Sequencing

Each lesson has 3 stages:

1. Students work on their own to collect information
2. Students join their group and exchange information
3. Students compose documents for the final report

Autonomous learning

One main goal of this module is to let students discover things for themselves and at their own speed. They will develop their search skills (using Internet search engines) and learn how to keep information available for their friends (copying text and images to a temporary file).

The "Useful links" in the lesson plans are meant for the teacher: only when students ask for his assistance, he may set them on the right track with these URL's.

Idem for the "Samples": these are pages that may be shown to students as an example of what they are expected to produce.

Group work

The class is divided in groups of 3 students who will cooperate to produce a final group-document. A class with 7 groups of 3 students will produce 7 different documents.

It facilitates the proceedings when each student gets a number within the group (ranging from 1 to 3). The teacher can then organize tasks as follows:
"All the numbers one will try and find information on topic 1,
all the numbers two on topic 2,
all the numbers three on topic 3!"
After the research stage, students will inform the other members of their group about their findings.

Communicative approach

Students have to collect data individually. When they join their group there is a natural information gap: they gathered different pieces of information and have all the reason to listen and speak to each other during the exchange process.

The most practical way for students to present their search results to the other group-members, is on the monitor of a pc. We suggest the teacher creates a shared folder (module e.g.) on the intranet with a subfolder per group (group1, group2, etc.). Each group member can create his/her temporary file in the right groupfolder and show it to the others. After all students have informed the group-members, the results are discussed, a selection is agreed about. What information is essential or most illustrative? Which elements make for a global view? What is just repetition or not to the point and will be left aside?

Product-centred

During the third stage of each period students work on their final report. They use adequate illustrations and texts from their temporary files, they add personal comment and lay-out elements to create informative pages about the subject of the day. New pages must be linked to the subjects of previous or following lessons, in order to reach a global view. In the end, each group should present a solid body of illustrated text (printed or in HTML-format) which shows what was learnt during the module processes.