QUOTES

"If we teach today's students as we did yesterday's, we are robbing them of tomorrow" - John Dewey

USING VIDEO IN THE CLASSROOM

Students love being the protagonists of their own film clips. In this class, students were paired up to create dialogues demonstrating various verb tenses. In this example, they are using the future tense with 'will' to make predictions.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1izrensSUY

CLASS WIKIS

I have been using wikis with my classes for a few years now. What I love about them is that they are so easy to set up and all my students can easily join. I usually put a lot of class resources on the wiki and set it out term by term. I find it easy to set up all my grammar links for the year too, so students can practise what they are learning in class at their own pace. Of course, I also add a lot of links for students to improve their English whilst having 'fun'. (songs with lyrics, word games, comics, etc...) As a class, we have also been in contact with another school in America and the students were able to share their information about themselves and their lives. Basically, I use the wiki to put all of the work and information from any given class into one place and it makes it very easy for me, the teacher!

EXAMPLE OF MY CLASS WIKI

XTRANORMAL

Xtranormal is a tool to make movies. The first couple of movies are free so it could be used for a one-off project. Fun and easy to use. The only negative thing I find is that you can't record your own voice and have to use one of the voices given to you. I can see a lot of possibilities for using xtranormal in my English classes with ESO level students. Here are two examples of short clips I have made.





An example of a short clip made by my 7 year old and I. She loved making it!


An Example from a student

BUBBLR

Bubblr is a great tool for adding text to your flickr images.  You can add your own photos to flickr and add text or choose from the photos in their database.  Students can make their own comic strips in minutes!

STUDENT'S EXAMPLE

VOKIS AND OTHER AVATARS

Students seem to love making their own avatars so why not have them practise their English whilst doing it.  I recently had students make avatars on www.voki.com practising the structure 'Present Continuous'.  They had to make the avatar, record a sentence about what they were doing or someone in their family were doing at that moment and send it to their teacher.  Not only are they practising their English; they are also using new tools technologies which are sure to help them with their blogging, facebook or personal websites.  They also feel motivated to do this type of task which is clearly important for their learning process.
Below is a link to one of my student's vokis:
http://tinyurl.com/4d8valp

WORDLE

It's not very often that a teacher leaves a class hearing another student say to another, 'Today's class was great, you're going to love it!' This is precisely what happened today and it was after having a class using 'www.wordle.net'.  For those of you who are not familiar with Wordle, it's a great tool for making word clouds. I usually use it in the language class for vocabulary, however today I used it to show the grammar tense, '1st Conditional'.  I had previously made a wordle using sentences such as, 'If you have a headache, take an aspirin', 'If there is an earthquake, get under the table', etc... The students paired up and had find the 10 sentences that were hidden within the wordle.  They did it as a race and this seemed to inspire them more.  Once finished, they had to invent a few examples of their own and we proceeded in making our own class wordle of 1st Conditional.  We agreed on the font, colour, design, etc... and their wordle was published on the net in seconds!  They loved the fact that others would be able to see their work.  For homework, each pair had to make their own wordle using their own examples that they did in class.  All in all, it was an inspiring class and the students were enthusiastic about using this tool for their own personal purposes.
* A word of advise:  Remember to print out your wordle or copy and paste it onto another document (I use the notebook cutting tool).  Wordle doesn't have a search box and it's practically impossible to find your wordle once you've exited the program.