English Central revamped!

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.

Getting students to use Spanish when they're working on online tasks

This is one I've been knocking my head against ever since I got interested in using ICT in my classes. The students get so engaged in what they're doing that they automatically switch back to their first language - and you as the teacher end up sounding like a record stuck in the same groove; reminding them to talk in English.

Here's an idea that I've tried out recently and which seems to have had positive results: get them to talk in Spanish.

Set a time limit of, say, 15 minutes and tell them to get on with the task and talk in Spanish, but to note down the phrases they use while they're working.

At the end of the 15 minutes get them to take turns writing their phrases on the IWB and getting other students to help them translate them into English. In this way they build up a really great bank of useful English which they can draw from.

I follow this up with a flipchart meter which I constantly update while students are working on the computers so that they're aware that I'm listening to and taking account of what they're saying.

If you want to do more work on computer vocabulary here's a site which provides basic vocabulary with images and quizzes.

Have fun!

Getting students to stick to English during the lesson

We talked about this problem in the INSETT on integrating ICT into project work, so I thought you like to see what Herbert Puchta has to say on the issue. Anybody got any more tips that you can offer us?