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Lesson plan 46: Elevator pitch

A business English class

link-icon_pdf_05.png  elevator-pitch.pdf

This activity, which can be downloaded on pdf (click on link above), could work well for students of business English. Part of the lesson plan involves students transcribing the following clip:

During the transcription, I recommend the following:

  1. Allow a student to control playback of the clip (i.e. stop, start, and rewind).
  2. Give students a time limit for the task (10 minutes for example)
  3. Let students get on with the task without any interference from the teacher. You could even leave the room. This may encourage students to work together and work well for classes of mixed abilities.

Following the transcription, students can prepare and later rehearse and recite their own elevator pitches. Products or ideas can include any of the following:

  1. A real company product (some company employees are expected to have a good knowledge of a certain product or service that the company offers).
  2. An imaginery product
  3. A product for YouTube. There are many demonstrations that could be used. Here are a few possibilities:

Posted by admin on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 3:43 pm.

5 Responses to “Lesson plan 46: Elevator pitch”

great! i love the idea of letting students ‘get on with it’. i wouldn’t limit this however for just business classes. For possible follow-up, there are a variety of ‘Dragons Den’ pitches (also ‘The Apprentice’ UK & USA) which have been posted on youtube which go down very well with students of all ages and inclinations. With a suitably poised Q&A handout, this can add up to a very enjoyable and educational lesson.

Left by mike roman on May 13th, 2009

Hi Jamie,

Something funny happened when I did this lesson plan just now. When I gave control to the students for the transcription activity, they found a ’slo-mo’ mode on the media player! This was using VLC Media Player off of my USB memory stick on a class computer. Something to note for next time!!

Mike

Left by Mike Harrison on February 11th, 2010

That’s interesting to hear
Did the slow mo function slow down the speech and reduce the frequency (so that the voice dropped). Or did it slow it down and keep the frequency the same?
I quite like the idea of this - student ingenuity! They probably thought they were cheating but it’s really a case of using techno tool to get the job done. This is something that they could use outside the classroom to transcribe YouTube clips.
Thanks for sharing
Jamie :)

Left by admin on February 11th, 2010

Hi Jamie,

Just to let you know, I blogged about the speed up/slow down feature my students found on VLC media player. Here’s the post: http://mikeharrison.edublogs.org/2010/02/16/techno-tool-tames-transcription-troubl/

Hope that’s useful :)

Mike

Left by Mike Harrison on February 16th, 2010

That’s great!!Thank you for this video.I’ll use it in my classroom.We need more.

Left by Sifa Mustafa on March 5th, 2010

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