TimeToast: A History of the Beatles

Using my own personal music preference, I decided to bring my 2nd Bachillerato students the following text called "A History of the Beatles", which you can check at this website link.

As it can be seen, the text is of a relative length, and it is written mainly in the past tense, with no ESL adaptation but considerably easy to read and understand.

Learning objectives:

• Understand a text written in plain, real English
• Work in pairs and take decisions together
• Use tools online (TimeToast, picture hunting)
• Summarise key information
• Scan for particular bits of information (dates)

After I presented the TimeToast tool in class, I asked my students to work in pairs, and decisions were genuinely taken by the members of each pair, with little or no influence from the teacher himself. I specifically asked them to find any instance of years or dates, and try to put it down on the Timeline, with a brief text written in the past tense.  I also asked them to accompany each event from a picture as close as possible to the fact happening.

In the end the whole class were brainstorming about their findings, and they joined all their ideas into one final timeline version, which is the one presented here.

As for the difficulties found, the students faced problems when they wanted to include a date of the type month & year (without knowing the exact day) since TimeToast doesn't allow to insert just months (either exact days or a whole year). They eventually suggested using day 1 of the month so that it wouldn't simply be the year, or they investigated deeper about the event so that they found out the exact date, outside the text. There was also some confusion regarding the American way of adding a date (first the month, then the day) which was solved with no major problems.

Once that they handled the tool, they really enjoyed it and finished the project in their own free time at home.

Next time that I will be using Timetoast, I would select an easier, shorter text to work with, where the information is presented in a simpler manner. This text was so long that many of them didn't stop to read it through, but rather they focused only on dates.

As a conclusion, in my opinion Timetoast has helped my students in the following ways:

• They have learnt a new tool to select and organize bits of information
• They have taken decisions through discussion in pairs and groups
• They have looked into the history of one of the greatest bands ever
• They have searched the web for extra information and photos.

Finally, here you can check the timeline.