Crazy Comparatives & Superlatives

I have to say that I used to dread teaching comparatives and superlatives and always found it really hard to think of something original to get my students interested, so when I saw this site I was really delighted. It's not only quite funny, but has some excellent materials for covering what can be a really dull language point.


The site is called the Universal Record Database and it is a collection of user generated and very unofficial world records. Anyone can go on the site and create their own world record. As proof they simply add an image or a video of themselves creating the record.

Here's a few examples:

Most People Simultaneously Drinking Out Of A Pineapple



The widest tongue


Most Handshakes Elicted From A Dog In 30 Seconds


Most Women Named Wendy To Eat At A Wendy's



There are lots of ways to use the Universal Record Database with students.

• Show them some images and videos and see if they can guess what the record was.
• Tell them the type of record and see if the can guess the number or amount (e.g. how wide is the widest tongue)
• Get students to think of their own crazy records and create a picture or video to upload to the site.
• Create your own class records and try to get each students to have a record.
• Get students to try to break one of the records from the site.
• Get students to find their favourite record on the site or the one they think is funniest and share it with the class, or blog about it.

The Universal Record Database certainly wasn't made for educational purposes, so be careful to check for appropriacy according to your students, but I think it's a wonderful example of the kind of bizare things you can use from the web. I know my daughter was always fascinated by the Guinness Book of World Records, so I'm pretty sure students will enjoy this and it will liven up those dull comparatives and superlatives class.

Anyway, here's my favourite record, Tallest Tower Of Humans Wearing One Sock Each, Brushing Teeth And Listening To 'Thriller'.



I hope you find this useful and have a lot of fun with your students.

Here you can find more than 100 online activities for EFL and ESL students

Related links:

• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Create Image Books
• 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages

Best

Nik Peachey

Get Kids Animating

Animation tools seem to be getting better and simpler to use every day and this one by Anithings is a great example of that.

It's designed for young learners to enable them to create short animated narrative clips. There's a nice video tutorial here showing how easy it is to create a short animated clip.



You'll need to have Adobe Air installed and then it is just a very quick download and you are then ready to start animating.

There are some useful PDF guidelines on how to use it which you can download from the site too.
There's a catch though, Anithings is still in beta and once it is finished the final version will cost money. Shame they can't think of a more up-to-date business model! Best download it now and get using it, if you can live with the bugs.

You can find some nice examples here of what kids in UK have been doing with the software.

Related links:

• Teaching EFL ESL with Comic Strips
• Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code
• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey

Teaching EFL ESL with Comic Strips

I've been aware of the Make Belief Comix website for some time now, but I'm amazed at how well over that period of time it has been developed to meet the neeeds of EFL ESL teachers and students.

The basic concept of the site is simple. It enables teachers and students to create colourful original comic strips using a range of characters, simply by using the point and click interface. The characters have a range of different emotions to choose from, you can add your own dialogue using the speech bubbles or you can leave them blank for students to add their own.


You can then either email your finished cartoon strips to people or print them up for use in class

The Teachers Resources section has a great collection of ideas for how you can use the site with students and there is a wonderful collection of possible story ideas to get students creating their own stories

Here you can see some ESOL students talking about how they have used the site.


This is a wonderful example of a technical solution that can enable teachers to produce materials for the low tech classroom. Some really simple but great ideas for providing students with motivating materials.

I hope you enjoy and use it with your students.

Related links:

• Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code
  
• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
  
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey

Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code

I've been a long time fan of Dvolver from its early days as Dfilm Maker. It was one of the first site I wrote about (Make you own animated movies)when I started blogging back in 2007. It's a really great site that allows students and teachers to create animated Flash cartoon movies with their own dialogue in just a couple of minutes.


I was in the process of visiting it again this morning to create a joke movie and was delighted to discover that an embed code has been added for the movies you create. This is great news as it makes it much easier to share the movies and include them in digital materials you or your students create.

Here's a quick joke movie I created



Great addition to a great tool. Hope you enjoy Dvolver and get your students making movies.

Here you can find some Cartoon Activities for students

Related links:

• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
  
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey

Darwin and Evolution

I've just been having a little play with a great feature on one of the Open University's websites Devolve Me.

The site is dedicated to Darwin and as well as having some useful information and resources about him, has a wonderful little tool to take yourself backwards through the evolutionary process.

Just upload your image adjust it for position and then watch yourself transform back for a few million years.

So if you would like to see how I got from this:
Through this

To this
Then just click on this link here and watch as I go back through time: Nik Devolved
Be sure to play with the little slider to take me backwards and forwards.

As for classroom exploitation:

• You could transform a few people using images of famous people then see if students can guess who they are.
• You could also get your students to transform images of themselves and guess who they are.
• Or you could be serious and use this to start a discussion on evolution. Students can post and compare their opinions to the 'Have your say' forum
  

Anyway, hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• Are You a Celebrity Lookalike?
• Photo Fun with Your Students
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth
• Manga images for EFL ESL
• Create an English Cartoon
• Guess the Word
• Play Games and Improve Your Vocabulary

Best

Nik Peachey

Are You a Celebrity Lookalike?

This is a nice site that you can use to have some fun with your students and of course to generate some language and learning activities. It's called Celebrity Matchup. All you do is choose the gender and then upload a picture of yourself or one of your students. The site then scans their image and selects a set of celebrities that they look like. Here are some of my matches!
Can't really say I'm flattered! I also tried matching myself to female celebrities (just curiosity) and got these results. Could I really be the Carmen Electra of ELT? Um! Doubt it!


Well I'm not really sure that Celebrity Matchup works, but I think you could have a lot of fun and discussion with your students deciding which is the closest match and what the differences and similarities of the facial features are. I'm sure there's a really good facial characteristics lesson in there somewhere with lots of vocabulary.

Anyway, if you or your students really like the matches you get you can even get a widget to add your results to your blog or website.
Just by clicking on the image you see above once you've matched up and pasting the code into your blog.

Well I hope you enjoy that and match up to some flattering celebrities, but do watch out for the advertising.

Related links:

• Photo Fun with Your Students
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth
• Manga images for EFL ESL
• Create an English Cartoon
• Guess the Word
• Play Games and Improve Your Vocabulary

Best

Nik Peachey

Bubble Joy for Thanks Giving

This is a real treat for anyone who wants to send a Thanks Giving message to any Friends from the US. It's from Bubble Joy and they have a selection of humorous frames that you can add your own short video message to.


All you need is a WebCam and a microphone. It's really easy to do, just select the card you want, then give the flash program access to your video and audio and record your message.


I particularly like the dancing turkey, but I guess we'll all have our favourites!


So just go to the Bubble Joy site and start recording.
Hope you enjoy this and maybe you could get your students sending thanks giving messages too.

Related links:

• Things You Can Do With Your WebCam 1
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages

Best

Nik Peachey

Great WebCam Software

One of the things that I love about my MAC is Photo Booth and its ability to add different backgrounds and effects when you are using a WebCam. It's a great tool to use with students to create motivating and personalised materials for a whole range of things. Here's an example of some characters I created to generate a story around (I then imported them into Comic Life).

But now it seems that you can do some similar things on your PC with this free software from ManyCam

I haven't had time to download and install it yet (PC is still booting up!!!!) but it looks like there is an impressive range of effects (3836!) that you can download from their site, many of which have been user submitted: ManyCam Effects

The software also works with quite a good collection of existing services, so you can also use it for video conferencing.

There's a nice demo video here showing what it can do

You can also check out some user submitted ones

Well it looks like my PC has finally booted up, so now maybe I can try it out.

Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages
• Language Learning through Communal Video
• Subtitling your video clips
• Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube
• Exploiting a Video Viral

Best

Nik Peachey

Photo Fun with Your Students

Some time back in March 08 I wrote a posting on ideas for creating personalised Personalised flashcards for EFL ESL activities. That posting used a site called FaceinHole which had some nice images that you could upload you or your student's picture to.

I've just spotted another site called PhotoFunia that also has a nice collection that you could use with many of the same ideas.
Here's a few examples that you or your students could use as prompts to create stories around. You could also get them to create a completely fake biography. Here's mine. See if you can decide which parts are true!!!

• Did you know I used to be an astronaut?

• Before I became a teacher I was in fashion.

• I also recorded a CD, but I only sold one copy. Wonder who bought it!
  

• Of course I've made some pretty influential friends too.

• And like every celebrity I had my own chat show

• And er! Well I can dream, can't I?

Well I hope you and your students enjoy this site. It is of course free, but has some advertising on so watch out for that.

Related links:

• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth
• Manga images for EFL ESL
• Create an English Cartoon
• Create Text to Speech Movies
• Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook
  

Best

Nik Peachey

Learn English and get fit

I just spotted this rather remarkable example of an English video lesson for Japanese students. It shows some rather remarkable use of music and includes a revolutionary drilling method.

Watch, learn and enjoy!



Try this at home and you might also get fit too.

As someone who has always believed in the benefits of drilling new language, it's great to see that the ancient art still finds a place in our modern world!

But on a more serious note you might find this useful if you're involved in teacher training and want to get some discussion going around the theme of drills.

best

Nik

Football vocabulary

This is a great free online game called GoalUnited. It isn't designed for education at all but I'm sure anyone who is keen on developing their English and has an interest in football would enjoy it and get a lot of vocabulary and reading practice from it.


The game is played in a similar manner to the popular Football manager computer game and each player builds up a team and plays against other teams online.

As I said it's free. It is available to play in other languages too so make sure your students choose to play it in the language they want to learn rather than the one they already speak.

I'm not really a football fan myself so I haven't really spent time with this, but for students that are, I'm sure it could be very motivational.

English version is here
To choose from other languages try here

Hope you enjoy it.

Best

Nik