Oleg Nesterenko has lots of ideas and materials you can use for pre-intermediate/intermediate students - (some more religious than others).
David Mainwood's excellent lesson plan Merry Christmas Mr Bean - also suitable for pre-intermediate/intermediate students
In this blog post, Sharon Hartle suggests ideas and activities best on an advent calendar (you can also download one she¡'s already done). Good for young learners.
Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want is the title of his leasson plan based on the controversial John Lewis YouTube Christmas advert. Advanced students. Comes with teacher's notes and worksheet.
LearnEnglish Kids has lost of activities from making a snowman to online quizzes
Ideas for activities from TeachingEnglish for all ages and levels
I think ELT blogs are get better and better and for me are a great source for class materials and teaching tips. Here are some of my favourites:
Kieran Donaghy's Film English - comprehensive lesson plans for different ages and levels based around short films
David Mainwood's EFL Smart Blog - imaginative lesson plans and activities with good visual stimuli, searchable by level, skill, topic and grammar point
Dale Coulter's Languge Moments - practical ideas for classes using a dogme approach. Easily adaptable to different ages and levels. The blog also has some interesting reflections on DIY professional development
David Petrie's TEFL Geek - his current Twelve days of Geekmas series have some really excellent teaching and learning tips
Sandy Millin - has some sound class activities particularly at FCE level
The Consultants-E blog - some very good, practical ideas for using mobiles as an educational tool
David Dodgson's Relflections of a teacher and a learner - as a very experienced teacher David offers some great insights into class dynamics and comes up with ideas for activities that can bring out the best from students
Steve Muir's allatc - a new blog with ideas for advanced students that includes the excellent lesson plan My blackberry's not working
Gary Jones' Listen now - good, quality podcasts with worksheets and teacher's notes
If you decide to take my advice and follow these blogs, you can make your life simpler by using Google Reader- that way you can see all your favourite blogs in one place and easily keep up to date with new posts.
Would like to know how to set up a class blog or wiki? Or would you like your students to create an interactive poster using Glogster or a VoiceThread presentation with a collaborative set of recordings or simply combine some images with text with an intuitive tool called Tabblo?
Here's a page that Gavin and me have created for our TDU group -ICT for language learning that shows examples and includes tutorials of how to use these very tools & platforms.
Nominations for the 2011 Edublog awards are now open. The purpose of the Edublog awards is to promote and demonstrate the educational values of educational blogs/resources. So I'd like to nominate these links as the ones I find most useful:
An easy way to keep up to date with the latest on the TeachingEnglish site and the ELT world in general - and you're not allergic to facebook - is to visit the TeachingEnglish facebook page (or like it, so that our daily posts appear on your Newsfeed).
According to David Petrie of TEFLGeek "In 2013 the CPE exam is not only celebrating 100 years of tormenting language learners and confusing their teachers, but will also be metamorphasising into its latest incarnation". He then goes on to make a really thorough analysis of what those changes will be. So if you teach the CPE, check his post out!
Last Friday (October 23) we had an INSETT on this. There weren't that many people there but that didn't matter because the discussion was good. We talked about:
how we learn and how gaining insights from this can help us understand better what works with our students
how far we can expect students to take the lead in their own learning
practical ideas for motivating students and encouraging them to be more autonomous
If you missed the INSETT you can see the prezi presentation we used to guide the discussion and a google doc that has loads of links that go with the topics we tried (not always successfully) to cover. Hope you find them useful!
Dogme certainly seems to be one of the current buzz words in English language teaching – we've even had a dogme session here at our centre (thanks Peter!) So what is it? As I understand, it's all about making as much out of students' input into your class as you can. But don't take my word for it. There are a lot of experts out there ready to give their definitions and specific takes about its implications for what we do in our classes.
Check out:
Scott Thornbury's blog An A-Z of ELT – and particularly the comments on his posts – for an unwinding debate about what dogme is all about. Scott wrote the classic on the subject - Teaching Unplugged (do we have a copy at our centre? We should!)
He co-wrote the book with Luke Meddings, who is currently the guest writer on the TeachingEnglish website. Lukes's already written there an article, 2 activities: Family snapshot and My wikipedia plus a blog post. And if these inspire you, why not take the opportunity to ask Luke a question while he's around on the site? All you need to do is to add one to his blog post.
Another dogme blogger to look out for is David Coulter. David's blog – which is endearingly called Language Moments – is based around him providing lesson skeletons – not lesson plans – because if you've got a plan you've probably not got the right dogme mind set to go with the flow of how students are responding to your class. (So forget most of what you learnt on your CELTA/DELTA course!) I personally like his skeletons a lot – they're full of practical ideas for activities to do in class and are obviously the product of a teacher who reflects a lot about what works (and doesn't) in his class.
There are many more dogme ELT bloggers than the 3 I've mentioned here. Perhaps you can add them yourselves in a comment or write another blog post? Or if you've found this useful, let me know and I'll add a follow up.
Draw a stick man is an online resource where - you've guessed it! – you draw a stick man. But then the remarkable thing is that your stick man comes "alive" and starts asking you questions and giving you instructions! I've used it with my Silver 2 class (Primary 9 & 10 year olds) and they were spellbound. We then followed this up up with me giving them a drawing-a-story dictation – which practised the vocabulary we'd learnt, following instructions, prepositions of place (next to, behind etc), some basic adjectives etc. I left the ending of the story up to them – what the monster did when the 2 stick men that they'd drawn escaped (hanging onto a balloon and a kite). So, we ended up by having a round the class interchange about what each monster was doing. Great stuff!
I reckon that Juniors would also buy into drawing a stick man. I've even used it with a Young Adult class for a quick mood change activity – and it seemed to go down well.
Another drawing resource that fits the seasonal theme – Halloween – is Grabba Beast I haven't used it yet but for a fun class activity to revise body parts, colours, adjectives and the obligatory draw a Halloween monster, I'm sure it'd work well.
Storify, a tool that has been used by news agencies, PR companies, bloggers and others inc the White House, has now been released to the public. Check out As it happened on the BBC and this example to get an idea. As well as the news it can be used to make narratives from vids, tweets, images as well as websites.
Read more or just watch the intro video:
Pictory is a(nother) online photo journal providing some thoughtful photos with accompanying texts to encourage students to produce some meaningful work, check it out: pictory blog here pictory site here
You could perhaps introduce the theme of personal experience and/or the task of students interviewing their family or friends with Susan Dirgham's 3 minute photo story.
(if you're feeling ambitious don't forget we have moviemaker)
Jamie Keddie's LessonStream - which you can search by subject & level
David Mainwood's EFL Smartblog also uses lots of short videos and has lesson plans/activities that focus on grammar concepts. For example, I just used 2 of these for practising the present continuous in a Junior class and the students loved them - particularly the clip about Mr Bean making a sandwich.
Also, don't forget the LearnEnglish website - particularly video-based listenings such as the Word on the street series, I wanna talk about. They come with online activities that work really well on the IWB. Just used this one on Learning languages as an assessed task for an Advanced A class. They wrote the answers to the task first in their notebooks and then we checked them by completing them on the IWB.
Also you can find quirky videos like this oneon YouTube about David after the dentist (specially if you've got quirky friends who constantly post links to them on facebook) and, for example, get students to write their comment about the video, randomly distribute them in the class and ask the students to try and identify who wrote the comment.
This could be an alternative to your class vocabulary bag with the advantage that students can access it from home.
Once you've registered with Memrise you can create your own vocabulary list which you do by adding descriptions/definitions and images. Once you've built up a list, you can play games (and invite your friends to join in with you) that are designed to help you fix the new vocabulary in your brain.
Homework to do lists
Help students to identify what they have most problems doing and the language skills they have most problems with. Then get them to create they're own to do lists based on what they think they need to practise.
They can do this online with an easy-to-use resource called doitdoitdone.
Nik Peachey describes the process really well in this blog post and also gives suggestions for activities that students will find useful and interesting. (There are more suggestions for good homework activities on the same blog.)
Get your students to email you the URL of their homework to do list. You can then get them to set themselves their own homework and cross it out on their list once they've done it. To check they've really done what they say, ask them to describe in the next class/ or get them to note down what they did specifically and to comment on how useful it proved to be.
English Attack!
This is a new website. According to their blurb: "English Attack! creates real innovation in English language learning by promoting discovery and learner autonomy instead of the traditional linear lesson based method; and focusing on "learning by doing."
I've just checked it out and it does seem to be better than most with songs where students can listen to/watch the video and fill in gaps, plus a whole range of vocabulary games. Another idea for more interesting homework
wordle clouds are all over the place for two very good reasons: wordle looks good and is very user friendly, but there´s a few things you can´t do with it such as shape the clouds, get the words to fill a shape, put words within words, nor for on your blog is there any interactivity (click, move around on each below to compare that aspect) so here are a few free alternatives for comparison:
Tagxedo (if you cannot see this that is because you need microsoft silverlight installed*) Tagul
worditout is very easy to use and you can fill all of that rectangle instead of editing away that white space in wordle (if you're fussy). but it looks very dull, not such a problem for worksheet photocopies however. on the web it has a built in google search link for each word.
*tagxedo looks funky on the web and has gained in popularity due to the growing library of shapes available. Despite that and the fact it has plenty of features two things need bearing in mind; one is that it's moving towards paying subscribers with reduced features available for free users, and the other is that silverlight is required. The 'Powered' by tagxedo tag is unforgivably naff too.
of the three, tagul is my personal preference and a prospective challenger to wordle: you can shape, edit embed as a flash object, download as an image etc etc, in short it looks as good as wordle with far more features. the only very minor snag is the need to be signed in.
To conclude, if you want to embed on the web then all three are worth consideration as alternatives to wordle having the advantage of interactivity as well as filling the shape. If you want more than rectangles for the web or photocopies then check out tagxedo and tagul.
Tefltecher has a post on an online app called present.me with which you/your students can record themselves giving a powerpoint presentation by webcam (something students have at home, cough). You need to sign up but it's free.
Tutorial and a lesson plan on public speaking using present.me at Ian´s pucker Tefltecher blog, inc. a how not to use powerpoint vid here
More on public speaking:
Kieran's The King's Speech lesson at his splendid film english site.
Some adaptable stuff at eHow
A powerpoint on powerpoint:
(or how present.me can help)
Tools for helping students build their vocabulary:
lingro paste URL of a website to make all words clickable with dictionary definition or translation. Students can also create wordlists and play games with them
wordnik gives a series of definitions, shows the word used in context and lets you hear it pronounced
forvo hear words pronounced by people from all over the world
Like a lot of teachers, I've been worried about hogging the IWB a bit too much. The recent insett on getting students to create flipcharts was really helpful and interesting. It gave me the idea of getting students to produce 5-minute tasks based on module 5 of English File Upp-int. One of my worries was that it would take up too much time so that's why I called them 5-minute tasks. I thought up the tasks and divided them into 'revision' tasks i.e. on areas we'd already covered and 'teaching' tasks i.e. on areas which were due to come up over the next few weeks. We then spent an hour in the CALL room and I monitored closely and made suggestions as to activity type - a lot of the final products were mix and match activities e.g. one pair wrote up rules for using 'used to' with examples for each rule. The other students then had to match the example to the rule. Over the next few weeks the students presented their 5-minute activities. They proved great as fillers and both the presenters and their audience seemed really engaged. And the objective of making the classes more learner-centred was certainly achieved. My biggest worry had been that the hour in the CALL room would be laborious, and would challenge their computer rather than their language skills. However, I stressed that the project would only be successful if they did the preparation part in English and they reponded well to this. This was something of an experiment for me, as I suspect that my classes generally rate low on the 'learner-autonomy' scale, but it worked out really well.
One of our perrenial tasks is to help our students build up their vocabulary - which means that we have to be inventive in finding ways to recycle and extend the words they know.
Here's some great ideas from Cecilia Lemos which work for all age groups and also a list of further activities from the TeachingEnglish website for you to try out .
MyWordBook helps students build up their vocabulary on the go. The program is free and works on on iPhones, iPod touch and iPad. It comes with a set of flashcards but more interestingly, you can create your own and add images, sound and notes. You can even draw your own pictures to help you remember the meaning of a word.
Twiddla is a free online collaborative IWB-type resource: students/you can read, respond in real time to whatever you/they write, draw, etc on the same page. Good for use in the CALL room. No registration or signing in required to use for it free. A Pro a/c with more bells and whistles is available free for teachers, see site for details. Give it a go! twiddla
"The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds".
Unfortunately, the text that's used across the archive is not very inspiring but the fact that all the recordings use it means that it's easy to compare accents and variations in pronunciation.
I printed out the text and asked students to mark where they thought there would be sentence stress and where intonation would rise and fall.(We'd been working on this before, so they knew what I was talking about.)
They then listened to the native speaker and compared their notations with what they heard.
They then listened to the Spanish speaker and marked where he put sentence stress and how he used intonation - and drew their conclusions.
Finally, they practised themselves saying the text.
The activity turned out to be quite productive. The the fact that I could use an anonymous speaker as a model of what to avoid was a boon and got over the embarrassment that often occurs when you try to focus on the typical pronunciation problems that students have.
Here's a really comprehensive lesson plan that practises speaking, listening and reading skills plus helps students to build their vocabulary. What more could you want! Should work well with Juniors above /intermediate levels and above.
This was the topic of one of last week's #ELTChats and here's the summary of what teachers from all over the world came up with. Well-worth the read and a great help in putting exam classes into perspective.
This was the burning question for Deb Roy, MIT cognitive scientist. But instead of merely writing a paper or a book on it, he has recorded on video the first 5 years of his son's life; focussing it on his progress in learning how to speak. This online article describes Deb's real-time action research and includes a video showing how the boy learnt to say the word "ball" over a period of months. And here is the video of his recent TED talk.
Looking for an imaginative but simple idea for your class - try this great idea for Six Word Stories from Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto. You can use it with students of all ages.
Find it difficult to find authentic online reading material at the right level for your students? Here's Twurdy to your rescue - a search machine that grades the results of your search according to reading difficulty.
BeeOasisis also good source of graded reading material - it's a site that offers stories, news, and comments about the arts and sciences -some of which come with video and sound. At the moment BeeOasis offers 30 days free access to material.
This blog post by Marisa Constantinides is timely reading for all of us who are thinking of taking up Beatrice's excellent Reading Challenge. Marisa digs down to reveal what the reading experience consists of and then provides practical steps we can take to help our students improve their skills. Recommended!
This Google presentation is really a must read for all teachers - a goldmine of tips and great resources that will help get your students writing. It compiles the ideas of many teachers and while it covers all ages and levels of students, it is particularly good on reading and writing resources for very young learners.
Looking for short film clips to liven up your class? Then Film English might be your answer. It provides regular topical lesson plans using a good choice of short film clips. Check it out!
If you use Paint to edit images here, then you´ll have noticed that the zoom of the version we have is restricted to 100% plus which isn´t helpful for managing vast images. To get around that: select the rectangle on the left, right click on the image, chose Stretch and Skew, and reduce the image by percentage (note you'll lose some resolution).
Using youtube's annotations app you can add text and links to video. You need a) a youtube account and b) to upload the video into your account (ie use your own videos or upload ones you've downloaded). And then: in your account open ´My videos´ and the dropdown menu besides whichever audiovisual delight you wish to teflise:
A bit sniffy of the value of twitter? That was my opinion until I came across #ELTchat. Every Wednesday ELT tweeters meet up on twitter to discuss a particular topic related to language teaching and learning such as, how do you teach writing, ways to develop learner autonomy, convincing colleagues that online professional development is as effective as face-to-face (recent chats). And the beauty of it all is that someone volunteers to produce a summary of all the tips (as in the previous links) and advice that ELT chatters came up with that week, so that even if you couldn't make the Wednesday chat you can still benefit from the wisdom and experience of ELT teachers from all over the world. You can also follow what everyone actually said by doing a search on twitter for #ELTchat. Up-lifting stuff!
This is the title of Shelly Terrell's blog post on the TeachingEnglish website. It's full of good tips on how to use different online tools and new technology and puts forward a really strong argument about how exploiting them engages students and enriches the learning experience. Worth the read.
Qwiki is a good resource for quick interest features in class - and for some topics an alternative to Wikipedia. Whereas on Wikepdia you're faced with a mass of text and very few images meaning it can take time to find the information you want , Qwiki is the opposite.
Use is to search for public figures, places, natural wonders etc and it comes up with a shortish, simple spoken text and lots of images of great images, pretty much like a presentation.
Also, have you come across SimpleWikipedia which consciously uses much simpler language than Wikipedia and therefore is often a better choice for language learners?
Glogster is a great resource for all ages of students (the link is to eduglogster which enables you to have the same login for your whole class). Give your students a quick how to video to watch on youtube and they'll be well away making interactive posters that can serve for presentations and all types of project work. Well worth a whirl!
EnglishCentral is a website which provides videos you can speak along with, record your voice and see how well you match the original speaker - a great resource for practising pronunciation.
It's now been revamped and is really teacher-friendly. If you register as a teacher you can access tools to monitor how well your students are doing with the tasks you set them.
The videos also now come with an online dictionary so that students can check any words they're not sure about.
LessonStream is Jamie Keddie's new site and an improvement on his highly popular TEFLclips. It's much easier to find things - lesson plans are listed by age, level and topic.
A great site with good ideas and a useful source for interesting, short video material to use in class.
Teacher's Pet is free software you can download to make fun worksheets: crossword puzzles, word searches, gap-fills etc. At the moment it's only available for Windows but the creators say it will soon be ready for Mac.
A fun quiz that tells you which animal(s) you are and the type of activities you'll enjoy using in class! The quiz was inspired by Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences which suggests that different people learn and do things in very different ways.
register free