Learning Kids Games: activities

Showing posts with label activities. Show all posts

Thursday, April 21, 2011

36 Tools to Digitise Coursebook Activities

Over the last few years, I have often heard teachers commenting that they would like to use more technology with their students, but they have to cover the materials in the coursebook. So, I started thinking about ways we could use technology to quickly and simply convert coursebook activities to something more interactive on the web.

I've created this document which shows 36 different ways we can use web based tools to enhance the things we do in the classroom and make students homework options more interesting and communicative. This document was used to support my presentation at IATEFL Brighton and you can see the presentation slides at: 36Tools for Digitising Your Coursebook

36 Tools for Digitising your ELT Course Book

I hope you find these useful and I hope to find the time soon to develop this document and add more detail and more examples. Until then please feel free to add comments and suggestions below and share ideas that you have for digitising coursebook materials.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, June 3, 2010

ESL Activities to Explore Issues Around Human Migration

Over the last few months I have been gradually working away at editing lesson plans and writing activities that exploit materials from the OPENCities project and I would like to share links to those materials here.

OPENCities is a project that collects together information and case studies on best practice regarding the successful social and cultural integration of migrant workers and their families into their host cities. As many of you probably already know, the issue of migration will be one that is and will continue to have huge impact on our societies over the next few decades and dealing with this effectively is going to be of key importance.

Language is of course a huge issue for anyone moving to another country and so it seems appropriate that the materials, information and images from the project be exploited for their language learning potential, as well as the potential they have to inform, enlighten and open up discussion about what can be a very sensitive issue.

Here are links to some of the materials.

Who is it?
This activity contains audio, script and images of real people who migrated to Dublin. The students find out about some of the real people and have to imagine the lives of some of the others to build up a profile.

Image by Veronica Vierin www.ctmp.ie

Activity: Who is it?

The challenges of being a migrant
This is a speaking and listening activity that involves students in thinking about the kinds of problems and challenges they might face as a migrant going to Belfast. They then listen to the true stories of 5 migrants talking about the challenges they have faced and this is made more real for students because these are genuine stories and the materials include images of the real people.

Activity: The challenges of being a migrant

Artists as immigrants
People’s ideas of what an immigrant to their country is and the kinds of work they do can often be very stereotyped, so in this activity I’ve tried to confront those stereotypes by using images of different kinds of artists all of whom are migrants to Dusseldorf. The students have to imagine they are one of the people and try to see the experience of migrating from their perspective.

Images by Liza Nguyen www.liza-nguyen.com

Activity: Artists as immigrants

These are just a few of the activities I’ve created and there should be some more on the way soon. There are also 4 complete lesson plans with pages of linked activities.

Most of the materials contain images as well as Mp3 audio recordings for listening exercises. You can find a complete list in the Education section of the OPENCities website.

I hope you find these activities useful, and if you d then look out for more coming soon.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Image Based Speaking Activity for IWB

This is a quick image based speaking activity that any teacher with an IWB or just a data projector in their classroom can do.

It's based around a photographic portfolio site by photographer Scott Stulberg. Scott's site opens directly to a slide show of some of his fantastic images.

The slides change at the rate of about 1 every 4 seconds and the sequence seems to be pretty much the same each time you go to the site. Here you can see Scott's images

So what's the activity?

It's very simple tell your students to watch the image slide show. After about 10 - 15 images, close the site and put your students in pairs and try to get them to brainstorm as many of the images as they can remember. This should get them talking and describing the images to each other.
Once they have had some time to talk and remind each other, get some feedback from the class and try to get them to describe as many of the images as they can remember to you. Help them with any vocabulary they may be struggling with.
Next, ask them if they can remember the order of the images. Which one was first etc? Put them in pairs once again to discuss again and try to remember the order.
Next, play the slide show again and get the students to check the order. When the slide show is finished. Get the students to once again tell you the order of the slides.
In the next lesson, ask the students again to try to recall and describe in pairs as many of the images as they can remember from the previous lesson. You could use some vocabulary words, especially the new words that came out of the lesson as prompts.

If you want to follow this up by getting some more static images to get students to describe in more detail, then be sure to check the index, as there are lots more images there.

I've always found images to be a very powerful tool for helping students to remember vocabulary and descriptive words. I hope you find this activity useful.

Find more: image based activities for EFL / ESL students

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Create Quick Interactive Activities

I've just been looking at this really useful tool for creating interactive close text activities (300 words limit).

The tool is produced by Nottingham University and can work with quite a range of languages, not only English.

The first step is to grab a text you want to use with your students. I just grabbed the first couple of paragraphs of a BBC News Report. Paste the text into the field and select which type of words you want to remove. Then select the type of activity you want it to be. At present there are 3 choices:

Drag and drop
Fill in the blank
Multiple choice

Just click the one you want and then click on 'Submit' and wait for your text to appear.

The drag and drop activity works pretty well. The students see the words beneath the gapped text and drag them onto the gaps. If the words are correct, they turn blue and become part of the text, but if the are wrong, they turn red and return to their place.

With the fill in the blanks activity the students see the gapped text and click on the gaps to type in the missing words. Again, correct word go blue and wrong words go red. The students can right click on the gap to get a first letter hint, or the solution.

The multiple choice exercise is slightly more complicated, it generates a gapped text and then you have to right click on the gap to get the alternative choices to appear to the right of the screen. It's quite impressive that it generates its own credible alternative words for each gap, but when I tried to create an exercise that gapped multiple word types, it couldn't create the activity, so if you use this option just select one word type.

This is a really useful tool for quickly creating activities for students. The down side is these activities can't be saved, so you either have to use the activities in class with an interactive whiteboard or data projector, or get students to work autonomously to create and complete their own activities. My advice would be to do a few in class to show the students how they work, then get them to create their own on their own computers.

This is a great way to revise a text or to discover examples of particular structures in context. I like tat you can select to remove all numerals as this can be great for getting students to predict answers before reading for specific information.

I hope you enjoy using this tool and find it useful.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Create Quick Video Task Sheets

Vidinotes is an interesting site that I spotted a few weeks back. It's a great way to produce instant (almost) video worksheets to go with YouTube videos.

Basically, what it does is to convert an flv video file into a number of screen shots with a space next to each screen shot for the students to take notes.

I picked this silent video with sound track by Micheal Galasso as it has a very visually rich digital narrative and made a worksheet for it.

To do this I first had to download the video as an flv file. I did this using the KeepVid site recommended by Vidinotes. Then you have to upload the flv clip to the Vidinotes site. This was pretty slow, but it will depend a lot on the length of your clip and you can do other things while you wait for it to upload.

Once the clip is uploaded start to play it and simply click the 'Capture' button when you see a frame you want in your worksheet.

As you capture images they will appear on the right of the video. And you can either give each image a title or leave it blank. You have to give the worksheet a name though.

Once you have captured all the images you want from the video (you can select up to 30) you simply click on 'Print' and you have your worksheet.

You can use these worksheets for a range of activities and with a range of different video types.

You could use them as prediction tasks before students watch the clip. Students could predict the story or what the characters will say.
Students could try to write in what the characters are thinking at each stage of the clip.
Students could use the worksheet to make notes of lectures or how to videos.
Students could use them to summarise steps in a process being described.
Students could describe the images from the video and build their own narrative or sets of instructions.

Here are some example worksheets from the site. You can check these out and think about how you might use them with your students.

This is a great way to create simple and versatile video worksheets that won't take you too long. I hope you find it useful and create some great tasks and activities for your students.

You can find 25 more video related activities for EFL and ESL students here.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Interactive Forms for Surveys or E-Learning

I've just been having a quick look a JotForm and it looks like a very useful tool. JotForm is a simple online tool for creating online forms of various kinds.

There are a number of pre-configured ones that you can create and customize, just using the wizard, or you can create a blank one and add what ever features you want from the Toolbox, just by dragging them onto the page.

Once you have your features on the page, you just click on them and edit the properties. It really is very simple to do. You can use JotForm for a whole range of things and it has some very powerful features. As well as adding images, password fields and captcha from the 'Power Tools' section, you can also add payment features, to enable you to charge for services.

The blank form creation is great for creating your own e-learning materials. You add images, text and by dragging in an html element from the Power Tools, you can even put in code so that you can embed videos from YouTube or other rich media.

Then all you need to do is add a few questions, or a text box for students to write in and when they click on submit, their answers will be sent to your email address or stored online.

Apart from creating e-learning activities, you could use the forms to get feedback on your teaching or to do a range of classroom research tasks. You could even get your students creating class surveys and compiling the results. You can also embed the forms into your own website or blog.

JotForm has a free option which allows for up to 3 forms a month and 100 responses, which should be enough for the average teacher.

Fantastic free tool. There are some tutorials on the site too if you want to dig more deeply into the potential of this tool. Here's movie one showing you how to get started.

Hope you find it useful.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, September 12, 2008

Autonomous Learning for EFL ESL Students

Well this news posting is actually about one of my own sites called Daily English Activities and this is a new site that I have launched to help EFL and ESL students develop their English language skills through online tasks.

I've tried to mix the tasks between activities that are 'made for' EFL ESL and ones that exploit generic websites. I've also tried to make these things that students could do every day.
So far the site is off to a good start with 9 activities up in the first week, the most popular of which is Exercise Your Ears with Authentic Film Clips.

So far the majority of the visitors seem to be teachers (80%) rather than learners (16%) but at this stage I'm happy with that as I think the site will be a useful tool for teachers wanting to set homework or for teachers wanting quick activities to print up for their students to do in a media centre or computer lab ( I've included a print as PDF function to make this easier)

To see a list of all the activities of the site so far please check out the sitemap and if you know of any EFL ESL teachers or students please send point them in my direction.

Activities so far:

Many thanks and best wishes

Nik Peachey Read More..