Using TimeToast to summarize the main events in a literary text
I decided to use this tool to work on my students’ comprehension of a literary text, which, even in C1, is a type of text that they often find challenging.
In this case, I used the first and last pages of the novel Saturday, by Ian McEwan, which is a text I often use with my students to do all kinds of activities. In this novel, everything takes place in more or less 24 hours, on a Saturday. So, if we read the beginning and the ending, we are able to see what the main character, Henry Perowne, does when he wakes up and when he goes to sleep.
My objective with this activity was to show students that they are able to understand a literary text, finding it easy to isolate the facts from the “literary elements”, so that they are able to understand at least what is going on, the action of the novel. Apart from understanding the text, the activity also had the objectives of learning how to summarize and having to reach an agreement with some classmates, while also practicing oral interaction. And, of course, another objective would be to encourage them to read literature.
I think that the advantages of using TimeToast were that it was fun to do a reading comprehension and a summarizing activity differently, adding a different tool. I also think that doing something that provides a result can be very motivating for students (in this case, seeing the resulting timeline they made).
To set up the activity, I asked my C1.1 students if they had ever heard of Ian McEwan (some of them had seen the film Atonement), and what they imagined a novel entitled Saturday might be about. After that, I explained that we were going to read the beginning and the ending, in groups.
I organized them into groups of six people, three of whom would read the beginning, and the other three, the ending. I asked them to read their part and discuss what they understood or did not understand. Then I explained how to use TimeToast, where I had already created the empty timelines, and gave each group of three a laptop.
Each group of three had to isolate the actions that Henry did in their text, and create the different events, in a simple timeline. If they wanted, they could add some images; I encouraged them to use images to illustrate some vocabulary that they were not familiar with, which some of them did.
The main problem we encountered was that I had not realized that TimeToast does not allow you to write the time when something happens, that is, you can only establish a date and, in this case, it would have been better to have the possibility of adding the time, because everything happens on the same day. Fortunately, the application respects the order in which you write the events, so I asked the students to add them in order.
Apart from that, some students found it hard to learn how to use TimeToast, but others didn’t, so we solved this by letting the most skilled students use the computer. In general, their reaction to the tool was positive: something different! And I think they found the activity fun, overall.
Maybe next time I would use a text where not everything happens on the same day, to make things visually easier. Also, I don’t know if it’s possible to use TimeToast on a cell phone, but, if so, I would prefer to make students use their own cell phones, because it always takes forever to make our laptops work.
TimeToast helped me achieve my learning objectives because its format favors brevity (great for summarizing), because it introduced something new in the classroom that turned out to be motivating for my students, and because having to divide the text into the different events helped them understand the text better.
Here’s one example of the result:
First page: https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/2186299
Last page: https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/2186316
In this case, I used the first and last pages of the novel Saturday, by Ian McEwan, which is a text I often use with my students to do all kinds of activities. In this novel, everything takes place in more or less 24 hours, on a Saturday. So, if we read the beginning and the ending, we are able to see what the main character, Henry Perowne, does when he wakes up and when he goes to sleep.
My objective with this activity was to show students that they are able to understand a literary text, finding it easy to isolate the facts from the “literary elements”, so that they are able to understand at least what is going on, the action of the novel. Apart from understanding the text, the activity also had the objectives of learning how to summarize and having to reach an agreement with some classmates, while also practicing oral interaction. And, of course, another objective would be to encourage them to read literature.
I think that the advantages of using TimeToast were that it was fun to do a reading comprehension and a summarizing activity differently, adding a different tool. I also think that doing something that provides a result can be very motivating for students (in this case, seeing the resulting timeline they made).
To set up the activity, I asked my C1.1 students if they had ever heard of Ian McEwan (some of them had seen the film Atonement), and what they imagined a novel entitled Saturday might be about. After that, I explained that we were going to read the beginning and the ending, in groups.
I organized them into groups of six people, three of whom would read the beginning, and the other three, the ending. I asked them to read their part and discuss what they understood or did not understand. Then I explained how to use TimeToast, where I had already created the empty timelines, and gave each group of three a laptop.
Each group of three had to isolate the actions that Henry did in their text, and create the different events, in a simple timeline. If they wanted, they could add some images; I encouraged them to use images to illustrate some vocabulary that they were not familiar with, which some of them did.
The main problem we encountered was that I had not realized that TimeToast does not allow you to write the time when something happens, that is, you can only establish a date and, in this case, it would have been better to have the possibility of adding the time, because everything happens on the same day. Fortunately, the application respects the order in which you write the events, so I asked the students to add them in order.
Apart from that, some students found it hard to learn how to use TimeToast, but others didn’t, so we solved this by letting the most skilled students use the computer. In general, their reaction to the tool was positive: something different! And I think they found the activity fun, overall.
Maybe next time I would use a text where not everything happens on the same day, to make things visually easier. Also, I don’t know if it’s possible to use TimeToast on a cell phone, but, if so, I would prefer to make students use their own cell phones, because it always takes forever to make our laptops work.
TimeToast helped me achieve my learning objectives because its format favors brevity (great for summarizing), because it introduced something new in the classroom that turned out to be motivating for my students, and because having to divide the text into the different events helped them understand the text better.
Here’s one example of the result:
First page: https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/2186299
Last page: https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/2186316
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