy skills as well as working with famous plays, such as Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.
Besides, what is interesting about these projects is that students feel they have more choice and that their interests are being taken into account by the teacher. As they are working with something closer to their realities, they can have a say and express their opinion with great confidence. They are motivated and use the target language in a meaningful way.

From the point of view of the SAMR Model, I would say that part of these projects are at the subtitution level as the students write a story but instead of doing it in paper, they do it online and surrounded by multimedia complementary material. In the case of soundtracks, we can say that it stands at the Modification level as they couldn't have recorded it without technology.

I will definitely look forward to integrating projects in my own teaching!