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.

Related links:

• Create a Video Q&A Booth
• So Ask Me a Question
• Create a Video Dictation Activity
• Teach Yourself to Teach with Tech
• Get your Students Listening and Interacting with Native Speakers
• Create Video Questionnaires
• Mobile Learning Survey 2011
  

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Pros and Cons as Web Based Research Tasks

I'm always looking for handy tools that students can use as follow up tasks to online research and Pro | Con Lists certainly looks like a good one.

The site enables students to collect together the advantages and disadvantages of a particular subject and create a list of each to see how they balance out.

Here's an example one on Solar Energy

As you can see, at the top of the page is the list of pros and cons,

and below it is the balance of the results.



When creating the list students can also add to or reduce the influence of some factors and balance emotional and rational factors of each too.

It sounds complicated, but these are very easy to produce. Just register and log in and go to 'Create a list'. Give the list a title, select the topic and add a description. You are then ready to start adding the pros and cons.

Each of the pros and cons added has a default weight of 3 in both the emotional and rational settings, but students can click on the numbers to increase or decrease the weight if they think the pro or con is more or less significant.

Once they have completed their lists they can publish them or share them through a range of social media platforms.

Visitors to the lists can then leave comments or agree or disagree with each of the individual pros and cons in the list, simply by clicking on them and voting.


To see how this works I've created a short Pro and Con list on the topic of Interactive Whiteboards. Feel free to comment and suggest more pros and cons.

• Pros and Cons of Interactive Whitebaords

I think Pro | Con Lists is a great way to follow up web based research activities and would work really well combined with something like Mashpedia.

• Students could go to the Mashpedia site and search for information on something like wind power, solar power or even different political parties or sporting teams, then use the information they find to create their list of pros and cons.
• Once the lists are created they could share them with other students and vote on whether they agree with the pros and cons.
• Students could also use the site to brainstorm pros and cons before they do research. This would get them thinking about the subject first and they could then look back at their own lists and see how they could change or modify them.
  

What I really like about the site is that it gets students thinking and evaluating the power of their arguments too.

It would be nice if the lists could be added to by visitors, but that doesn't seem to be possible, but I still think this is a really useful tool and one that can be used to create research based reading and listening tasks.

I hope you like it and find it useful.

Related links:

• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• 35 more reading tasks
• Using Wise Quotes with EFL Students
• Get the News Through Images
• Create Authentic Web Based Research Tasks With Mashpedia
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Education for the Global Economy

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Note Taking Tool for Digital Literacy

I spotted Eyeplorer last week and have been playing with it since then. Eyeplorer is a great tool for helping students to write essays by using online sources and to develop their digital literacy in a responsible way (avoiding plagiarism)

What Eyeplorer does, is to search Wikipedia for information based around one or two or even more search terms. It then produces a spectrum of key words and concepts linked to those terms.

You can then see notes on each term by hovering over the keyword. If the notes are relevant to your essay, you can drag them to the notepad at the side.

Here's a video showing how it work.

• Download the video for i-Tunes / i-Pod
• Watch on YouTube

Once students have their notes they can either save, copy or email then to themselves. They then have notes on which to base their essay along with links to follow up and find more information.

Great tool and a great way to show students how to use web sources without just copying and pasting complete articles.

Hope you find it useful. Here you can find more writing activities for students

Related links:

• Ideas for Creative Writing
• Simple Tool for Collaborative Writing
• Creating an interactive cloze text
• MS Word tutorial 1: Adding ‘comments’
• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Picture phrases
• Using wikis for teacher development
• Improve Typing and Punctuation and Have Fun

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..