Multimedia Travel Activities

What'sOnWhen is really useful travel site that allows students to find out about cultural events and places all around the world. You can either search by city or country, enter keywords and search or browse destination or the collection of videos related to specific events.

The content is really simple to access and is well organised and the video clips are small and short - not really appropriate for a single computer classroom, but great for students doing research or activities work in alone or in pairs on their computer.

There are a number of tasks you could set students using this material.

• Get each student to think of a country or city they would like to visit, send them away to research an event that is happening in that city / country then they can come back to class tell other students about the event and try to persuade them to come to the event with them.
  

• You could get students to browse through the video section watch some of the videos and decide which place they would most like to go to.

• You could get students to research their own country, find out what events are being advertised and see if the information is accurate. They could then create their own content based around any events that happen in their country that have been missed, using the website entries as a model.

I really like the site because the information comes in different media and is very much split into the kinds of small digestible chunks that lend themselves to online study and language development.

This isn't a site that was designed for education so their is quite a bit of advertising, but your students will need to get used to noticing and ignoring that.

I hope you find it useful and your students enjoy it.

Related links:

• Creating multimedia stories
• News Videos for EFL ESL Materials Design
• Things You Can Do With Your WebCam 1
• Exploiting a Video Viral
• Lesson plan Top 10 Cartoons for Children’s Rights
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Videos for Global Issues Lessons
• Update on the Education Clip Library

Best

Nik Peachey

Exploiting Travel Images

I have to say that I do really enjoy the multimedia pages on the New York Times website. I think they really demonstrate how web based journalism can add new dimensions to a story.


One of the things that I particularly like is the multi media slide shows, and I think these are great to use with students as the images are strong and can arouse their curiosity, and the amount of authentic text isn't too much so students with a reasonable intermediate level of English they will be prepared to struggle through it. They are also nicely categorised around themes, which makes it easier to use a group of them to design materials around.


Suggestion for a travel lesson

This is a very simple idea that I came up with for exploiting the travel slide shows.

• Just give your students the links to 3 or 4 of the different travel destinations.
• Ask them to watch and read the slide shows and decide which of the places they would most like to visit for a holiday.
• Make sure they justify their decision, the ask them to discuss or write about what they would do or see there and who and what they would take with them.
  
• If your students choose different destinations you could pair them and ask them to persuade their partner to change destinations and come to the place they want to go.

Here are some of the destinations they could choose:

• Marrakesh
• Madrid
• Cape Cod
• Thailand
• India
• Colorado

Well I hope you and your students enjoy some of these marvelous images. You can find more activities based around images on my Daily Activities blog

Related links

• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Interactive presentations
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases
• Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey