Archive for the 'efl' Category

Excellent Free Online Courses - EVO Online 2008

Published
by
Seth
on December 3, 2007
in courses, efl, ict and professional development
. 0 Comments

The TESOL association’s special CALL group have just announced the timetable and sign up period for their Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2008 courses.

The EVO courses are a series of free online courses for language teachers. Many of the courses are based on recent developments in ICT based teaching. The EVO courses are taught by an international team of teachers and teacher trainers, many of whom are active members of the Webheads Yahoo group. In fact the Webheads themselves grew out of a past EVO project in 2002!

There are 13 different free courses which look really interesting this year. They cover a variety of ICT & language teaching topics from “Advanced Tips & Tricks for Successful Online Teaching and Learning” to “Teaching With Powerpoint.” There are also courses on non ICT based subjects too like “Music in the Classroom” or “Getting Started with Drama in the Classroom.” All in all it looks like a great learning opportunity, certainly one not to be missed! You can read about it and find out registration details from the EVO Online 2008 Wiki.

The sign up period is from the 1st to 14th January 2008, so there is still plenty of time to have a think about what you want to study. I fancy the look of the Advanced Tips and Tricks course, EVO Video 2008, Social Media in ELT courses… and many of the others! The organisers suggest not signing up for more than two courses, so I guess I’m going to have to narrow my choices down.

Anyhow, I look forward to bumping in to everyone in the online sessions, this is going to be fun!

6 Billion Others

Published
by
Seth
on November 18, 2007
in efl, ict and video
. 4 Comments

Yesterday I came across one of the most moving and beautiful sites I’ve ever, ever found on the internet: 6 Billion Others.

6 Billion Others is a site which puts the same simple but meaningful questions to people from all over the world and films their responses. The result is an awe-inspiring portrait of the human condition. The first thing I thought when I saw this site was “I’ve got to use this in my teaching somehow.” I tell a lie, the first thing I thought was “This is an incredibly profound, unique moment” the second thing I thought was “How can I share this” so I thought of how to use it in class.

Attentive Listening - Good For Students!

The interviews are mostly shot in the person’s mother tongue, though there are three language versions of the site and all the videos are subtitled in either English, French or Italian. This gives them a wonderful scope for a humanistic slant on teaching languages. The videos present these wonderfully diverse people to the language learner in a full frame shot, which grabs the listener’s attention. As the 6 Billion Others website so succinctly put it, “The closeness of the interviewee’s face generates an intimacy conducive to attentive listening. The viewer concentrates on the words and facial expressions and can thus identify with people of very different origins.”

Uses In The Classroom

So how can we use this amazing resource with our learners? Here are a few ideas I came up with:

Start a discussion with your learners on “5 questions that they would like to ask people from all around the world.” This will create a nice lead-in to, and interest in, the subject. You could also see if your students would like to predict the type of answers they expect people from different countries and continents to give to their questions.

Next, I would suggest you go to the website yourself and choose a link to follow, or if you are teaching online specify a video for your students to watch. This way you can teach a few bits of necessary vocabulary, write a few gist and comprehension questions or any of the other exercises you would like to do with the videos.

Selecting One Video For Your Students

Because the videos are all made in flash, it’s difficult to send online students to a specific video, which you might like to do for your language based questions. To get round this, take a screenshot (press shift + the Print screen button) and write on the screenshot which video you want your students to watch first. Here’s an example (click to see a higher definition version)

Considering the wonderful, absorbing nature of the videos, I would then really wish to give my students a bit of freedom to explore the videos further. To do this, you could ask them to watch another 2 or 3 videos which are each about 5 or 6 minutes long. The videos are also repeated cyclically, which is useful for language learners because if they miss something a speaker says the first time round they, will hopefully catch it the second time round.

Follow Up Activities

While they are watching, I will ask my students to take notes about anything the speakers say that really interests them and the country the person was from. I’d then ask the students to discuss their notes together and compare what they found most interesting about the videos. I would also talk with my students to see if the videos had asked any of the questions the students had thought of at the beginning of the lesson.

From reading the website, It seems like the plan of the project is to eventually allow their internet viewers to upload their own answers to the questions on the site, which would be a wonderful in-class project. I don’t think this is going to be available until 2008 though.

Your Class’ Own Interviews

A wonderful way you could exploit the ideas and concepts from the site before they allow users to upload videos would be to ask your students to each write one question they would love to ask everyone in the class. Try to encourage them to ask “deeper” questions like: “What makes you happy” rather than “who is your favourite pop singer?” Then compile these questions together into a list, give a copy to each student and ask each them to record an answer using a webcam.

YouTube would be a perfect place to record the answers to the list of questions your students write. There is a clever little tool they have now, which would also work very well for this type project, called “Quick Capture.” This allows anyone with a webcam attached to their computer to record a video message and upload it directly to YouTube. You could start an account at YouTube for your students, give them all the username and password for the account and ask them to upload their video answers to the site. Below is a photo of the “Quick Capture” facility (click for high resolution version) , or otherwise here’s a demo video that a YouTube user made.

Finally, when they have all uploaded an answer to their questions, ask the students to watch each other’s videos on YouTube and leave a video response to them.

If you have any other ideas of how to use this wonderful site with your students, please feel free to post them as a comment below as I’m definitely interested in using this site and would love to know any other ways of using it.

Seth.

The Archers Podcast

Published
by
Seth
on October 19, 2007
in efl and ict
. 0 Comments

After reading a post by Dennis Newson, from the Webheads newsgroup,where he was brave enough to admit he listens to the Archers, I felt inspired to admit that yes, I too am an Archers fan!

The Archers is a very long running radio soap opera and is one of BBC Radio 4’s most popular programs. The reason why we are talking about it is that it has now been put on to the already excellent list of podcasts that Radio 4 produces. This means that teachers or students can download each day’s episode for free and listen to it either on their computer or on an Mp3 player (such as an iPod.)

The great thing about the Archers is that it is only 10 -15 minutes long and so won’t overload students who already have a reasonable level of English. There are all sorts of activities you could ask your students to do with a program like this, here are a few ideas I had:

  • Ask a different student each day to listen and write a short summary of that day’s episode. They could then post it to a class blog.
  • The class listens to an episode with the traditional comprehension tasks, then after hearing the “cliffhanger” finish to the episode, each student makes two or three predictions as to what will happen next.
  • The class listens to a weeks worth of episodes. Each student chooses a character from the show and keeps a blog from their point of view. They write a blog entry each day commenting on what happened in that episode as their character would have seen it.
  • After listening to a few episodes of the show, the students could visit two different fan websites of the Archers: http://www.archersanarchists.com and http://www.thearchers.co.uk and compare the different viewpoints of the fans
  • The teacher could prepare a n Archers internet treasure hunt based on the idyllic country life that The Archers lead….

I’m sure we can think of other ideas… is anyone else as daring as Dennis was to admit they listen to The Archers though?

PhotoBucket - Quick and Easy-ish Video Editing

Published
by
Seth
on September 29, 2007
in efl, ict, video and video editing
. 8 Comments

This is an idea I came up with when I did the excellent Consultants-E “ICT in the Language Classroom” course earlier this year.

A colleague on the course was asking if anyone could think of a way to use this video clip with learners.

Well after I’d stopped laughing at the video, this was the idea I came up with:

I think a nice lesson for this particular clip would be just for everyone to be “eyes.” You turn the sound down on the TV and after watching the film once, the students, in pairs, have to talk together and guess what was said in the dialogue.

They write the dialogue down, then watch the film again to see if they had predicted correctly. As we all know, prediction skills are a vital help to listening skills.

You could even do something like this online.

If you posted the film to a blog or website without the dialogue, you could then invite students to write their ideas of what is being said and post it as a reply to the blog entry.

After a week (and lots of nice prediction ideas have been posted by your students) you could post the “real” version with sound to the blog..

Of course, saying that you could do something like this online, and actually doing it are two different things. My colleague asked me how you could edit the film to remove the sound. I thought that Photobucket would be a good tool, so I set out to test out my theory with their video editing tools. And… it worked! Here’s how I explained to my classmate to go about doing it:

Before you start you’ll need:

  • A Photobucket account
  • A video you want to use in class like the ones you find on Youtube or Google video .
  • About an hour of time (unless you’ve done this sort of thing before)

Ok now let’s get started.

  1. Download the video you want to use from Youtube. Video Downloader is a good tool for this. Save it somewhere you’ll remember on your computer.
  2. Log in to your PhotoBucket account and upload your video.
  3. To make sure your students can’t see the original version of your film, upload it (or move the film) to a private album. If you leave the film where it is, as soon as your students have finished watching your cleverly edited film clip with no sound, they will be able to watch the original. This would probably ruin your lesson!
  4. Now you are ready to start the fun bit. Look in the botom left hand corner of the page and you’ll see the “Create Remix” button. click this then edit your film. there is a written tutorial here if you need help, though to be honest I’d recommend watching the video tutorial that opens up the first time you use the Remix tool.
  5. To cut out the sound from your film, all you need to do is add a bit of music to your film. There is a music button on the right hand side of your main video editing screen.
  6. Add some titles to your film from the “Graphics and Captions” box and you’re nearly there!
  7. Finally, when you are ready, click the “Preview” button to see what you have done so far.
  8. If you are happy with your film click on the “Publish” button and hey presto!

All you’ll need to do now is to tell your students the web address of your newly edited clip. You could ask them to post their dialogues to a blog if you have one already. Otherwise, you could simply ask them to write their dialogues on paper and bring them to the next lesson.

And here is the finished article… a video with no dialogue, which is ready for students to post their ideas of what the conversation is that they’re having in the film.