"It's elementary, my dear Watson"

Regarding the activity done in class which was related to famous crime writers of the UK and the US, we can reflect on the following key points. 

Firstly, the main objective of the activity is learning more about different writers from these two countries, as in class they have read two crime stories, one written by Arthur Conan Doyle and another by Agatha Christie, and they are going to read one adaptation of Raymond Chandler. This way, they can relate the stories they have read to the lives of these writers and learn a little bit more about them. Moreover, it is a way to show them different stories which could increase their extensive reading. Finally, another important goal of this work is for them to know how to extract the main ideas of a short text and how to organize them into a time line, so this way they learn to summarize important aspects of a text. 

Regarding the advantages of using TimeToast, it can be said that it is useful not only to see the development of the writer, but also their most important events. Additionally, it is a way to show the rest of the groups these important aspects, as each group developed the time line of a different writer. Moreover, it is a very visual tool which helps students to understand the information better, especially those students which are visual learning students. 

For the organization of the activity, we followed the following procedure:

1. Explanation of the activity: reading a short text related to one famous writer provided by the teacher and create a time line so everybody can see the main events of their lives. 
2. Divide the class into groups of three people each with a website which creates random groups.
3. Divide the text of each group into three parts, so each members becomes an expert in their part.
4. Share the information of their individual text with the rest of the group with a summary.
5. Read the whole text together to check the information.
6. Use the laptops of the high school to create the time line using TimeToast: teacher explains them how to use it and show them an example created by her. 
7. Almost two were dedicated to create the time line.
8.  One session was used to expose their time lines to their partners orally in order to share the information. At this point, the rest of the groups had a checklist to assess their partners (peer-assessment)
9. Kahoot to check how many important information they had collected. 

During the process shared above we could find some problems that were solved. The most important one was related to the use of TimeToast, that is why two sessions were needed. They needed extra explanations to check carefully how the tool is used so they could do it well. At the beginning of both sessions I explained them how to use it, how to look for photographs or add key words. At the end of this second session, they were experts in using TimeToast. 

To this point and related to the previous one, we can say that my students find really challenging the use of this tool as they have never used it before, but they also find it very useful to show the importance of their texts and also to learn new information about other authors. Furthermore, they found it really attractive and told me that it could be really useful for other subjects such as Geography and History or Spanish. 

When I think into aspects that could be improved for a future activity, I think that maybe three people were too much regarding the type of text, and that just two of them would have been OK. Additionally, next time I will upload a video tutorial (simple one) to their Google Classroom so they can check on it as many times as they need. I would also say that it was a very good idea to give them two sessions instead of one as it was previously established, because they understood better the task. 

To sum up, if we take into consideration all the points mentioned above, we can conclude that TimeToast has helped me show the students how to summarize texts in which many dates and important data are being told and also how to organize them. Plus, it has help me that my students work cooperatively starting with a text and have been able to learn not only from their text, but also from others. Finally, as this TimeToast activity was focused on crime writers, it has also helped me motivate my students to read different types of stories and authors, some have even become fans of crime novel.

Crime writers: Arthur Conan Doyle

The Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie