Interactive Lesson - Drones

Task 1 - Speaking

Discuss these questions with a partner:

What is a drone, and what are they used for?
Do you think the skies will soon be full of them?


Task 2 - Reading 

Below, you will find four BBC news articles involving drones.

Work individually.
Read one of them and make notes under these headings:

• Summary of story (maximum 3 sentences)
• Advantages of using drones
• Problems arising from using drones
• If I was Prime Minister, I would pass legislation (make a law) which said...

Here are the links to the news articles:

Bears       Knock Out       Airspace       Sea Gulls


Task 3 - Vocabulary Check

After making your notes, go back and underline any difficult words or phrases in the article (maximum 4 examples).

Discuss these with a partner without showing them your notes.

Modify your notes if you need to.


Task 4 - Presenting 

Use your notes to explain your news stories to your group.

While you listen, make notes under the same four headings: summary, advantages, problems, if I was prime minister...



Task 5 - Discussion and Writing

With a partner, look at all the different laws that the whole group came up with.

Agree and write down one law that covers all the situations.

Include penalties for breaking the law.



Task 6 - Testing Your Law

Is this man breaking the law? Should he be punished?
What do you think of his "invention"?

Task 7 - Internet Research (homework)

Find out what you can about Zano drones.

• What is the concept of Zano drones? What are they designed to do?
• Zano is a modern company, funded by Kickstarter. What is Kickstarter?
• What problems has the company experienced?
• Do you think that Zano drones will be a success?

Interactive Lesson - Global Population Growth

Task 1
Discuss the following questions with a partner:

• How many people are there in the world today?
• What's the population of your country?
• Is it growing or shrinking?
• How does it compare to the UK?

You can find answers to these questions and more on the BBC's feature: The World at 7 Billion

- - - - - -

Task 2

Hans Rosling gives an interesting talk on Global Population Growth on the TED website.

Take a look at the worksheet, and try to answer the questions while you listen. First focus on the main ideas of the talk, then go back and listen again for more detail, and switch the subtitles on, if it helps.

You can find the talk here.

Watch Hans's presentation again and think about how he structures it. What language does he use that could be useful for your own presentations?

- - - - - -

Task 3

The digital graphics that Hans Rosling uses are available on his own website, gapminder.org.

Try to work out how to use the graphs and plot different variables on the horizontal and vertical axes. There is a pdf guide to help you.

Prepare a presentation using a Gapminder graph. You can choose an example by clicking on "Open graph menu", or you can select variables of your own.

- - - - - -