THE 'ENVIRONMENT' PROJECT: AN EXAMPLE OF CREATING CROSS-CURRICULUM DIGITAL MATERIALS FOR THE ENGLISH/CLIL CLASS WITH MALTED

Teaching specific subjects or topics in a second or third language in secondary school, in multilingual programs, face the problem of the lack of materials to use in the classroom. The task to prepare the materials (texts, audiovisuals or activities) to cope with the learning strategies of the student at a particular level is not a matter to improvise but a matter to prepare these materials in advance in order to achieve successfully the objectives stated in the specific program or schedule. That could mean an important challenge for the teacher interested in the creation of his/her own material, a challenge to carry out new techniques for second or third language learning. The Malted editor software can provide the teacher with an interesting tool for his/her classes to be used by students at the computer classrooms or as a complementary study material at home. In this presentation we will deal with the internet resources the teacher can find to create materials with the application of basic software to modify pictures or record texts to add to the frames in MALTED. We will analyse the possibilities of the different tasks in learning languages that the teacher can introduce and the way content can be organized in MALTED. The way web resources and Malted activities contribute to develop learning strategies.
The Environment project is an example of how cross-curriculum topics and the CLIL approach can be applied in the fourth course of Spanish students in compulsory secondary education and its adaptability to other levels or necessities. We can watch the advantages and disadvantages in the real practice and its introduction as an experience in the English class which includes the students’ feedback. Also we will consider the possibility to include Environment in a general school project for sustainability education.
The application of TICs in education has meant in my experience a new way to introduce curricular material different from other more traditional methods -with emphasis almost exclusively in the linguistic view- and to integrate content and language learning, in a more motivating way and a more independent learning process.