Learning Kids Games: authentic materials

Showing posts with label authentic materials. Show all posts

Friday, May 29, 2009

Using Advertisements for EFL ESL

I've always found advertisements to be really effective and stimulating input for language classes. They are usually just the right length, easy to understand visually as well as linguistically and are often very imaginative and creative.

So I was delighted to see Coloribus which claims to be the world's biggest ad archive with over 2 million ads. The site has a huge range of ads from all over the world so will be useful what ever language you are teaching. You could even explore the different approaches to advertising the same products in different countries and cultures.

One very handy feature of the site, is that the video clips can be viewed online or downloaded for off line viewing. Really handy if your connection is slow or unreliable.

You can browse the site buy category

Or just type in a search query

Coloribus has print advertising as well as video clips, so if your students don't have access to the Internet you can still download and print some really handy authentic materials to base lessons on and get students talking.

You can get students

Looking at the language used in ads
Examining the rationale behind them ( who are the aimed at, and how do they make the product appealing etc.)
Describing favourite ads or ones they don't like
Watching and describing ads
Acting the ads out in class
Creating their own ads
etc

I hope you and your students enjoy these advertisements. Here you can find video based activities for students.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Publishing Multimedia Projects

I'm always looking for interesting free tools for multimedia project work and I recently stumbled across a very nice one called Museum Box. It describes itself as providing 'the tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box".

To use the site you need first to collect up your various media. You can upload videos , images , audio files, collect links and add documents.

All of these are uploaded to sectioned boxes, and each section of the box is a cube with 6 sides to which you can add your media.

When the box is finished you can publish and share the results and users can view the different sections of the box.

I think this is a wonderful idea and a great way of publishing your students' work. There are already quite a collection of boxes on the site, which students might find interesting.

The projects don't have to be historical, you could create a box with a section for each member of your class, or students could create boxes about their local city or environmental problems.

Hope you enjoy this and find it useful.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Monday, September 1, 2008

Update on the Education Clip Library

I first wrote about the ECL (Education Clip Library) a few months back, but now I've finally got round to exploring it and I have to say it's a really impressive resource.

There are about 5k + clips at present and once you are registered there is an option to request a clip on a specific topic if you need one. The clips are arranged by age suitability ( 3 - 1 years or 11 - 19) as well as topic. All the clips I looked at also had a transcript underneath too, which is always really helpful for EFL and ESL students.

There is a good collection of Business related clips for anyone teaching Business English or Business skills.

There is also a huge range of historical footage going all the way back to the 1930's

The user interface is simple and clean and the clips stream pretty quickly and still look okay when played full screen.

On the whole this is a really nice resource for EFL , subject specific or CLIL lessons.

Apply for you password now as it may take a little while to get one.

Hope you enjoy it

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Ready Made Authentic Video materials For ESL EFL

If you like using authentic video materials with your students but don't have the time to put together the materials then this could be the site for you.

Yolango has a huge collection of short video clips from a whole range of sources and they come complete with transcription and a range of language learning activities for each clip.

Anybody visiting the site can watch the clips and read the transcriptions, but if you register and log in you can also get access to 'fill in the blank', comprehension questions and vocabulary definition type exercises. Students are graded on these exercises and get the results on a scoreboard.

This is a great way to set motivating homework for your EFL ESL students and make sure that they do it and see how well they do it.

The collection of clips available is very varied and there are many that would be ideal for Business English students too.

When I first checked this site out a few months back there were some clips that were of a more adult nature, but I can't see these anymore. All the same be careful with less mature students. Certainly a great site for adult learners though.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Sunday, August 24, 2008

News Videos for EFL ESL Materials Design

Great new for those of you who like developing authentic EFL ESL materials around news clips.

CNN is now making available an embed code from each of it's video news clips, so we can now embed these into blog pages or online multimedia materials and develop great authentic and up to date EFL ESL learning materials for our students.

Here's a nice example of what the embedded player looks like.

Any ideas about how you would use this? By all means send in suggestions.

For those of you who aren't sure how to embed a video, have a look at my learning technology blog at:Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube

The tutorial refers to YouTube, but it works pretty much in the same way.

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Nik Peachey Read More..