wanna twiddla?

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

Other etherpad sites here

Using the speech accent archive for working on students' pronunciation

"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've just used 2 recordings with my Post FCE group: a native speaker and a Spanish speaker.

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.

Larry links

A recent post by Larry Ferlazzo a prolific EFL blogger is on The best and easiest ways to use youtube, featuring ESL video, and some interactive sites such as World Adventure Kids, Drop the Weapon, Spelling Bee and Ken Burns National Parks Photo challenge (fotobabble might go with this?). It also back references to Larry's own collections inc. Best places to read, write and choose adventure stories.
Larry tweets here and his blog, at least one of them, is here. Definitely worth a butcher's.

Global Projects for Young Learners

A webinar by internationally renowned ELT blogger, Shelly Terrell.

And here's a link to her wiki: technology4kids

Lesson plan on everyday gadgets (including use of Glogster)

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.

How do you approach teaching exam classes?

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.

How do we acquire language?

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.