Learning Kids Games: images

Showing posts with label images. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Create Quick Video Task Sheets

Vidinotes is an interesting site that I spotted a few weeks back. It's a great way to produce instant (almost) video worksheets to go with YouTube videos.

Basically, what it does is to convert an flv video file into a number of screen shots with a space next to each screen shot for the students to take notes.

I picked this silent video with sound track by Micheal Galasso as it has a very visually rich digital narrative and made a worksheet for it.

To do this I first had to download the video as an flv file. I did this using the KeepVid site recommended by Vidinotes. Then you have to upload the flv clip to the Vidinotes site. This was pretty slow, but it will depend a lot on the length of your clip and you can do other things while you wait for it to upload.

Once the clip is uploaded start to play it and simply click the 'Capture' button when you see a frame you want in your worksheet.

As you capture images they will appear on the right of the video. And you can either give each image a title or leave it blank. You have to give the worksheet a name though.

Once you have captured all the images you want from the video (you can select up to 30) you simply click on 'Print' and you have your worksheet.

You can use these worksheets for a range of activities and with a range of different video types.

You could use them as prediction tasks before students watch the clip. Students could predict the story or what the characters will say.
Students could try to write in what the characters are thinking at each stage of the clip.
Students could use the worksheet to make notes of lectures or how to videos.
Students could use them to summarise steps in a process being described.
Students could describe the images from the video and build their own narrative or sets of instructions.

Here are some example worksheets from the site. You can check these out and think about how you might use them with your students.

This is a great way to create simple and versatile video worksheets that won't take you too long. I hope you find it useful and create some great tasks and activities for your students.

You can find 25 more video related activities for EFL and ESL students here.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, September 4, 2009

Flashcards for ESL and EFL

Free ESL Flashcards is a simple site that delivers a very simple but really useful product for free. Flashcards! One of the most useful classroom tools every invented for language teaching!

There are loads of them on this site and they are really nicely drawn, easy print and quick to download. Most of all, like it says on the box, they are free.

The sets are listed alphabetically and hovering the mouse over the set title will show you what images are in the set.

Simply click on a set title to see the complete collection.

Then simply download the set at the size you want them.

This is a really handy resource put together by Eric. It does have some advertisements, well quite a lot, but then everyone has to eat, even Eric, and if you want to assist him in making a living you can leave a donation for him.

Great stuff Eric. Hope you are making a reasonable living from this.

Here you can find image based activities for EFL ESL students

Friday, July 31, 2009

How to Create Bomomo Art

Bomomo is a fantastic online tool for creating colourful abstract images in just a few seconds.

Bomomo looks like an online Paint program, and it is very similar, but it has a very interesting collection of tools for drawing, which make it hard to control but also very creative.

You simply select your tool and then click on the canvas. Try moving the mouse around before and after you click and then try clicking and holding down the mouse keeping it in a single position and then dragging it. This will create different effects with each of the different tools.

I felt I got my best results by creating a colourful background first using this tool (see below) if you click on the screen and hold down then drag you will get wide bands of vertical colour. If you then repeat that you'll get wide bands of horizontal colour. This makes a good background for some of the other tools and the patterns they can create.

This one creates nice circles if you click and hold the mouse at a static point.

Another of my favourites is this one which creates vertical and horizontal shapes where ever you click. Try holding the mouse down and dragging it too.

You can also get some interesting bubble effects with this tool.

The best thing to do is experiment withe the various tools and see what they do and which effects work best together.

If you don't like what you get just click and get a new canvas. If do like what you've got then just click and save your work as jpg file or a png.

It's really that easy. Once you have created your images you can either use them as backgrounds for banners or just to liven up dull pages.

So how can we use this tool in the EFL classroom?

Well you could create some images for your students and see if they can associate them with words or feelings.
They could discuss which ones they like.
They could create there own to express different feelings or link them to abstract concepts like fear, love, independence etc and so create a graphic vocabulary.
They could try to write a short poem or haiku and link it to an image.
You could also just use it to decorate the classroom or a class website or blog.

I hope you enjoy playing with this tool.

Here you can find more image based activities for EFL ESL students

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, May 22, 2009

Teaching EFL ESL with Comic Strips

I've been aware of the Make Belief Comix website for some time now, but I'm amazed at how well over that period of time it has been developed to meet the neeeds of EFL ESL teachers and students.

The basic concept of the site is simple. It enables teachers and students to create colourful original comic strips using a range of characters, simply by using the point and click interface. The characters have a range of different emotions to choose from, you can add your own dialogue using the speech bubbles or you can leave them blank for students to add their own.

You can then either email your finished cartoon strips to people or print them up for use in class

The Teachers Resources section has a great collection of ideas for how you can use the site with students and there is a wonderful collection of possible story ideas to get students creating their own stories

Here you can see some ESOL students talking about how they have used the site.

This is a wonderful example of a technical solution that can enable teachers to produce materials for the low tech classroom. Some really simple but great ideas for providing students with motivating materials.

I hope you enjoy and use it with your students.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, April 24, 2009

Flickr in 3D

Can there ever be enough Flickr search engines? I don't really know but there doesn't seem to be any end to the variety of ways sites are accessing Flickr's fantastic wealth of images. Tag Galaxy though has to be one of my favourites. If you want to see how it works just watch this 3 minute movie.

Using Tag Galaxy to Search Flickr Images

Or read on.

Tag Galaxy looks ordinary enough until you enter and search your first key word. Then you are presented with a galaxy of planets all representing related keywords and your search word at the centre.

You can click on these related term to build up or refine your search. When you are ready you click on the central planet and watch as the images relating to your tag start to appear around your central globe.

You can then click and drag to rotate the globe and look at the images. When you find an image that interests you, click on it to enlarge it. Then click again to get more information about the image.

Clicking on the small rectangular icon bottom right of your screen will also make the interface full screen, which would look great on an interactive whiteboard.

This is a great way to access images and would be great to use with students for vocabulary building , brainstorming, or playing word association, by getting students to predict images they will see or words which related to key concepts they type in such as politics, religion, purple, sport etc etc.

I hope you enjoy playing with this great tool.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, March 13, 2009

Exploiting Travel Images

I have to say that I do really enjoy the multimedia pages on the New York Times website. I think they really demonstrate how web based journalism can add new dimensions to a story.

One of the things that I particularly like is the multi media slide shows, and I think these are great to use with students as the images are strong and can arouse their curiosity, and the amount of authentic text isn't too much so students with a reasonable intermediate level of English they will be prepared to struggle through it. They are also nicely categorised around themes, which makes it easier to use a group of them to design materials around.

Suggestion for a travel lesson

This is a very simple idea that I came up with for exploiting the travel slide shows.

Just give your students the links to 3 or 4 of the different travel destinations.
Ask them to watch and read the slide shows and decide which of the places they would most like to visit for a holiday.
Make sure they justify their decision, the ask them to discuss or write about what they would do or see there and who and what they would take with them.
If your students choose different destinations you could pair them and ask them to persuade their partner to change destinations and come to the place they want to go.

Here are some of the destinations they could choose:

Well I hope you and your students enjoy some of these marvelous images. You can find more activities based around images on my Daily Activities blog

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities

I've always loved and been moved and inspired by great photographs and I have always found them to be powerful prompts for language and communication. I think the power of images goes all the way back to cave painting which was our earliest form of asynchronous communication.

So whenever I see site with great images on I try to think about how they could be used with language students. Simon Hoegsberg's site is one such site. It's not just that these are great images, they are also powerful themes and he has also understood the potential of websites to deliver these images.

You can see some of his photographic projects at: http://www.simonhoegsberg.com/

Some of the projects I think would have the most immediate use would be 'Faces of New York'. A collection of images of 10 New Yorkers talking about their faces. This could act as a nice model to get students doing a similar thing or be great as a split reading with students having information about the different people and having to connect it to the correct face.

I also like this one with the rather morbid title of 'We're All Gonna Die Sometime - 100 Metres of Existence' which is a 100 meter long horizontal image of people taken walking over a bridge. It's a great one for getting students to identify people by their descriptions and to describe them.

Anyway, it's certainly worth checking out the other projects, though some of the image are quite strong and not recommended for younger learners.

Hope you enjoy these. If you like using images in language teaching it's also well worth checking out the Images4Education group, a group of educators who collaborate to develop teaching ideas that exploit web based image technologies. You can also find image based activities for learners here on my Daily Activities site.

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Nik Peachey Read More..