Setting Learning Goals

Ever done one of those exercises where you get your students to decide on their learning goals? Do you ever get round to coming back to them and really seeing if they have been achieved?

Well here's a little tool that may well help. It's called FutureMe and it's like an email message that you can send to yourself in the future.

You just fill in the form with your message and then set a date for when in the future you want it to be delivered.

• You can use this to get students to check back on their original learning goals.
• You can use it to get students sending themselves reminders about new vocabulary they have learned. They can simply send themselves a message for a week or two in the future with the new words in and see if they can still remember them and what they mean etc.
• You could also do this for test revision. So many students do their tests, look at the score and then forget what the answer was. They could send themselves the questions they got wrong or right and see if they can still answer them a week or two in the future.
• The same could be done with errors and correction. They could send their mistakes to their future self to correct in a week's time.
• They could even send themselves notes from lessons or texts or even their own compositions to review and correct.
  

FutureMe is a simple tool and quick and easy to use and could well help your students to become more autonomous learners by getting them to revise and review their work on a regular basis.

Hope you like it.

Related links:

• A Tool for Comparing Words
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Creating Word Lists
• List Your Favourite Words
• Learn Some Cliches
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Video Dictionary 2.0
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Picture phrases

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Create Flashcard Packs

I've been trying out Muchobeets (strange name) free flashcard creator, and apart from a few hiccups, it looks like a useful tool.

You can choose from three different types:

• Regular - Topic related notes that should help you to remember facts and figures etc.
• Vocabulary - These are for recording and revising vocabulary using a word with an example and definition.
• Picture - These enable you to upload images, which user then click on to find the word / sentence associated with the image. The students then see the images and click on them to find the word / text.

I tried creating some image ones, but my images were much too large, so be sure to use small image files if you choose to create these.

They are very quick and easy to create (you do have to register first though) and once you've created a pack of flashcards you can either email them to yourself or your students.

There are actually quite a lot of packs already there including the 'Hot SAT List' which students might find pretty useful.
This looks like a pretty simple but useful free tool for vocabulary revision or revision of any sort. I particularly like that you can email the revision packs to students.

I hope you can use it.

Related links:

• Multi Player Vocabulary Revision
• A River of Images
• 20 + Vocabulary Activities
  
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Multi Player Vocabulary Revision

Hunam Brain Cloud is an online multiplayer game I spotted some time back. It's a cross between a word association game and visual thesaurus. Students see a word and type in a word they associate with this word and submit it. They can continue with this for as long as they like, or they can check out the other words that other users have associated with the word.

As they play students help to build up the thesaurus of words too, and there is also a simple search to help them look up words.

Tis would be great for ESL / EFL students as it is an enjoyable way to learn and extend vocabulary. They can look at other words people have associated with the words they know and try to deduce the meaning of words they don't know by looking at the other associations.

That make sense?


Give it a try and you might see what I mean.

As ever be careful of those words that ESL / EFL students love and we pretend we don't understand.


Best

Nik Peachey Read More..