I'm carrying out some quick research to find out which ELT blogs teachers are reading these days. Many of the ones I used to consult seem to have died and I'm interested to see who is still blogging and if there is a new generation of ELT bloggers emerging.
Please share links and vote for your favourite ELT specific blogs.
Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy, which is a collection of lesson plans based around infographics, and looks in more depth at the genre and how infographics can be used as both sources of information and as creative learning tasks for students.
The tasks that accompany the infographics are intended to encourage students to think more critically about the information they are exposed to and to question the sources of information they find whilst browsing the internet.
Exploiting Infographics should help teachers to start creating their own tasks, activities and lesson plans for students and to integrate infographics in a way that will enhance students’ critical thinking, digital literacy, language and communication skills.
Exploiting Infographics was conceived as part of The Digital Classrooms Series which started with the award winning Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers.
The series is intended to help teachers, teacher trainers, materials writers and course designers integrate digital technologies into their classroom practice in a pedagogically sound and impactful way.
I hope you enjoy these books and find them useful.
Related links:
Is there a teaching degree required for teaching EFL ESL in Second Life? I will be meeting up with Dennis Newson and anyone else who is interested to chat about my experiences in Second Life and what I see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to delivering English language instruction there.
My Movie Moment is a tool designed for Father's day, though I'm not sure I would want one of these clips for a Father's Day gift! It enable you to put yourself into one of six famous film clips, simply by uploading an image of yourself. Here's one of me talking about my working day!
My Movie Moment is simple to use. You just select the clip you want to use and watch it, then click on 'Star in this Clip' and upload your photo.
Then size it so that your face fills the field using the tools on the right.
Once you have done this more the markers over the parts of the face. Click on 'Continue' and the movie should be ready.
To save your movie you click on 'Share' then either get the URL, or click 'Grab' to get an embed code.
How do we use this with students? Much as I don't think these are great Father's day gifts or appropriate for younger learners you could use them with your students as prompts for creative writing.
Get your students to create a clip using their own image. Then they should write a story of the context surrounding the clip, i.e.
What's happening?
Who are the people?
Why are they there?
What happened before the clip?
What happens next?
etc
This is a good way to get students using contrasting time structures and tenses in a reasonably creative and imaginative way. This is likely to work better if they haven't seen the films as they won't try to rely on the film story.
They could upload their writing to a blog and add the the clip by embedding it in the blog or website page. As I said I think some of the clips could be a bit inappropriate for younger learners, so have a look at them all and check them for suitability before you get your students on the site.
I hope you find this useful and you and your students enjoy it.
I've just been browsing through the website of the Centre for Adult English Language Acquisition (CAELA) and although it couldn't possibly be described as fun and sexy, there is a lot of potentially really useful information there especially for anyone involved in teacher training and development.
There are 72 quick Q & A digests that deal with a broad range of subjects from methodology to program design and technology.
There's also a handy Tools section that has guidance for Instructors and Program developers.
You can email in a question and get it answered at Ask CAELA and even sign up for a free newsletter.
I've just been looking over a really useful site called TeflClips which has a collection of lesson plans for using YouTube video clips to teach English. The creator of the site, Jamie Keddie, includes step by step procedure instructions as well as downloadable materials for use in class.
At the moment there are 28 lesson plans on the site, with a new one being added every week, and these vary from focusing on specific grammar points to dealing with different themes or skills. The lesson plans are very creative, each one taking a unique approach to the materials and many have links to additional digital materials too.
The site is nicely designed and focuses on delivering the materials rather than incorporating a lot of slow loading 'sticky' content. There's also a link to a clips resource page which has a lot of useful clips if you want to create your own lessons.
This is a really useful site for EFL teachers looking for ready made lesson plans or some inspiration or good ideas on how to create their own. Well worth checking out.
Nice one Jamie. You can also find out about other interesting things Jamie is up to at: http://www.jamiekeddie.com/
Hope you enjoy using these plans with your EFL ESL students.
Well this news posting is actually about one of my own sites called Daily English Activities and this is a new site that I have launched to help EFL and ESL students develop their English language skills through online tasks.
I've tried to mix the tasks between activities that are 'made for' EFL ESL and ones that exploit generic websites. I've also tried to make these things that students could do every day. So far the site is off to a good start with 9 activities up in the first week, the most popular of which is Exercise Your Ears with Authentic Film Clips.
So far the majority of the visitors seem to be teachers (80%) rather than learners (16%) but at this stage I'm happy with that as I think the site will be a useful tool for teachers wanting to set homework or for teachers wanting quick activities to print up for their students to do in a media centre or computer lab ( I've included a print as PDF function to make this easier) To see a list of all the activities of the site so far please check out the sitemap and if you know of any EFL ESL teachers or students please send point them in my direction.
I've always been fascinated by AI since I saw the Stanley Kubric / Steven Spielberg film by that name some years ago. There used to be a fantastic chat bot on the website for the movie (which is now gone) that I developed a lesson around for a group of students in Morocco. ( A chat bot is a virtual person that you can type text to and get answers)
That's why I was so delighted to find Virsona. The site is still very much in development, but does have a virtual Abraham Lincoln that you or your students can chat with and other virtual personalities are being developed (including Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis).
The wonderful thing about Virsona though is that you can create your own chat bot quite simply, by registering and then adding information and training the bot to answer questions that it might get asked.
There are quite a few ways of adding information to the chat bot's log. You can either do this in the form of diary entries, uploading files or typing in questions and answers. I've already made a start on a virtual Nik Peachey! This is great language practice for students and a bit of fun too.
It's often been a criticism of many attempts to make MMORPG computer games educational, that when that happens the fun goes. I have to say that it is often the case, but I think Power Up is an exception.
Power up is an educational computer game based around the concept of helping students to understand the need for clean energy. It takes the scenario of a planet ( set in the future) which needs rescuing. The game looks and feels convincing and has some nice collaborative game play thrown in with some blasting of alien beasts. Students can play it alone or in multi-player mode. They are assigned missions that they have to complete and there is even use of some text to speech.
The game is free, but you will have to download the software (200Mb!) which takes about 40Mins on a good broadband connection (and lots longer on a bad one)
It's great that the quality of these games is improving so much. This would be a really motivating game for students to play to learn more about clean energy and also good for intermediate + EFL ESL students as they would need to work at understanding the instructions to progress through the game. Also great to base a CLIL lesson around.
Definitely a serious game to be taken seriously. Hope you enjoy it.
Babbel is one of the few really effective vocabulary building websites that I've seen on the web. It's actually a social network and can help you to make friends for language exchange etc, but the core of the site is it's interactive multimedia vocabulary building exercises. These work with words being presented along with images and the sounds of the words. The exercises then move on to recognition of the sounds of the words and then you have to spell out the words for the images as you see and hear them. I know this all sounds a bit PPP (Present, Practice, Produce) but for EFL or MFL students working alone, I still think there is some value in this. The site isn't only for learners of English, but also has exercises in Italian, French, German and Spanish.
This is one of the great strengths of the site because it draws on students from more languages, it makes it possible for students to connect with and practice their language with users from the target language.
As always it would be wise to be careful with this and to protect your students' privacy etc, but there certainly is some potential here and I do like the design of the vocabulary building activities so for that alone, it's worth the free registration.
Last week I wrote a posting with some teaching suggestions based around the Face your Manga website. Some people were understandably put off by the ability of the images to make some rude gestures. I have since discovered the DoppelMe website which does a similar thing and could be a good alternative, though with this one you do have to dress your avatar from naked!
This is a really nicely designed site which helps you calculate the amount of carbon your family emits. The site looks great and is rich in vocabulary. It's probably more useful with more mature students as it asks for information like the amount you pay for your gas bill etc, but you do have the option to say you don't know.
The CO2 Calculator is aimed at a UK audience and asks for post code, but you can just type in a few letters and numbers at random and proceed.
Would be a useful tool for creating a Carbon league within your class, to see who produces the least carbon.
If you wanted to follow this up with some research. Wikipedia has some useful information on Greenhouse Gases.
I first wrote about the ECL (Education Clip Library) a few months back, but now I've finally got round to exploring it and I have to say it's a really impressive resource.
There are about 5k + clips at present and once you are registered there is an option to request a clip on a specific topic if you need one. The clips are arranged by age suitability ( 3 - 1 years or 11 - 19) as well as topic. All the clips I looked at also had a transcript underneath too, which is always really helpful for EFL and ESL students.
There is a good collection of Business related clips for anyone teaching Business English or Business skills.
There is also a huge range of historical footage going all the way back to the 1930's
The user interface is simple and clean and the clips stream pretty quickly and still look okay when played full screen.
On the whole this is a really nice resource for EFL , subject specific or CLIL lessons.
Apply for you password now as it may take a little while to get one.
The series of videos is divided into 16 clips in all and takes you from registering with the site all the way through to adding different page elements and importing video.
My favourite clip in the series though has to be number 2 where he talks about my Learning Technology blog!
The rest of the site is also well worth checking out too as there are a lot of other videos on useful topics.
If you have used blogs or wikis with students, I'd be interested to know which you find most effective., so please leave a comment.
Do you want to show your virtual EFL ESL students images, videos from YouTube or just chat with them all within a 3D environment that runs in your web browser. Well now you can.
I've just been playing with Vivaty a new 3D virtual world that runs from within your web browser with only a minimal download (4.5Mb).
The strange thing about it though is that it runs from within Facebook!
Despite this it's quite good and quite easy to set up and customise. You can also easily add pictures or videos to your own personal room. Within a few mins I had managed to add a TV screen to my room and configure it to play a video from my YouTube channel.
Here's my avatar watching me doing a video presentation!
Once you've downloaded the 4.5Mb program and installed it, you simply log into your face book account and your room appears at the bottom of your profile page and you just click to enter the room.
There are also a selection of other rooms that you can visit if you want to meet other people to chat with. Vivaty certainly doesn't have the rich graphics and degree of customisation that you can get from something like Second Life, but it is a much smaller download, runs in your browser (Internet Explorer only - Sorry MAC only users!) and or use with EFL ESL students, it is much safer (that's if you trust Facebook to protect your privacy!).
For me though, the strongest thing in its favour is the potential to watch, share and chat about videos whilst in a simple online environment.
Getting ESL EFL students singing songs is a great way to improve their pronunciation, so here's another great karaoke site (the 3rd in a month) that has been brought to my attention.
This one is called Karaoke Party and is a little different, for a couple of reasons, the main one being that if you register, you can actually get a score for your singing when you hit the right notes.
This could make the whole activity more motivating for learners as the site is giving them some feedback on their performance. If you got a whole class logged in they could learn their songs at home and compete for the highest score.
I also like that the site has embedded YouTube videos of the original singers for many of the songs, so students can listen to the original and look at the lyrics ( They usually appear under the video clip) before they try to sing themselves.
The site doesn't have servers available in every country yet, but even if you can't register and get a score the lyrics, video and audio to sing along with are still available.
The presentation attracted quite a lot of attention and comments, one of the main one being a request for the links to the sites I mentioned in the presentation.
So here are links a a quick summary of the sites I mentioned. Inclusion in this list doesn't necessarily imply an endorsement of these sites. The presentation was intended to be informative of what is happening in the world of Web 2.0 and language learning and what is becoming possible. When exploring these sites I still recommend that you be aware of the cautions which I mentioned at the end of the presentation.
Anyway, hope you find these interesting.
Big Think is a video debating website that allows users to exchange opinions on some of the major issues of our time. To get tips and teaching suggestions for this site go to:
Flickr is an image hosting and sharing website that allows you to create an account upload your images. You can also search the huge database of images. The creative commons section is particularly useful for teachers looking for images to use in online media or teaching materials.
Games With a Purpose (GWAP) is a fantastic gaming website that has a variety of different ‘intelligent’ games which can be played collaboratively or competitively with online partners. To find out more see:
Teacher Tube is a video sharing website dedicated to teachers. It allows teachers to upload video and accompanying materials. It provides a ‘safe’ and friendly environment for educational sharing.
Sound transit is a wonderful site that allows users from around the world to share the sounds of their culture and environment. To get tips and teaching suggestions for this site go to:
MonkeySee is a video sharing website for people who want to visually show how to do something. It contains a wide variety of tutorial and lesson videos from teaching dance, how to play musical instruments, through to developing business skills or even how to build a sandcastle. To get tips and teaching suggestions for this site go to:
Podomatic is a site that enables anyone to produce and record their own podcast show. The site also hosts the audio or video media.
280 Slides is an online presentation tool which enables you to develop quite complex slide show presentations and either download them or host and play deliver them online.
Voice thread is a unique site that allows you to post images and add accompanying audio. User are then able to add audio and text comments to the presentation. To get tips and teaching suggestions for this site go to:
Babbel is a vocabulary building site that enables users to develop their vocabulary through multimedia image recognition. The site also has a social network perspective.
Voxswap is a simple social networking site that allows users to log in and teach each other languages.
Guardian Languages is a site that puts language learners in touch with native speakers so that they can get help with their language development. It uses VOIP and video conferencing. Potential teachers can charge learners for lessons.
Palabea allows any speaker of any language to become a teacher and learner. Teachers can set up their own online classrooms and import multimedia materials to share with their students.
CourseLab provides free software which teachers / materials writers and developers can download to create their own multimedia course materials. The software provides a range of interactive activity types. Tasks are easy to construct and no programming knowledge is required.
Great new for those of you who like developing authentic EFL ESL materials around news clips.
CNN is now making available an embed code from each of it's video news clips, so we can now embed these into blog pages or online multimedia materials and develop great authentic and up to date EFL ESL learning materials for our students.
Here's a nice example of what the embedded player looks like.
Any ideas about how you would use this? By all means send in suggestions.
Wow! This is like having a complete ELT library at your finger tips and it's all free! PDF Geni is search site that gives you free access to PDF e-books all of which are freely available on the web. It isn't limited to ELT and can be used to search for any subject. I had a look for a few things which might be useful for EFL / ESL teachers and found loads of free materials.
Social networks and what has been described as 'Web 2.0' are having a prfound influence on the way we can 'design' and deliver online learning.
As part of an ICT training course I worked on recently I delivered a short opening presentation entitled 'Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution'. I was later encouraged to record this presentation by Jurgen Wagner for his 'Info Blog' and you can either view the presentation there at:
By publishing this presentation, I'm sharing my opinion and my perception of the way things have developed and I don't presume to be an authority in this area. When i watch the pesentation I can already see that there are some flaws in the way I've expressed or portaryed my understanding of the situation.
I would welcome any comments or different perspectives on this, so please do feel free to drop me a line / comment.
You may also be interested in looking at my posting Create your own social network 7 steps which includes a step by step guide to creating a social network using Ning.
