A Tool for Helping Students Develop More Complex Sentences

A couple of years ago I wrote an activity for students called Extending a Sentence which used a Flash animated website to show how a simple sentence could be elaborated to become rich in detail. The site called Telescopictext had a marvelous sentence which started with 'I made tea' and developed into a full paragraph, just click on the grey words.
I'm glad to say that this site has now been developed so that everyone can create and save their own sentences. Here's my first one and it starts,"Telescopic text is great."

Creating your own text is really easy and if you register you can save the text and get a hyperlink to it. The first thing to do is to go to http://www.telescopictext.org/ and register. Then once you have logged in, click on 'Write'.


You can then start by adding a very short sentence. Then click the 'Start' button.
You can then add more words by slicking on a word, adding more detail and then clicking 'Insert'.
You can keep clicking on words and adding more parts to the sentence. If you click on the small magnifying icon at the bottom right of the screen you will also be able to see the structure of the sentence as it has been developed.


If you click on 'Fold' you'll be able to close the phrase up and then try it out by clicking on the word to expand it again.
When you think the sentence is finished, you just need to click on 'Publish' and after a few quick checks you'll be able to get a URL to share with your students.
Here's the one I just made: I went to class.

I think this is a great tool to use with students.

• You can put students in pairs with a starter sentence and get them to keep taking it in turns to add parts.
• You can see which students can create the longest single sentence without any grammar mistakes.
• You can put in short texts your students have created then get them to edit and make them more interesting.
• You can create a text with mistakes in and the corrections hidden, then just click to show what the mistakes are. Students can try to predict what the correction will be before you show it.
• You could create also a create a version with some errors hidden and some visible and students have to decide which one are genuine errors and which are actually correct.
• You can give students a starter sentence and get them to create short story around it by gradually building up the sentences.
• You can use 'View Structure' feature to highlight the way the sentence is formed and the different parts of speech etc.

I think Telescopictext is a wonderful tool to use with students either on a data projector / IWB in class or to get them creating sentences at home. I hope you find it useful. Read More..

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
  

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Comparing and conditionals - The facts about countries.

Last week I saw IfItWereMyHome and instantly thought that it would be a useful resource to get students making meaningful 2nd Conditional sentences based on real information, but a closer look shows that the site has much more potential than just that.
By clicking on 'Country Comparison' the site detects your home country. You can then click on any of the country names below to get statistical comparisons between your own country and the one you have selected.
The comparisons are actually colour rated according to whether they are viewed as negative, positive or neutral aspects.
If you click at the end of each comparison you can also get more information about the facts being presented.

At the bottom of the page there is voting button where you can choose which of the two countries you would prefer to live in.

Once you click to choose the country you would prefer you can leave a comment to say why and also read other comments.

Here are some ways I think you could use this site with students.

• Get them to find a country they would prefer to live in and ask them to find 5 reasons to justify.
• Get students to find a country they would NOT prefer to live in and ask them to justify.
• Select two countries and ask students to choose one to live in and justify their choice.
  
• Ask students to look at the colour rating of the facts and see if the agree with the positive / negative rating of the facts.
• Ask them to compare a number of different countries and find out which is the most environmentally sound / destructive.
• Ask students to compare a number of countries and find out which has the best quality of life (They will need to decide what the criteria are for this).
• Ask students to decide which of the facts displayed would influence their choice of country most.
• Ask students to look at the facts that are compared and decide which important facts they feel are missing.
• Ask students to look at some of the comments about the countries and decide - which they agree with / disagree with, which they think are ridiculous.
• Ask students to compare their country to a number of others then post a comment or ask a questions about each country.
• Get students to find the comments about their own country and respond to one of them ( in a polite way)
• Ask students to look at the site and try to decide who constructed it and why.
• Ask students to look at the facts about their country and decide if they think they are accurate.

I hope you find IfItWereMyHome and these activities useful. If you think of any other activities you could use the site for ,please post them in the comments.

Related links:

• Translate Shakespeare 2 Text Lingo 4 Twitter??
  
• Goolge Maps for Directions
• Prompting reading speeds
• Comparing Texts to Aid Noticing
• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Drama project tools

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Create a Web Based Song Activity in Minutes

Back in December 2010 I wrote an article about how you could use Batlyrics, a site which combined Song videos and lyrics, as a corpus to find examples of grammar or vocabulary you wanted your students to focus on: 'Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus'

Since writing this article I've spotted another useful feature of the site, and that is the addition of an embed code button.

This is really helpful, because now it means that you can select the song you want to use, copy the embed code and then embed it into your own web page or blog and write your activity around it.
This is particularly easy if you use the Posterous blogging platform, as all you need to do is copy and paste the embed code into and email, add a title and instructions and post it off to post@posterous.com.


A few seconds later you should get a message back with a link to your published activity. Then you just share the link with your students.

• Here's a quick example that I created: In my life

So now you can create quick online song based activities within just a few minutes. I hope you find Batlyrics useful.

Related links:

• 5 Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology
• 3 More Tasks to Teach Yourself to Teach with Technology
• Animated Music Videos for EFL
  
• Using Word Clouds in EFL
• 6 Activities you can do online with songs and music
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

A Collaborative English Grammar

I have to admit that I'm not a great fan of grammar, but this is a site that I do really like. It's called English Language and Usage and it is like a Q & A of English grammar. The site has a huge collection of questions that people have sent in about various aspects of English grammar idioms and general usage and anyone who is registered can the try to answer the questions.

I think this would be a great tool to use with trainee teachers. They could find questions and check to see if the agree with the answers. They could also post their own questions and answers. It's also a great way to test your ability to answer thorny questions that might come up.

If you are looking for questions related to a particular aspect you can search through the tags to the side and click on any that interest you.

For me this is a great way to approach the development of grammatical knowledge ( I find attempting to read grammar books impossible). Though I'm not sure that the site would be suitable for any but the more advanced students of English.

English Language and Usage is a really good way to make grammar interesting and collaborative. I hope you find it useful.

Related links:

• Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus
• Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation
• Teaching Grammar Through Songs
• Crazy Comparatives & Superlatives
• Revising Short Texts and Syntax on IWB

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus

A while ago I wrote a posting (Teaching Grammar Through Songs) on how you could search song lyrics for particular words or phrases, then find the lyrics and video to go with the song. In the posting, this involved using two different sites, but now I have found one site that does the whole thing.

The site is called Batlyrics. It's very simple to use. You just go to the search part of the site and click the 'Lyrics Words' search.

Then type in the phrase, structure or words you want to find in the text and you'll see the possible phrases from the lyrics start to appear.
Once you select one, you will be linked through to a page of possible versions of the song. Select the one you want and the video of the song should appear with the lyrics underneath.
This is a really fast way to find motivating listening materials for your students that deal with specific structures or vocabulary.

Using this with EFL students

• You can get students to search for their own examples and learn the words.
• You can use it as a way to find listening materials and copy the lyrics to make into classroom activities such as gap fill or reorganising the text.
• You could cut and past the lyrics into this cloze test creator and you then have an interactive listening activity. Better still students could find there own songs and copy the lyrics into the cloze test creator so that they create their own personalised activities.

Batlyrics is free to use, but it does carry quite a lot of advertising though so be careful where you click.

I hope you find Batlyrics useful. Here you can find more EFL / ESL activities that use songs.

Related links:

• Animated Music Videos for EFL
  
• Using Word Clouds in EFL
• 6 Activities you can do online with songs and music
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation

Phras.in is a really handy site I saw today that allows students to check two different ways of saying the same thing, so that they can decide which is most likely to be right.

If you type the two different ways of expressing something into the two fields, the site checks these through Google and shows you which is the most popular. This is a great way to get students checking paired sentences with their common mistakes against against each other. Also great for getting them to check collocations to check that they have the correct combinations of words or how popular different collocations are.

What's also nice about the site is that it shows you the context in which it found the examples, so students can reinforce their learning by seeing some examples of the phrase used correctly in context. So you could also use this as a source of authentic materials to build grammar lessons around.
Students can even click through from the phrase the the source to find out where and how the expression was used. This is a great tool to get students editing or peer checking thier work together and to encourage more self correction.

I hope you find Phras.in useful.

Related links:

• Teaching Grammar Through Songs
• Crazy Comparatives & Superlative
• Create Image Books
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Ask & Answer Video Questions
• 4 Similar Tools to Wordle
• Cloze Test Creation Tool

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Teaching Grammar Through Songs

I have to admit that I find teaching grammar a bit on the boring side and finding good examples of grammatical structures in interesting authentic text can be quite time consuming, so when I saw this lyrics search tool Lyreach I was instantly impressed.

All you need to do is type in an example of your grammar structure and you can then find it in a whole range of different song lyrics.


This links to the lyrics start to show beneath the search box as you type, and then you just click on the sentence to link to the correct verse from the song. You'll see the part of the song highlighted and there's a link to a clip from Amazon.



Unfortunately the clip is only the start of the song and may not have your grammar example in, but it is easy from hear to find the clip on YouTube or find the clip and the rest of the lyrics together using a tool like Tubeoke that matches clips to lyrics.

So now using these two easy tools you can find lots of authentic examples of your grammar points in song lyrics and create quick activities based around them. You could even paste the lyrics from the verse into Wordle and use it as a prompt to get the students to drill, memorize or review the verse after they listen.

So, who says technology doesn't save time??

I hope you find Lyreach useful.

Related links:

• Using Word Clouds in EFL
• 6 Activities you can do online with songs and music
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Crazy Comparatives & Superlatives

I have to say that I used to dread teaching comparatives and superlatives and always found it really hard to think of something original to get my students interested, so when I saw this site I was really delighted. It's not only quite funny, but has some excellent materials for covering what can be a really dull language point.


The site is called the Universal Record Database and it is a collection of user generated and very unofficial world records. Anyone can go on the site and create their own world record. As proof they simply add an image or a video of themselves creating the record.

Here's a few examples:

Most People Simultaneously Drinking Out Of A Pineapple



The widest tongue


Most Handshakes Elicted From A Dog In 30 Seconds


Most Women Named Wendy To Eat At A Wendy's



There are lots of ways to use the Universal Record Database with students.

• Show them some images and videos and see if they can guess what the record was.
• Tell them the type of record and see if the can guess the number or amount (e.g. how wide is the widest tongue)
• Get students to think of their own crazy records and create a picture or video to upload to the site.
• Create your own class records and try to get each students to have a record.
• Get students to try to break one of the records from the site.
• Get students to find their favourite record on the site or the one they think is funniest and share it with the class, or blog about it.

The Universal Record Database certainly wasn't made for educational purposes, so be careful to check for appropriacy according to your students, but I think it's a wonderful example of the kind of bizare things you can use from the web. I know my daughter was always fascinated by the Guinness Book of World Records, so I'm pretty sure students will enjoy this and it will liven up those dull comparatives and superlatives class.

Anyway, here's my favourite record, Tallest Tower Of Humans Wearing One Sock Each, Brushing Teeth And Listening To 'Thriller'.



I hope you find this useful and have a lot of fun with your students.

Here you can find more than 100 online activities for EFL and ESL students

Related links:

• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Create Image Books
• 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages

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Nik Peachey Read More..