Our Educational Message

Hi, and welcome to our blog. This space is designed to share ideas and methodologies that we use to teach Turkish teenagers. In particular, there is a strong focus on ICT-ELT, which means if you like visual and technological support for your style of teaching, this blog is for you. My colleague, Brentson Ramsey, has been working alongside me for three years. He is also a big proponent of the ICT-ELT Paradigm, which means he will also be posting from his own teaching perspective on the blog.

2010 was the beginning of this new journey, and although there is no definitive ICT-ELT road map available for everyone to follow, it is exciting to explore the technological means to make teaching more fun and affective for students. Our main message is for teachers to ADOPT & ADAPT the paradigm shift for their own needs, and remember that
ICT-ELT is a TOOL, NOT a SOLUTION.

Friday 19 April 2013

USING PROPAGANDA to PERSUADE YOUR AUDIENCE

Today we want to share our latest INNOVATION ZONE project that is taking place this morning over in our Preparatory classes.  Since we have been studying PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES in ADVERTISING and ACADEMIC WRITING we felt it a great opportunity to have the students use these (hopefully) learned techniques to promote and persuade their audience (US, or any of you who would like to see them?) in next week’s presentation time during the INNOVATION ZONE. I will explain it below…

The use of propaganda in our lives is perpetrated by governments, associations and other groups who want to sway and persuade audiences to follow their ideas and beliefs.  The THREE techniques we shared with our young teens in Hazirlik were:

ASSOCIATION – Celebrities, Jumping on the bandwagon of groups, fashions…

LOADED LANGUAGE – Positive or Negative

EMOTIONAL – Vanity, Fear, Humor etc

So, I made two adverts that are self-explanatory once you click the links. 



You can see that I have used the same pictures for both Edu-Commercials.  That is another scaffolding attempt to get students to see that if emotive language, association and loaded language are used they can be persuaded to follow the commercial/advert maker’s idea.  I intentionally exaggerated the negatives and positives to show how far people go to persuade their audience.  I decided, however, not to use overly-graphic images since that can turn people off who are sitting on the fence.

So, how are we expecting to transfer this to the students’ collaboratively creative minds?  We will be putting them in groups, chosen by our desktop app, Triptico (that way everyone participates, as it is done randomly) then we will ask the students to discuss in groups of FOUR to decide upon which social issue they feel strongly about.  For this to work, and assure that everyone has a voice and the chance
to persuade using the techniques stated above, each student is being given 3 minutes to convince their peers which social issue they want to promote.  Once the 3 minutes are over, a vote will be taken, and that is what that group will research and complete for presentation next week.  We will now have FIVE different propaganda campaigns next week.  We will share with our school's colleagues and have them see our students participating in this creative & collaborative process.

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