Learning Kids Games: image

Showing posts with label image. Show all posts

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..

Thursday, October 8, 2009

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

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Get the News Through Images

Images are a great way to create curiosity and get students interested in finding out more about a topic, that's why The Photo Stream could be such a handy tool for getting students interested in reading short news stories.

The site shows the images connected to news stories from all over the Internet. When you put the cursor over an image a brief summary / teaser text appears.

If you click on the image you can go to the story at its original source. The story will appear with a Photo Stream frame at the top and here you can click on 'Comments' and leave a comment about the story.

You just need to have an email address (which doesn't appear) to post your comment.

There are many ways you can use this with students:

In class you can show students the most recent images (using a data projector) and summaries and see which ones they would most like to read. They could discuss and vote on the one they most want to read and argue about why. Then click and print the story for them.
Before showing the site you could get them to predict what images they will see based upon what they know is happening in the news. Give points for correct guesses.
Show the images and ask the Sts to guess what the story is about and what information will be contained. Then print some or get students to read and check the stories to see if they were correct.
Get students to read an article then post a summary as a comment.

The main thing to be careful of with this site is the images may well be inappropriate for younger learners, so think carefully before letting your students loose on the site.

You can find 30 + more reading activities for EFL ESL students here.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

What are you Wanted for?

I just came across this collection of fun photo adapting tools and thought this one that enables you to create a 'Wanted' poster from your own image could be a useful one to use with students or on teacher training courses.

It's really easy to use, you just upload an image and then write in your own caption. You can then download and print the images or add them to blogs or web pages.

There are a number of ways you could use this with your students:

As a writing prompt - Get them to create their own 'Wanted' poster with their own captions and then exchange the posters and get someone else in the class to write the story of how they became 'Wanted'.

As a speaking prompt - Get students to create and print their wanted poster and then create their own fictional story of how they became 'Wanted'. See which students can create the best story.

For self-evaluation and reflection - Get students to think about their weaknesses and select one weakness they would like to work on improving . They should add this as the caption, then get them to think of how improving that weakness will help them and add this as the reward (they will need to be concise). They can then print their 'Wanted' posters and hang them up in class around the walls as reminders of what they need to focus on. The students could then look at each other's posters and offer each other tips and advice on how they can improve. This can work well with teacher training sessions too.

I hope you make some useful wanted posters and be sure to check out some of the other ways in which you can adapt your images here. Do leave a comment if you came up with some good ideas for how to use them and let me know which ones are your favourites.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Monday, June 22, 2009

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.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

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.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary

Shahi is a visual dictionary that combines Wiktionary content with Flickr images, and more! This is a really handy tool for students or in the classroom if you have a computer + projector set up.

All you do is type in your vocabulary word and you get images ( from Flickr, Google or Yahoo) and a definitions with part of speech and some example sentences from Wikitionary.

If you want to give your students a better view of the images that the Shahi finds in relation to the word, then just click on the image and it enlarges.

Of course the most common problem with picture dictionaries is that the concepts of many words, especially at higher levels aren't 'visual' as such and are much more abstract concepts. I did a search on 'noise' and here's what I got.

You can use this to your advantage though by getting students to think about the connections and associations between the words you search for and the images. You can turn this into a game and give points to the students with the best explanation for the connection between word and image. The explanation could be literal or more imaginative and narrative based.

One other thing that I like about Shahi, is that the results from each word you type in are 'piled up onto top of each other, so if you use it as a reference throughout a lesson or activity, you still have a record there of all the words that came up.

You could also use this feature in reverse, by creating an image word list before the activity so that students can prepare their vocabulary and refer to it during the activity.

Shahi is a nice versatile free tool and one that your students could easily use on their own. Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Monday, March 2, 2009

Image and Video Search

Tag Bulb is a great tool to make images and videos accessible within the classroom. It's also incredibly simple to use. Just type in your keyword and click. It searches through a range of video and image sharing sites and displays the results as thumbnails. You can just toggle between videos or images.

Tag Bulb is a great fast way to access visuals from your classroom and really handy if you have a data projector or IWB. It can become an instant picture dictionary or great tool for helping you stimulate discussion or brainstorm vocabulary around a topic.

Of course be careful about what you or your students search for as you/ they could come across some more adult orientated images, but on the whole this is a really useful tool.

Hope you enjoy using it.
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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Darwin and Evolution

I've just been having a little play with a great feature on one of the Open University's websites Devolve Me.

The site is dedicated to Darwin and as well as having some useful information and resources about him, has a wonderful little tool to take yourself backwards through the evolutionary process.

Just upload your image adjust it for position and then watch yourself transform back for a few million years.

So if you would like to see how I got from this:

Through this

To this

Then just click on this link here and watch as I go back through time: Nik Devolved
Be sure to play with the little slider to take me backwards and forwards.

As for classroom exploitation:

You could transform a few people using images of famous people then see if students can guess who they are.
You could also get your students to transform images of themselves and guess who they are.
Or you could be serious and use this to start a discussion on evolution. Students can post and compare their opinions to the 'Have your say' forum

Anyway, hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Creative Commons Images

Fotonauts must be one of the most attractive photo sharing websites I've seen for a long time and it is especially good because of the focus on using creative commons licensed images.

There are some beautiful images from all over the world and each album has information about the topic and links to Google maps so you can see where the image comes from.

The site is beautifully designed with a really nice interface and slide show feature. You can also create widgets of the slide shows to embed into web pages (I couldn't actually get this to work on mine though).

If there's a problem with the site then it's the lack of a search tool, which seems a strange omission on a site aimed at organising and sharing images! Fotonauts is still in beta though, so perhaps this will soon be resolved.

This is a site that must be worth keeping an eye on if you use images regularly in your teaching.

Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Are You a Celebrity Lookalike?

This is a nice site that you can use to have some fun with your students and of course to generate some language and learning activities. It's called Celebrity Matchup. All you do is choose the gender and then upload a picture of yourself or one of your students. The site then scans their image and selects a set of celebrities that they look like. Here are some of my matches!

Can't really say I'm flattered! I also tried matching myself to female celebrities (just curiosity) and got these results. Could I really be the Carmen Electra of ELT? Um! Doubt it!

Well I'm not really sure that Celebrity Matchup works, but I think you could have a lot of fun and discussion with your students deciding which is the closest match and what the differences and similarities of the facial features are. I'm sure there's a really good facial characteristics lesson in there somewhere with lots of vocabulary.

Anyway, if you or your students really like the matches you get you can even get a widget to add your results to your blog or website.

Just by clicking on the image you see above once you've matched up and pasting the code into your blog.

Well I hope you enjoy that and match up to some flattering celebrities, but do watch out for the advertising.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Create a Flickr Montage

I just spotted Flickrin which is a really nice site that exploits flickr images and helps you to create a photo montage, like the ones below, that can be embedded into a blog or web page.

It's very easy to use, just type in a username or tag keyword, decide how many rows of images you would like and then click on 'generate'.

It's then just a simple matter of copying the code and pasting it into your blog or website html.

All the images that appear in the montage are hyperlinked to the original image on flickr, and you can select anything from 1 to 10 rows of images.

This is a really handy tool for teaching and you could use it in a number of ways, like getting students to create their own picture dictionaries (The strong visual images should help them to remember words)

You could also create a montage and get the students to guess the word used. There's an activity here designed around a similar idea: Guess the Word

It might also be a useful tool for exploring the lexical fields or particular words and see how they can be used to describe different things. For example I created this montage by typing in the word 'fire'. This demonstrates some the various ways the word can be used.

Range of lexical use. The tag word here was 'fire'.

What I haven't discovered yet, is whether the montage is regenerated each time the page is opened. It's likely that it is, and this could mean that the montage changes as other flickr users add images with the same tag word. You can also get some interesting images by using more than one tag word. This seems to pull in images that carry both words as tags.

I spotted this tool along with some other interesting stuff on the Life is a Feast blog which belongs to Ana Maria, a teacher from Brazil.

Hope you enjoy Flickrin and find some good uses for it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Great WebCam Software

One of the things that I love about my MAC is Photo Booth and its ability to add different backgrounds and effects when you are using a WebCam. It's a great tool to use with students to create motivating and personalised materials for a whole range of things. Here's an example of some characters I created to generate a story around (I then imported them into Comic Life).

But now it seems that you can do some similar things on your PC with this free software from ManyCam

I haven't had time to download and install it yet (PC is still booting up!!!!) but it looks like there is an impressive range of effects (3836!) that you can download from their site, many of which have been user submitted: ManyCam Effects

The software also works with quite a good collection of existing services, so you can also use it for video conferencing.

There's a nice demo video here showing what it can do

You can also check out some user submitted ones

Well it looks like my PC has finally booted up, so now maybe I can try it out.

Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Great Time Line Tool

I've just seen this great time line tool called TimeRime. It enables you to create time lines of events like the one here and compare them against other time lines. (Mouse over the one below and have a play with it)

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

You can add media such as images to the time lines too and once you've created them you can embed them into your blog, wiki or webpage.

The other nice things about this site are that you can compare time lines side by side, it is kind of community based so you can leave comments of time lines and you can also add extra information and embed media such as images and Youtube video into the pages to give extra information about each of the things on your time line.

This would be a great tool for history projects or for building up multimedia narrative for digital story telling.

Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Photo Fun with Your Students

Some time back in March 08 I wrote a posting on ideas for creating personalised Personalised flashcards for EFL ESL activities. That posting used a site called FaceinHole which had some nice images that you could upload you or your student's picture to.

I've just spotted another site called PhotoFunia that also has a nice collection that you could use with many of the same ideas.

Here's a few examples that you or your students could use as prompts to create stories around. You could also get them to create a completely fake biography. Here's mine. See if you can decide which parts are true!!!

Did you know I used to be an astronaut?

Before I became a teacher I was in fashion.

I also recorded a CD, but I only sold one copy. Wonder who bought it!

Of course I've made some pretty influential friends too.

And like every celebrity I had my own chat show

And er! Well I can dream, can't I?

Well I hope you and your students enjoy this site. It is of course free, but has some advertising on so watch out for that.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Easy Photo Editing

If you or your students need to edit photographs or pictures quickly, easily and for free, then DrPic.com could be the place for you. You can crop, resize add text change colours and create a number off effects with the real minimum of ease. You simply upload a picture from your computer and start to play.

You can also download the images to your hard drive or upload them to the web and all without any registration or passwords.

DrPic is a great tool for creating your own flash cards, adding text to images or just giving your students some hands on practice at doing their own photo editing. I'll certainly be using this myself.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Create Your Avatar Image

Last week I wrote a posting with some teaching suggestions based around the Face your Manga website. Some people were understandably put off by the ability of the images to make some rude gestures.

I have since discovered the DoppelMe website which does a similar thing and could be a good alternative, though with this one you do have to dress your avatar from naked!

Seems like there's always a problem!

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

The Encyclopedia of Life

This is a wonderful new site with some fantastic images, most of which are licensed under creative commons.

The site is still in its early days, but the intention is that it will become a kind of wikipedia of life on Earth with a vast collection of text and images and possibly other media.

Original source of image and license

There's already quite a substantial number of organisms with images listed and many of the images and illustrations are really remarkable.

At the moment the site owners are looking for people to be curators of pages or species, but later this year there is a plan to open up the pages so that anyone can contribute.

This is a fantastic resource of information and images and has loads of potetial for teaching exploitation. One of the creators of this project is Edward O. Wilson and you can also find some short video clips of him talking about issues related to the environment on Big Think. All useful and interesting stuff if you are thinking of doing any lessons on the environment or if you just need some flashcards or images to use in teaching projects.

The link for Edward O. Wilson on Big Think is:
http://www.bigthink.com/user/edward-o-wilson
The link for The The Encyclopedia of Life is:
http://www.eol.org
To get some tips and suggestions for how to use Big Think go to my article 'Video Debating website'

Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, May 16, 2008

YouTube for IWBs with PicLens

While I was checking links yesterday for the posting to my learning technology blog, I was delighted to see that PicLens have added YouTube support for their browser plugin.

Click here or on the image to watch a movie showing how it works (2.2 Mb)

This is one of my favourite plugins and I think it's a fantastic teaching tool, especially for those with IWBs (interactive whiteboards) or data projectors in class. (See my Learning technology blog posting for teachging ideas for ELT).

This addition of YouTube support means that we can now get full screen Youtube videos direct to the classroom without any of the distracting text or advertising that lives on the web page, and in the fantastic PicLens 3D immersive interface.

If you want to use PicLens then you can download it for free from here:

Love it

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Nik Read More..

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Looking at the universe

Well Microsoft had to go one better than Google's Earth and bring you the whole universe! I've just been watching an amazing video from the TED Talks website. It's about the new WorldWide Telescope that Microsoft will be launching in the Spring of this year. This will enable web users to explore the universe in close up detail by drawing on imagery from a whole range of the world's most powerful telescopes.

The images and capabilities being described on the video look really amazing. Well worth a watch!

Hope you enjoy it. Really looking forward to getting to use this.

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Nik Read More..