Get Rid of Embarrassing Ads

There's nothing worse than sending your students to or showing your students a website only to discover it is covered in embarrassing or unsuitable advertisements.

Most of you who use any websites with students will probably have seen these IMVU ones which seem to appear even on very respectable websites.

Well here's a really easy way to get rid of them. Just go to http://adout.org/. Enter the URL of the site you want to remove the ads from and click on 'Go'.

Now you have the site without the ads.



If you want to make sure the ads don't appear next time you go there or when you send your students to the site, just copy the URL from the top of the page and use that as your link. That's what I've done here, so if you click the link now you should be able to see the page with or without ads.

• HowJSay
• HowJSay without ads

This won't work with every ad from every sites, but it can get rid of quite a few on most innocent sites.

• You should also check to see if you can navigate around the site and make sure it has blocked any legitimate features of the site.

Adout isn't perfect but it's a free and easy way to get rid a few potential embarrassments particularly if you work with younger learners or students from more sensitive cultures.
There's even a browser button that you can add to your browser.
Just click on it if anything unexpected appears and it should help you to get rid of it.

I hope you find this useful.

Related links:

• Create Your Lego Avatar
• Multiple Media Search
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Image based activities
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Multiple Media Search

I have to say that I think Spezify has just become my favourite new search engine. I think this is a really great search engine to use in class with students or to get them to use. It's really simple. It displays all results as images and it searches a wide range of multiple media sources such as video, image Twitter etc, not only text.
To make a search you just type in your key word and all the results start to appear as images.

If you click on the small spanner icon at the top right you can adjust the setting.

There is a safe search option here which is on by default, so that's handy. You can also turn various other options on or off so that you restrict which sources are included in your results.

As I said I think this is a nice search engine to use in class on IWB / data projector or for students.

• You could type in keywords to brainstorm around topics or themes for the class you are doing.
• You could type in a keyword and get students to choose one result that they think will be interesting and get them to explore it as a warmer.
• You could get students to find an image, a text, a video and a tweet and write / talk about the connection between them.
• Or you could just use it to reinforce and find examples of vocabulary.

Hope you like Spezify and find some good uses for it in your class.

Related links:

• Creating Word Lists
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Image based activities
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Create Your Lego Avatar

Having an avatar (some kind of representation of yourself) can be pretty handy both for you and your students. It's a good way to protect your students' identity if they are becoming part of an online community and helps reduce the amount of unwanted attention that some very attractive students might get from having their real image on a site.


Mini-Mizer 3.0 is a really nice way to get your students creating avatars. It's really easy to use and they can quickly click through the various options for customising the basic blank figure.

They can add various extras and backgrounds as well as changing all the features of the face. They could try to make the avatar look like themselves or totally different. When they are finished they will just need to take a screen grab of the image and then they can use is it when ever they create online profiles on any social type sites.



You can also use Mini-Mizer 3.0 in classes to develop language of description.

• You could write some brief descriptions of people and get students to try create an avatar of them.
• You could describe a famous person, get the students to create an avatar and then guess who the famous person is. The students could decide which avatar looks most like the celebrity.
• Students could work in pairs, one with an image that they describe but don't show while the other listens / asks questions and tries to recreate an avatar version of the image.
• Students could create avatars of someone in the class and the others could try to guess who it is.

Mini-Mizer 3.0 is a simple free fun tool, that particularly younger students are likely to enjoy using and which can be used to help protect your students' identity. I hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Image based activities
• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..