Two favourite YouTube activities for young learners
Posted on | April 11, 2013 | No Comments
This one came from a session at a Macmillan Teachers' Day, but I regret no longer remembering who first suggested it.
Hilarious with small kids if they sing along and act it all out!
And this second one was suggested as The #1… (song activity) on David Deubelbeiss's excellent blog.
Hilarious results also guaranteed with this one, assuming that you have a suitable song — one with lots of bits of vocabulary that get repeated. You want to get the kids to shout out their word(-s) as they hold them up (the kids in the video don't seem to).
With large classes, dividing the learners into 2 or 3 groups of up to a dozen who then have to perform for the others is competitive fun.
My 10 best sites for teachers of young learners
Posted on | April 11, 2013 | No Comments
Particularly for those of you coming to my session at the Macmillan Teachers' Day in Zaragoza this Saturday, here in alphabetical order, are 10 sites I can highly recommend if you teach English in Primary.
- Carol Reed's ABC of Teaching Children
- Enchanted Learning, for printables, though in fact I use it more for the ideas and then draw my own pictures — or get the kids to do so
- OneStopEnglish, which has a great children's section (especially if you have a subscription, currently €53 a year for an individual)
- Ozge Karaoglu' blog
- National Geographic Kids
- TeachingEnglish.org.uk, which in fact includes a whole suite of great sites, with its Learn English Kids, Primary Tips, Teaching Kids all being excellent
- Vanessa Reilly's blog
- YouTube, where you have some great song channels, if you teach young learners, including Dream English, ELF Learning and Super Simple Learning (and see also my two favourite YouTube clips for young learners)
… which makes eight; and two more:
- Richard Bryne's FreeTech4Teachers site, to include one on technology (though it's by no means all intended or suitable for young learners of English)
- And Edmodo, to include at least one tool which learners of all ages will enjoy using. To my mind, it's the very best of the Web 2.0 tools for education.
For other Web 2.0 tools, see this post [coming shortly].
Anything missing…? Please feel free to add further suggestions in the comments!
One for young learners: GoAnimate… at home
Posted on | April 11, 2013 | No Comments
For those of you coming to my session at the Macmillan Teachers' Day in Zaragoza this coming Saturday, this is one of the tools I'll be mentioning…
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com.
It's one of those tools your learners will love and — as I'll be suggesting — one of those tools you the teacher don't need to know all about.
If you suggest it to your learners, possibly as homework, possibly to your fast finishers and/or to those in very mixed ability classes with a much higher level of English, I think you'll be amazed by the results.
You might want to suggest that the animations are kept private and then displayed only in class, a solution that could also be adopted if you are uploading videos to YouTube. Privacy, as I'll also be suggesting, is a big issue with young learners.
Note the GoAnimate for Schools version, if you want full access and are willing to pay for it.
See also Two more your young learners will enjoy creating animations with are Voki and ZimmerTwins.
Things I carry: Nice idea, but is it for class?
Posted on | April 8, 2013 | No Comments
This idea came from the weekly email I get of "Top presentations on SlideShare this week"… but I'm not sure it's one I'd use in class.
Are the images ours?
With my learners, I insist that they use only their own images in project work, hand-drawn or taken on phones or cameras, and that they don't steal them from Google Images (etc), or use even images with Creative Commons licences. In designing projects for use in class, I bear that in mind, designing them so that can't happen… and that's the first reason why I'd probably reject this idea for a language classroom: the temptation to steal the images rather than creating them is probably going to be too great for many people.
On the other hand, here there's another example which does use its author's own photographs…
See also Why is it wrong to steal images… and text
Is it collaborative?
One of the other things I insist on is that (sometimes to the annoyance of some of my learners, possibly!) is that all class and project work is collaborative (because, among other things, in collaboration, we get communication and use of language. "Things I carry" by definition isn't going to be collaborative, another reason why I'd reject the idea.
However, "Things we carry" might make a nice little project, possibly especially if the "we" is teenagers and the things are not necessarily material ones…
About Slideshare
If you're not familiar with Slideshare, PowerPoint plus Slideshare would be the way for you or your learners to embed (put) a PowerPoint presentation on a blog. A great alternative would be to use Google presentations, which can be embedded directly on a blog — and which can also be edited collaboratively.
More about Slideshare | Slideshare Help
Footnote
On the very interesting TeachThought site, the presentation embedded above is to be found entitled 10 things every teacher needs to survive.
See also Ten things I take to class
Things you can do with Edmodo
Posted on | April 6, 2013 | No Comments
This, from the excellent Edmodo Blog, shows teachers and students at Meadowbrook High School in Richmond, Virginia, making use of Edmodo in a number of interesting ways. Using Edmodo as a book discussion group is an idea I've found to work particularly well.
From the same source, how Edmodo teachers can save 160 million sheets of paper a week (!!!).
On TechLearning.com, Lisa Nielsen compares Edmodo to Facebook and makes the point that "Facebook is the platform where our students and parents are already communicating".
My experience of using Edmodo is that there certainly always seems to be a learner who eventually puts their hand up and says "Couldn't we do this on Facebook instead?" but, more than anything else, it's Edmodo's greater (ie. total!) privacy that makes it my preferred social learning platform.
If students designed their own schools…
Posted on | March 20, 2013 | 2 Comments
I'm not sure where I got this one from (Mashable?). At 14'26" it's way too long to watch in its entirety in class but I think not watching it in class, and just asking the learners to finish the sentence (the title of this post) would probably be a great starting point for discussion, especially with teens.
Posting it on an Edmodo group and then having the discussion (and the reactions) continue there, once they had watched it, outside class, would probably also work well.
Mini-webquest: Brains of rats connected via internet
Posted on | March 20, 2013 | 2 Comments
This one is a suggestion I made as tutor on our Technology for Language Learning course (hello, everyone in Hyderabad!), where we were looking at webquests.
I've never been a big fan of full-blown Bernie Dodge type webquests, much preferring mini-webquests in which you have learner-generated questions.
The recent headline in The Guardian "Brains of rats connected via internet" caught my eye as being something learners would be curious about (and never do a webquest unless you think that will be the case!)
How about this…?
- Dictate the headline to the class
- Have them in pairs talk about it for several minutes — what do they think? (Asking "is it a hoax?" sometimes works well!)
- Ask "Any questions?"
- Have a learner note the questions digitally (on an interactive whiteboard page, in a new class blog post, on Edmodo…)
- Provide the link to the article
- Possibly outside classtime, have the learners see how many of their questions they can answer either from the article or from elsewhere on the internet
- Allow (encourage!) all other debate (is it ethical..? etc), which can be either oral or via written "comments" on the class blog or Edmodo group
Note also how the readers' comments on the article (as I write, 400+) can also be exploited (how are people reacting…? etc).
Some kind of mini-presentation afterwards, perhaps in pairs, each pair with 2 minutes max to present either the pros or the cons, can also be a good idea, especially if the topic has excited the interest of your learners.
What do you think…?
Google Reader to be ditched, July 1
Posted on | March 14, 2013 | 8 Comments
My thoughts entirely…!
As of July 1, Google is pulling the plug on Google Reader, in my view absolutely its best tool (with the possible exception of Google Drive), says The Guardian and the BBC, and Lifehacker, and Mashable, and 100s of other sites in my Reader feeds.
Currently in a state of shock, I just don't know what I'm going to do without all the amazing material for classes, all the amazing new technology, all the great ideas that all come to me daily in one conveniently crap-free space, the last not something that can be said of garbage collection points like Twitter and Google+.
Having swept aside Bloglines, Google is now just going to trash Reader in order to force on us whatever of its products it deems is going to make it most millions…?
See also
Lifehacker has a number of suggested alternatives
Earth Hour Challenge from IH Barcelona
Posted on | March 11, 2013 | No Comments
IH Barcelona has an Earth Hour Challenge for you? Can you stop using the photocopier for just one day a month?
Find out more about Earth Hour (Saturday March 23, 8.30pm).
Wonderful job interview ad for class
Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 1 Comment
This one would work particularly well with adults, level say B1+, with experience of job interviews.
As an obvious lead-in, you have your learners' experience of job interviews (bizarre or otherwise). A series of "What if" questions might also be discussed such as, "What would you answer if you were asked "What's your management style?" or "What would you do if your interviewer collapsed?" (watch the video!) might be an alternative.
For a while-watching task, you could then get learners to observe what the "candidates" actually answered and did and then stop the video at 2'00" to discuss who they think got the job. (There's another obvious question and "stopping" point, earlier at 30".)
As with all ads, post-watching the question of whether or not the ad is a successful one (and why/why not?) is always possible.
If you wanted to be more creative, and you've been reading some of my suggestions for podcasting, you could also divide your class into teams and get them to brainstorm tough questions and then interview (and record) candidates.
Podcasting 101: More complex tasks
Posted on | February 22, 2013 | No Comments
In a previous post, I suggested some tasks for getting started with podcasting. Here, also from my recent session at our Conference, are a couple that are a little more complex…
Role play and podcasting make a great combination, and not everyone needs to be recording all the time
Particularly with adults, role playing the sort of situations that arise at work (job interviews, telephone calls, asking for a pay rise…) makes a great subject for podcasting — apart from anything else as they can then be played back for comments and an improved, language-enhanced second performance.
The feedback doesn't have to come from the teacher. What I find works well is to have people (C and D, above) in non-recording roles, possibly with a checklist (eg. the one in the yellow box, above) for peer feedback.
Again, as I've suggested previously, it's the rehearsal, the feedback and the repeat performance — not the actual recording — that really interests us as language teachers.
Getting creative with podcasting
We can get more creative with role play and podcasting by having learners storyboard four connected episodes that go together to make up a coherent story, as outlined above.
As well as any rehearsal, there are so many opportunities for language practice in storyboarding before anyone goes anywhere near a recording device. It goes without saying, of course, that such things need to be done in English for full advantage to be taken of them (which can sometimes be difficult when learners get excited about such things).
If such stories are being posted on a blog, a certain amount of "setting the scene" text will help keep the story coherent.
And finally…
In the next and final post in this series, I'll look at a couple of ideas for a regular podcasting program.
Amazing video shared on an Edmodo group
Posted on | February 21, 2013 | 1 Comment
MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.
This one comes from my online Technology for Language Learning course (thanks so much for sharing, Asea!).
One of the things we trying out there is my favourite web 2.0 tool, Edmodo. The course partipicants have to do various set tasks in our Edmodo group but what also happens — and it happens with virtually every Edmodo group that I've ever used — is that people start to share things, and comment on them, irrespective of whatever tasks the teacher (or tutor, in this case) may have set.
That has to be a good thing for language learning!
All posts by Tom Walton, teacher trainer at IH Barcelona
Blogs I learn from
Online course for teachers
April 22nd—June 2nd 2013
Barcelona, Sat.8th June 2013