Sharing online

If you like it, pin it!

At the end of this section, you will have...

shared your paragraph with classmates.
learnt about how to improve a written paragraph.
practised expressions to make suggestions.
reported to the whole class about ideas in your group.
worked on smartphone use vocabulary.

In this project we consider collaborative work as very important. For this reason, you are going to start sharing your missions with other students so that you can help them at the same time as they help you improve your tasks.

For a start, you will enter your site at Weebly to recover the paragraph about smartphone use that you wrote in the previous section. Do you think your text can be improved?

Let your classmates give you some tips on how you can write a good basic paragraph. Likewise, try to make some suggestions to other students. Now, your previous work needs to have included some new information regarding good writing.

Remember that your reference to check the texts must be the document `Rubric to assess informative/explanatory texts' (download in editable odt format, download in pdf)

Follow these steps

Watch the video How to write a basic paragraph to get some ideas.

Answer these questions orally:

What guidelines should you follow to write a good text?
Is there anything else that you must consider for writing a good paragraph or text? Brainstorm ideas with your classmates and teacher.

Watch the video IELTS Writing - Coherence & Cohesion and check if you considered the same or some other tips for good writing.

Now that you all know a bit more about good writing, it is time to share it with some of your classmates. Enter your site, more concretely the page entitled "My writing guide", where you posted your paragraph. Click on the social network buttons and choose P, which stands for Pinterest, the tool with which you are going to share your text with other three students. Likewise, the other students will share their text with you.

Tip: accompany your text with an image related to your text topic. You can upload it from your PC or find it on the Internet.

After reading your classmates' paragraphs, answer the following questions orally:

Were your ideas about the use of smartphones approximately the same?
How can you improve your classmates' text? Did your classmates use connectors correctly?

You will be able to answer these questions properly after practising the language contents presented below.

Upgrading your text

From the ideas that you all have suggested in your text regarding smartphone use, create a wordmap entitled 'smartphone vocabulary' using the online app cacoo.com. Sign in at this site and include all the expressions that are new to you. Your teacher will check that you include key vocabulary in your wordmap.

Once you finish your wordmap, copy the url link and include it in your site, within a section entitled "smartphone vocabulary".Remember that you will need to use the words and expressions included here in your final challenge.

Now, you will focus your attention on tips you can give to improve your classmates' texts.

For suggesting some tips, you can use expressions such as:

I think you need to/must/should ...
How about ...?
It is a good idea to ...
My suggestion/advice is that you ...
Why don't you ...?
You could (try) ...

Enter the BBC learning English site and identify some of the expressions above that are mentioned on a radio programme. In the mission that you are about to carry out, try to use some of these expressions to suggest your partners how to improve their paragraph in terms of content and grammar structures.

Do you know how to accept or refuse suggestions? Click on myenglishpages.com and notice several expressions that you can use to answer your classmates.

In order to fulfill the mission successfully, you will need to follow these instructions:

your teacher will create a group of four students.
from your site, you will click on P, which stands for Pinterest, where you will be sharing your paragraphs.
leave comments on whether you agree or not with your classmates' opinion about the use of smartphones and suggest ways of improving your classmates' text. Use the language structures and vocabulary that you have previously learnt.

In your group, discuss about which paragraph was the best and give a badge to the student who wrote it, according to your own opinion.

After having read and commented on the paragraphs, your group will report to the teacher and the whole class the ideas that the four of you had in common. Remember to add any new words or expressions to your wordmap and post it back on your weebly site.

Finally, at your site, enter the page 'My writing guide' and include all the tips and suggestions that you have received from your classmates.

Learning Diary

As you did in the previous section, reflect on how you have performed this mission in your Learning Diary (download in editable odt format, download in pdf)

Peter O'Shea. Writing tools (CC BY)

Create a new post on your blog with the title 'Sharing online' and answer the following questions:

What are the most difficult aspects?
What tool was the most difficult for you to work with?
What do you think is the most important aspect you have learned?
Are there any aspects you didn't understand?

Do not forget it would be great if you shared these feelings and thoughts with your classmates. You will have 10 or 15 minutes to complete this part.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 4.0

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