Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks

I'm always looking for handy tools that students can use as follow up tasks to online research and Pro | Con Lists certainly looks like a good one.

The site enables students to collect together the advantages and disadvantages of a particular subject and create a list of each to see how they balance out.

Here's an example one on Solar Energy

As you can see, at the top of the page is the list of pros and cons,

and below it is the balance of the results.



When creating the list students can also add to or reduce the influence of some factors and balance emotional and rational factors of each too.

It sounds complicated, but these are very easy to produce. Just register and log in and go to 'Create a list'. Give the list a title, select the topic and add a description. You are then ready to start adding the pros and cons.

Each of the pros and cons added has a default weight of 3 in both the emotional and rational settings, but students can click on the numbers to increase or decrease the weight if they think the pro or con is more or less significant.

Once they have completed their lists they can publish them or share them through a range of social media platforms.

Visitors to the lists can then leave comments or agree or disagree with each of the individual pros and cons in the list, simply by clicking on them and voting.


To see how this works I've created a short Pro and Con list on the topic of Interactive Whiteboards. Feel free to comment and suggest more pros and cons.

• Pros and Cons of Interactive Whitebaords

I think Pro | Con Lists is a great way to follow up web based research activities and would work really well combined with something like Mashpedia.

• Students could go to the Mashpedia site and search for information on something like wind power, solar power or even different political parties or sporting teams, then use the information they find to create their list of pros and cons.
• Once the lists are created they could share them with other students and vote on whether they agree with the pros and cons.
• Students could also use the site to brainstorm pros and cons before they do research. This would get them thinking about the subject first and they could then look back at their own lists and see how they could change or modify them.
  

What I really like about the site is that it gets students thinking and evaluating the power of their arguments too.

It would be nice if the lists could be added to by visitors, but that doesn't seem to be possible, but I still think this is a really useful tool and one that can be used to create research based reading and listening tasks.

I hope you like it and find it useful.

Related links:

• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• 35 more reading tasks
• Using Wise Quotes with EFL Students
• Get the News Through Images
• Create Authentic Web Based Research Tasks With Mashpedia
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Education for the Global Economy

Best

Nik Peachey

Create Quick Video Task Sheets

Vidinotes is an interesting site that I spotted a few weeks back. It's a great way to produce instant (almost) video worksheets to go with YouTube videos.

Basically, what it does is to convert an flv video file into a number of screen shots with a space next to each screen shot for the students to take notes.

I picked this silent video with sound track by Micheal Galasso as it has a very visually rich digital narrative and made a worksheet for it.


To do this I first had to download the video as an flv file. I did this using the KeepVid site recommended by Vidinotes. Then you have to upload the flv clip to the Vidinotes site. This was pretty slow, but it will depend a lot on the length of your clip and you can do other things while you wait for it to upload.


Once the clip is uploaded start to play it and simply click the 'Capture' button when you see a frame you want in your worksheet.

As you capture images they will appear on the right of the video. And you can either give each image a title or leave it blank. You have to give the worksheet a name though.

Once you have captured all the images you want from the video (you can select up to 30) you simply click on 'Print' and you have your worksheet.
You can use these worksheets for a range of activities and with a range of different video types.

• You could use them as prediction tasks before students watch the clip. Students could predict the story or what the characters will say.
• Students could try to write in what the characters are thinking at each stage of the clip.
• Students could use the worksheet to make notes of lectures or how to videos.
• Students could use them to summarise steps in a process being described.
• Students could describe the images from the video and build their own narrative or sets of instructions.

Here are some example worksheets from the site. You can check these out and think about how you might use them with your students.

• Build a BristleBot
• How to make sushi
• How to rave dance
• Ghetto workout moves

This is a great way to create simple and versatile video worksheets that won't take you too long. I hope you find it useful and create some great tasks and activities for your students.

You can find 25 more video related activities for EFL and ESL students here.

Related links:

• Cropping YouTube Videos to Create Activities
• Quick Twitter Video Activity
  
• 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages
• Animated Music Videos for EFL
• Creating multimedia stories
• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube

Best

Nik Peachey

Subtitle Movie Fun

We often forget just how much communicative meaning comes from visual clues rather than linguistic information. This site is a great one for reminding students of just how much of the communicative message they can pick up just by using their eyes. It's also a lot of fun, particularly for anyone like me who likes Indian movies.

The site is called BombayTV and it has a collection of Indian film clips. Each is quite short and has space for you to add 3 lines of subtitles. You can select from a range of clips then add the subtitles and then either send it to a friend, get a URL or best of all, get an embed code to add it to your blog.

Here's one I created.



It's really easy to do, just go to BombayTV and click on 'Make a Movie'.
You should then see the movie player with the movie index. Select a movie and watch it in the player, then write your subtitles in the fields at the side.


Once you have done this you can send it to yourself to get the URL. After sending it you will also see a text to click to get the embed code and you can copy and past this into a blog.
You can choose whether you get your students to guess what they think the characters are really say or just make up some dialogue of their own. Hope you have some fun with this, and if you enjoy it, then you also check out BombayTV2 which allows you to select a number of scenes and build a sequence, of Futebol TV which has clips of football matches and your students can type in commentary.

I owe a big thank you Özge Karaoğlu as I first spotted BombayTV over at her blog on the BBC | British Council Teaching English website. Where she is writing about technology in ELT.

Thanks Özge Karaoğlu .

Related links:

• Getting Video Tasks Online
• 15 + Video related activities for students
• Find out about free video editing software
• Free Educational TV Channels
• News Videos for EFL ESL Materials Design
• Exploiting a Video Viral
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Video Clips for Teaching English
• Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Language Learning through Communal Video
  

Best

Nik Peachey

Autonomous Learning for 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.

Activities so far:

• Learn a Song in English
  
• Try a TOEFL Reading Test
• Improve Your Vocabulary and Make Friends
• Exercise Your Ears With Authentic Film Clips
• Record Yourself Reading a Poem
• Using a Word Cloud to Remember Words and Texts
• Take a Quiz Adventure Journey
• Create an Online CV in English

Many thanks and best wishes

Nik Peachey