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The Image Conference: Film, Video, Images and Gaming
The Image Conference is taking place at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, UAB Casa Convelescencia, Barcelona on Saturday 8th June. The conference has been organised by the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG and UAB Idiomes, and it is the first conference exclusively on the use of film, video, image and gaming in language teaching.
Speakers include renowned experts in the field such as Jamie Keddie, Ben Goldstein, Paul Braddock, Ceri Jones, John Hughes, Kyle Mawer and Lindsay Clandfield. There will be 2 plenary sessions, 5 keynote sessions and 10 workshops all designed around the theme of film, video, images and gaming in [...]
Amoeba, Amoeba: a hilarious game, fun to film
Also from last week's session in Zaragoza…
Here's one that my daughter Isabel brought back from Canada last summer and which I suggest as a fun activity to do with young learners, perhaps in the last 10 minutes of an "animal vocabulary" lesson. My example has amoeba, chicken, bird and eagle in it but you could have any animals and I'd play this on the first day that these are new words to my learners.
To play the game, you need space in which everyone can mingle (try outside in the [...]
Games for learning
From the excellent TechLearning blog, this selection of 40 Sites for Educational Games, not by any means all of them intended for language learning.
Specifically for ELT, there's the excellent Digital Play blog (Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer) as well as the prize-winning book of the same title.
I'm not a big games-in-class player myself, though it's always been my secret wish to have a DoS tell me "I want you to teach this teens class; there's no coursebook, but you do have 15 copies of Age of Empires…"
Just to see if it would work, you understand 
Minimally invasive technology
The next quotation I used in my conference talk actually came from Scott Thornbury's talk at the IH Barcelona conference last year, in which he talked about "minimally invasive education" and discussed Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall experiments.
Technology too should be "minimally invasive", though there is always the danger that classroom technology will take over, if we let it, and things like the interactive whiteboard will become the focus of attention, rather the learners and the learning.
Task As a group, play an online game… slowly
The ingredients missing in Second Life
Fifa10: now that's what I call a game!
An article on ASTD caught my eye this morning: Ten Ingredients of Great Games.
Which of those does Second Life not have?
While SL does have "self-representation with avatars" and "three-dimensional environments", obviously, what I found missing until I vowed never to return was "narrative context" (engaging narratives, in other words and feedback — which ASTD describes as "progress bars, zooming numbers, and status gauges, all in a well-organized dashboard that lets players know how things are going, good or bad".
Maybe I've just played too much Call of Duty, [...]
10 books for teaching young learners
Someone on our post-CELTA support group asked the question the other day… Did anyone have suggestions on how to spend a £500 budget (!) on books for the staffroom for those teaching young learners?
These would be my suggestions, with the cash left over being spent on giving each teacher their own personal copy of the first…
A skill you can teach yourself…First a supremely useful skill, which will entertain and teach your young learners, and will save you ever again having to waste your life stealing pictures from Google-is-Evil: 1000+ Pictures for Teachers to Copy, Andrew Wright (Longman): Unquestionably [...]
The power of story telling
Once upon a time…
Another one I didn't have to search for, as it came to me via my RSS feed: an article on storytelling by Mario Rinvolucri on my favourite ELT site, teachingenglish.org.uk.
Story telling, Mario says, is "a uniquely powerful linguistic and psychological technique in the hands of a language teacher" and suggests various story-telling techniques that a teacher can use.
One of the most frequently asked questions on our post-course support group must surely be "Can anyone suggest games for younger [...]
Eyes right! A fun way to revise grammar
This is a fun way to revise grammar!
Loved this activity, by Jo Budden, which I got from my RSS feed for teachingenglish.org.uk.
You get all your learners to stand up, get themselves into a nice long line, and then dictate to them sentences which are either right or wrong.
If they think the sentence is "right", they take a "big step" to the right (though as you can see in the photo, I got my learners just to look right or left); if [...]
FreeRice vocabulary game
Here's a worthwhile cause, freerice.com and a vocabulary game you might like to try out on yourself.
For every word you get right, the site donates 10 grains of rice to the starving in the Third World, via the United Nations, paid for by advertising on the site. On Novemeber 21, 3,256,135,000 grains have so far been donated.
I'd suggest that the vocabulary is probably going to be too difficult for most of the learners you teach and (from their point of view) it isn't exactly very high frequency [...]
Role playing games for language learning?
Third World Farmer: Wheat and corn are planted, but I can't afford a chicken, and my kids are sick…
The (free) online role-playing game Third World Farmer is one I'd come across before, and one I'd recommended to language learners — as one they might like to play in their own time, outside class. In reading, and understanding, and responding to the instructions, I think they would learn some English, in an enjoyable game, which might also heighten their awareness of some of the problems people in the [...]
Barcelona, Sat.8th June 2013