Last week you may have seen Sarah's posting on our big day out at EmbassyCES, Deptford filming ourselves teaching lessons using MEC on an IWB.

We had a great time and would like to say a big 'Thankyou' to EmbassyCES for letting us borrow their students for the morning, and also to the students themselves.

Sarah had a bit more footage of her lesson than I did, but a summary of my IWB lesson is below. I hope it gives you a few ideas for using MEC on the IWB in your school. Please excuse the shaky camera work…

Lesson using MEC on an IWB

Resources:  The MEC News Item 'Nanotechnology could be used in food' and the Listening Activity 'Food and Nutrition'

Language: Food vocabulary

Skills: Reading, listening and speaking

Level: Upper-intermediate

Age: Adult

Part 1

I began this lesson with a quick warmer and then I showed the class photos of different types of food on the IWB. I'd taken these directly from the internet by searching in Google images. I elicited the food vocabulary from the learners and then elicited whether each food was healthy or unhealthy. Then I asked learners to discuss with a partner two foods they hated, two foods they loved, and why. Each pair reported back to the class.

Here you see the learners talking about food. I think they were enthusiastic because it was the lesson before lunch!

Here's some feedback from a few individual students.

Part 2

The second part of the lesson was to introduce the learners to the MEC News Item. I showed them the picture that goes with the News Item and asked them to guess what it was about. Then I gave everyone a printed copy of the News Item and asked them to read it. They had 5-10 minutes to do this.

Once learners had read and understood the News Item I asked them to put the article away and look at the activity on the board. As a class I showed them sections of the News Item with key vocabulary blocked out. I asked for a different volunteer to read each paragraph out loud, filling in the missing word when they came to it. Each missing word had a definition at the bottom of the screen to help them work out the answers. Any words they didn't understand we looked up on the board together using MEDO. You can see them having a go in the clip below.

And here's a vocabulary revelation.

For the final activity we opened up the MEC level 5 listening activity 'Food and Nutrition'. As a class we listened to the information about the nutrients found in different foods. Then the learners volunteered to come up and choose the correct options from the list of vitamins and nutrients. This was a great activity for the IWB as they just had to tap the correct answers with their finger. The rest of the class fed back on whether they agreed or disagreed with the choice and as a class we got MEC to instantly mark the activity.

To round up I asked the learners to discuss the 'Food for thought' questions from the News Item in pairs, then we had a group discussion on the feedback from each pair. It was a fun lesson and all the easier to do for having the whiteboard there to make the group activities really interactive. By the time the bell went everyone was famished!