Explore The Past Online

I spotted this interesting tool this morning. Take Me Back To is a search engine which can locate information from a particular day in history.  It searches for a range of things from the date you enter, from popular songs and movies on that day, to news, fashion styles and advertisements.

All you have to do is type in a date and click on 'Go' and it will generate your results.

You can try it from here.

Powered by TakeMeBack.to

This is potentially a great tool to use with students.

• You could show results and see if they can guess the year / date
• You can get students to research a date and make past tense sentences about it.
• You can get students to find out what was happening on the day they were born.
• You can get students to compare results from two different decades.

There are a few things you need to be careful about though

• The search doesn't work so well when you tart going further back than the 60s
• In the section that shows magazine covers, it sometimes shows the cover of Playboy magazine and students could possibly click through to the site from there, so be careful about letting younger learners or teens access the site.

Despite the potential problems, I still think Take Me Back To is a really interesting site to generate materials for language work in the classroom.

I hope you find it useful.

Related Links:

• 36 Tools to Digitise Coursebook Activities
• Comparing and conditionals - The facts about countries.
• Translate Shakespeare 2 Text Lingo 4 Twitter??
• Goolge Maps for Directions
• Prompting reading speeds
• Comparing Texts to Aid Noticing
• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Drama project tools

 Best

Nik Peachey

Multiple Media Search

I have to say that I think Spezify has just become my favourite new search engine. I think this is a really great search engine to use in class with students or to get them to use. It's really simple. It displays all results as images and it searches a wide range of multiple media sources such as video, image Twitter etc, not only text.
To make a search you just type in your key word and all the results start to appear as images.

If you click on the small spanner icon at the top right you can adjust the setting.

There is a safe search option here which is on by default, so that's handy. You can also turn various other options on or off so that you restrict which sources are included in your results.

As I said I think this is a nice search engine to use in class on IWB / data projector or for students.

• You could type in keywords to brainstorm around topics or themes for the class you are doing.
• You could type in a keyword and get students to choose one result that they think will be interesting and get them to explore it as a warmer.
• You could get students to find an image, a text, a video and a tweet and write / talk about the connection between them.
• Or you could just use it to reinforce and find examples of vocabulary.

Hope you like Spezify and find some good uses for it in your class.

Related links:

• Creating Word Lists
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Image based activities
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage

Best

Nik Peachey