June 25, 2010

Activity with Film Previews

A colleague of mine, Daniela Fernandes, posted an interesting video activity in which students watch the preview of a film and complete a hand-out with information. The same hand-out can be adapted to any film preview. I liked it so much that I asked her if I could share it with you.

Activity With Film Previews

June 23, 2010

June 22, 2010

Using images in class

This is a wonderful post by @jenverschoor where she describes several flickr tools which can be used in class.


I've explored a few and really liked:


map location letter  L counterfeit Lego letter I letter F counterfeit Lego letter E typewriter key letter F E letter A letter S letter T

Great VIDEO to discuss Racism

This a video shared by a colleague (Heidi Norwig) and another participant of Cultura EDtech course.

It's an interesting animation which can be used to start a discussion about RACISM.
CHECK IT OUT


Go South Africa! from Sir Moving Images on Vimeo.

Video Activity: Reported speech

Let me share a nice activity a colleague of mine (EloĆ­sa Paula) and a participant of Cultura EDtech course has posted in her course portfolio.

THe focus of the class was Reported Speech. A student of hers showed her a video in which a little kid gets stuck behind the couch. Then, what she did was, the moment the student showed them the video, she elicited some sentences said by the little boy  and asked the students to REPORT what the little kid said.

This is the video:
\

This is the hand-out:
Reported Speech Activity Based

June 21, 2010

Video created by students (WORLD CUP 2010)

This afternoon , a colleague of mine, Felipe Attux, showed me a video he and his students had produced in class. Students learned the World Cup theme song "Wavin'  flag" and did all sorts of funny faces in front of the camera. I image they had a lot of fun, and so did I watching it.

June 15, 2010

How I used ZOOMWORDS

A friend of mine, GeĆ³rgia, this week showed me a tool I had forgotten about, ZOOMWORDS. She had made a list of words for our students to revise and used the ZOOMWORDS application from BLIXY.COM.


Create your word widget and more at Blixy.com!



This is how I used it:
  1. I told my students I would show them a list words they would have to copy for 2 minutes. 
  2. I used the clock counter in our IWB to set the time limit and showed the ZOOMWORD above which I had embedded in a blog.
  3. Students had 2 minutes to write down in their notebooks as many words as they could.
  4. When time was over, we checked how many words they had been able to copy and then asked them to check if they knew all the words in their list. Students asked me to explain the words they didn't remember but I always repeated the questions for the other students to try to explain.
  5. IN PAIRS, students gave definitions of words from their list for the other student to guess what word it was.
Why I liked the activity? Students were really involved, it was a fun way to revise, it called students' attention to the fact that they need to study vocabulary a bit more, good way to help them recap vocabulary we had studied the previous month.

SCROLL MESSAGES for your blog

If you want to use scroll messages in class blogs to call students' attention, check out some interesting ones I've found via Luz PĆ©rez in her blog "Having fun with English"

Life is a feast

Worry is a misuse of imagination.

"There never was a great soul that did not have some divine Inspiration"

You can find the embed codes at Blog de CĆ©sar

June 13, 2010

20 WEBTOOLS applied to teaching

I´ve finally managed to finish the english version of the e-book I´ve published earlier this year.I describe 20 webtools I´ve tried out, give examples of how teachers have been using it and suggest other ways to use them in class.

You can order a paperback version or download it as pdf.

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/webtools-applied-to-teaching/15104257

Hope you find the suggestions useful.



June 12, 2010

Dress up your Avatar - Clothes / Appearance


Yesterday, a colleague of mine, GeĆ³rgia, showed me a site she´s been following "Think in English" . It´s written by Aurora Jove, a teacher in Spain, and brings really interesting sites we can explore and use with our students.
The first site I´m going to talk about is STYLETOOL.COM
The site allows you to dress up an avatar you create with various options of t-shirts, dresses, shoes, bags, and sunglasses. It´s an interesting way of teaching CLOTHES VOCABULARY as each item of clothing is identified with a word and image. After dressing up your avatar you can post it in facebook, grab the embed code for publishing,


HOW CAN WE USE THIS SITE WITH STUDENTS?
  •  Use the site to build an avatar in class with students and exploit the images of clothes to teach / revise the vocabulary.
  • Ask students to create an avatar, dress it up , write a description for it and then share the avatar + description in a class blog. 
  • The teacher can create several avatar dressed differently, take screenshots and then use the images to present CLOTHES VOCABULARY. 
  • Write descriptions of the way avatars are dressed and ask students to build the avatar according to the description.
  • Have students create their avatars and present them to the whole class by describing both appearance (dark/ fair skin , hair, eyes) and clothes. 

June 3, 2010

Students from 3 countries get together in Skype


June 01, is PENPAL DAY. It's a great opportunity to get our students to communicate with other teenagers from around the world.

Thanks to Alex Francisco and Eva, Guido (Spain), Arjana (Croatia) and I (Brazil) got in contact and arranged to have a skype conference call.

Before June 1st, each group prepared a list of 15 simple questions in English about their own countries. On the day of the skype session we would have to try to answer each other questions, therefore, our students had to study about the other 2 countries beforehand.

Well, we prepared our questions and I asked my students to look up information about Croatia and Spain in the internet for homework. To my surprise, most of them not only read about the 2 countries in English but also printed a sheet so that they could keep it.

I took my laptop to school (I have skype and a webcam)and attached it to our e-board , projector and loudspeakers so that my sts could see / hear the other groups.

This is a part of our skype session


We started off having some students introduce themselves and then we moved on to the question challenge. I must admit the sound wasn't very good, nevertheless the experience was fun, motivating and really worthwhile.

What a crazy bunch of people we were! :)

June 1, 2010

PROJECT: Describing pictures / Making deductions

Last week, the focus of the lesson was MODALS TO MAKE DEDUCTIONS: must, may, might and can't. Students, listened to dialogues and did exercises.
Today, I had planned something different for them:
  1. I gave each student a different picture and asked then to write a written description where they would also use modals for makind deductions.
  2. While students wrote the descriptions I helped with vocabulary and had a look at some mistakes.
  3. I asked students to practise reading their texts in pairs so that they would pay attention to words they could not pronounce and pauses.
  4. I used a voicethread presentation I had prepared beforehand to record sts reading their descriptions.
  5. After doing all the recordings, I showed them the full voicethread presentation so that they could listen to different descriptions. (They really paid attention!)
MY OBJECTIVE: to show students what kind of picture description is expected of them on the final oral exam at the end of term, to help them notice how important pronunciation/ rhythm is when recording, provide students with various picture descriptions.