News Coverage: Task Based Learning with Tourism Projects

One of the biggest Task Based Projects in my Advanced One English class is a Tourism Project. They get in small groups and create a travel agency whose purpose is to sell you on their city. Each group is given  a different English speaking city and they work together to create a brochure, presentation and then sell the hell out of it!

This year we worked hard to make it something special. Students were given a table to make their own, and after school for two hours family, friends, teachers, fellow students and everyone I could tweet showed up waiting to be convinced which team should get their covetted vote.

Students worked hard (in English!) to get people to vote for them and it was a great success.
 
We even got some newspaper coverage: www.noroeste.com.mx/publicaciones.php?id=857285
(this link seems to be acting temperamental. You can also access it from the wayback machine)

For my non Spanish speaking readers here's the essential gist (not a direct translation, as I changed a few things for clarity):

Tour around the world

School students have an English Festival with a sample of countries and traditions

By: Gabriela Camacho
March 28th 2013

CULIACÁN. Coordinated by English teacher Carissa Peck, fourth semester high school students at ITESM were put into 27 groups of 3 or 4 members to present various English speaking cities.

Singapore, Perth, Dublin, Seattle, Durban and Bristol were among the cities represented by high school students who creatively and enthusiastically prepared their booths.

As guest judges evaluated the students, their foreign language teachers: John Harper, Ann Persaud, and Carlos Gonzalez graded them based on their innovation, information, fluency, explanations and overall presentation.

Not the most  in depth coverage, but it was great to see the level of enthusiasm rise as students realized they'd be "famous" in the newspaper.