Integrate traditional lessons with Internet teaching

I am really pleased with the series of lessons I have had with some upper intermediate learners recently. The overall topic was money.

The first lesson involved a traditional printed on paper article about universal currency. It dealt with challenging Vocabulary of international money markets (e.g. exchange rate, transaction fee, etc.). In addition the text was structured as pros and cons of a universal currency, so we debated those and formed opinions. Homework was to create a vocab test based on the words and give it to another student.

Second lesson: buy nothing day.  Focus on overconsuming, wasting money.  I emailed a link to a website about BND. Students read it and discussed the idea. Homework was to write a persuasive email to their boss suggesting a BND be organized for employees. Teaching point pragmatics, and expressions were elicited From which students chose for wording their email.

Third lesson: mark Boyle, the economist who lived for a year without money. Students got a check list of keywords from a video about Boyle. Task was to tick words as they heard them while watching the video.

One thing I've always been interested in since I heard the expression CALL for the first time, in 2002, is how to integrate it with traditional pre-CALL methods. This series worked very well from that point of view. The students tend to print or photocopy whatever I give them, look up any words they don't know and write them into the text in L1. With this series of lessons, we included that tradition with listening to a video online and ticking what they heard, so we moved gently to an integrated style.